Here's a Worthy Event

This next week there will be a "March for the Arts in Education" at Legislative Hall, in Dover. This is an annual event celebrating the importance of the arts in education.

Groups of kids from a variety of schools around Delaware will perform at Legislative Hall, most on Tuesday, though two performances (including one featuring Colleen) will be on Thursday.

If you've been here before, you are probably aware that I am an arts-partisan. Both of our daughters attend the Southern Delaware School of the Arts; Karen teaches there. Colleen is about to graduate eighth grade and I think stands as a great example of what an arts-integrated education can accomplish.

I'm particularly pleased to now be working in an office just across the way from Legislative Mall and Legislative Hall. I can see where I'll try to be at lunch on Tuesday. On Thursday, Colleen will be one of a small group of dancers from SDSA performing at the opening of the State Senate's session for the day.

She has sung