Hey, Lewes Folks, Please Vote for Me

Today I filed paperwork to run for Lewes City Council. The election is Saturday, May 10.  I hope you will vote for me.

I have lived in Lewes since 1987. This is where the Lovely Karen and I started married life. She's proved her patience and good humor for more than 25 years.  Together we've raised two lovely young women who will always call Lewes their home town.

I have served on the Lewes Planning Commission since 1999. I've had the honor of serving as Chair of the Commission since 2009. Over these years I've learned a great deal about the city and how it functions. I've helped in the drafting of updates of the City Comprehensive Plan, the City Zoning Map, the Zoning Ordinance and the Subdivision Ordinance. And I've been involved in making recommendations to Mayor and Council on some wonderfully complex and controversial proposals.

I was born just over 52 years ago in Washington DC and grew up in the Maryland suburbs of that city.  In 1984, I graduated from Colby College, in Waterville, Maine, with a Bachelor of Arts. I was an English major.  I learned how to learn.  And I've had great fun doing just that, ever since.

I first moved to eastern Sussex County, in 1986, for a job at WGMD radio. In 1989 I began a career with state government that has included working as a public information officer, a business research director, a data coordinator, Governor's Liaison to the Census Bureau for the 2000 and 2010 Census counts, and (most recently) as Acting Director of the Delaware Government Information Center. I have worked at DNREC, DEDO, the Office of State Planning Coordination and the Department of State.

As a by-product of the jobs I've held, and because of the intimate size of the state of Delaware, I've worked closely with the leaders of many of the major state agencies that interact with Lewes.  My jobs have brought me into close contact with many legislative leaders and our last four governors (and probably some of the next few, if my guesses are correct). I can offer a comprehensive knowledge of how Delaware works, at the municipal, county and state levels.

You are reading this (shameless) autobiographical sketch on a blog I started in 2004 as a place to exercise my writing muscles. I haven't regularly updated this site for several years. My writing and photographic urges have shifted to facebook, twitter, flickr and instagram. But there's record here of what I was thinking here that you may find useful.

Many of my posts have been about Lewes.  I've done no pruning, so you'll find a representative slice of what I was thinking at various times.

And I hope you will consider voting for me.

Winston-Salem

We are visiting Winston-Salem, in North Carolina. Christina is auditioning today for a summer ballet program. Tomorrow we tour Wake Forest University.

Camera + Trombone + Imagination = Cool

Via kottke and colossal.

RGIII is an Inspiring Player; He's Also Still a Kid

There's a cute "mic-ed up" of Redskins Quarterback Robert Griffin III in the Dallas game last week on Sound FX. It's a montage of Griffin making inspirational little speeches, cheering on his teammates, grunting his way through plays and celebrating successes. It's fun to watch him lead his team and enjoy his game.

There's also a funny moment at about 3:15 in the video where he's in the huddle, telling his teammate that they can take over the game and finish their victory. They all stare at him for a long moment and then he says, "Oh. Ya'll want the play? OK."

He's a great player. He's a leader. He's inspirational.

But he's also just a kid.

Annual Personal Metrics: 2012 Book List

I read just under 56 books in 2012. That's about the same reading pace that I maintained in 2011. Of the total, all but two were fiction. Most were borrowed from the Lewes Public Library.

Here is the list:

Driving North

We took a week and drove north to Highgate Springs, in Vermont, by way of Boston. We were on our way to visit Colleen, who is working this summer at the Tyler Place resort. We stopped in Boston on the way to tour Boston University and Emerson College with Christina.


View New England Trip, Summer 2012 in a larger map

A full photographic collection from this trip is on my flickr account. There are a few photos also posted on instagram.

An Evening in a Kayak

Untitled, a photo by mmahaffie on Flickr.

Yesterday evening, I joined the folks from Delaware Paddlesports in a "social paddle" at Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge. Prime Hook is on the Delaware Bay near Milton, Delaware, and includes a large range of marsh and open water. We saw Ospreys and Herons and Skimmers and many other birds. Very pleasant, a nice minor workout, and quite relaxing.

It's Been 25 Years Since I Moved to Lewes

Lewes Lighthouse Sign, a photo by mmahaffie on Flickr.

Walking downtown today, I realized that it has been 25 years since I moved into the City of Lewes, Delaware. I came here in the spring of 1987, after a winter in Rehoboth Beach.

I had a tiny bachelor apartment on Second Street before Karen and I married. We had a small apartment on West 3rd Street when we first married. We rented a small duplex on Market Street briefly before buying our first house, a Cape Cod on East 3rd. Eighteen years ago, we moved into a suburban-style house on Inlet Place. And here we've stayed.

I've lived in Lewes for half of my life now. In fact, this is the place I've lived longest in all of my life.

I'm proud to be a part of this town; glad that our daughters have grown up here. It's been my honor to serve for several years now on the Lewes Planning Commission.

I wonder if I'll still be here in 25 more years?

Literature: Words About Jazz

I'm reading a great novel about jazz musicians in pre-war Berlin and Paris. Half-Blood Blues, by Esi Edugyan, tells the story of a group of American and German jazz players who had been successful playing in the clubs of 1930s Berlin but had to hide and eventually run from the Nazis. The group includes African American musicians who found less racism in Europe and Germany, some of them of mixed African and German descent.

The story, the history and the evocation of time and place are wonderful. But I was struck by this passage about playing the music. In this scene, a young, scrawny black German trumpeter first comes to play with an established group of musicians, who are skeptical that he can even hold his horn. The narrator is Sid, a bassist from Baltimore.

But when he lifted his horn, we gave him a respectful silence. His trumpet was a cheap-lookin thing, dented, like a foil-wrapped chocolate been in a pocket too long. He put his rabbity fingers on the pistons, cocked his head, his left eye shutting to a squint. 

"Buttermouth Blues," Ernst called back to him. 

The kid nodded. He begun to tease air through the brass. At first we all just stood there with our axes at the ready, staring at him. Nothing happened. I glanced at Chip, shook my head. But then I begun to hear, like a pinprick on the air -- it was that subtle -- the voice of a humming-bird singing at a pitch and speed almost beyond hearing. Wasn't like nothing I ever heard before. The kid come in at a strange angle, made the notes glitter like crystal. Pausing, he took a huge breath, started playing a ear-splitting scale that drawn out the invisible phrase he'd just played. 

The rest of us come in behind him. And I tell you, it ain't took but a minute more for me to understand just what kind of player this kid was. He sounded broody, slow, holding the notes way longer than seemed sane. The music should have sounded something like a ship's horn sounding across water -- hard, bright, clear. The kid, hell, he made it muddy, passing his notes not only over the seas but through the solid too. Sounded rich, which might've been fine for a older gate, but felt fake from him. The slow dialogue between him and us had a sort of preacher-choir feel to it. But there wasn't no grace. His was the voice of a country preacher too green to convince the flock. He talked against us like he begging us to listen. He wailed. He moaned. He pleaded and seethed. He dragged every damn feeling out that trumpet but hate. A sort of naked, pathetic way of playing. Like he done flipped the whole thing inside out, its nerves flailing in the air. He bent the notes, slurred them in a way made us play harder against him. And the more we disagreed, the stronger he pleaded. But his pleading ain't never ask for nothing, just seemed to be there for its own damn sake. In a weird way, he sounded both old and like he touching the trumpet for the very first time.

Happy Maori New Year

Watch the skies, a photo by mmahaffie on Flickr.

I learned that today is the Māori New Year, celebrated in New Zealand when the Pleiades star cluster, known to the Maori as "Matariki," makes its only appearance in the night skies.

It got me thinking back to about this time of year in 1980. I was a senior in high school and had invited a young woman from New Zealand to be my prom date. Helen was an exchange student and part Maori. She had the coolest accent ever.

It's traditional, for Maori New Year, to look to the skies.

Flag Bench

Flag Bench, a photo by mmahaffie on Flickr.

On my walk to a sandwich shop in the western part of downtown Dover today, I came across this flag bench sitting all by itself.

Overfalls

Overfalls, a photo by mmahaffie on Flickr.

The Lightship Overfalls under a perfect early June sky at Canalfront Park, in Lewes.

Come fishing

Come fishing, a photo by mmahaffie on Flickr.

The fishing fleet in Lewes Harbor on an early summer morning.

A Hot Day on the Fairway

Fairway, a photo by mmahaffie on Flickr.

I played a practice round at Old Landing Golf Course outside Rehoboth Beach today. It was a very hot day. I didn't carry my clubs, but I did walk the course. I'm glad I took along enough water.

Just Because This Picture is Simply Charming

Gee-Up!, a photo by josefnovak33 on Flickr.

This is from a great flickr group called The Smiling Victorian. Found via the cool web editor at NPR's Fresh Air.

"Make Up Your Own Rules"

It's graduation season and I am enjoying watching a variety of graduation addresses. Here's one from author Neil Gaiman, who is one of my favorite writers and who is modeling a new way of living as an artist and writer... on social media and the web.



Here's a part of the speech I found very interesting. It comes at the end when he has already given advice about akin art and living as an artist.

We're in a transitional world right now, if you're in any kind of artistic field, because the nature of distribution is changing, the models by which creators got their work out into the world, and got to keep a roof over their heads and buy sandwiches while they did that, are all changing. I've talked to people at the top of the food chain in publishing, in bookselling, in all those areas, and nobody knows what the landscape will look like two years from now, let alone a decade away. The distribution channels that people had built over the last century or so are in flux for print, for visual artists, for musicians, for creative people of all kinds.

Which is, on the one hand, intimidating, and on the other, immensely liberating. The rules, the assumptions, the now-we're supposed to's of how you get your work seen, and what you do then, are breaking down. The gatekeepers are leaving their gates. You can be as creative as you need to be to get your work seen. YouTube and the web (and whatever comes after YouTube and the web) can give you more people watching than television ever did. The old rules are crumbling and nobody knows what the new rules are. 

So make up your own rules.

Blackbird Creek, From a Canoe

Blackbird Creek Canoe Trip, 5/17/12, a set on Flickr.

On Thursday, I took the morning off for a naturalist-guided canoe trip on Blackbird Creek, in New Castle County. It was a part of the outreach programming from the Delaware National Estuarine Research Reserve, a part of DNREC. My boss took the morning and came along, as did several members of the staff of a company called Delaware Interactive, with whom we have been partnering on several eGovernment projects lately.

Our Purple Tree, Spring 2012

There's a purple-flowering tree in our yard. I think, technically, it is called a Redbud. All I know is that each spring it goes through a purple phase before turning green.

A Walk Through Historic Williamsburg

The second part of our Williamsburg visit was a day spent doing the historic part of Williamsburg. It's important to note that a single day isn't really enough, but it is a very nice way to spend a day and we had nearly perfect weather.

We saw the key things we wanted to see and returned in the evening for a lovely meal at the Kings Arms Tavern, where nearly a quarter century ago (!) I proposed to The Lovely Karen.

A Visit to the College of William and Mary

We're in Williamsburg, Virginia, for a few days of spring break. We wanted a get-away and we've taken advantage of the visit to start Christina's college search process with a tour of the College of William and Mary.

William and Mary is a tough place to start, I expect. It's such a lovely campus and seems a desirable place to go to school. I worry it might spoil the game for the other schools.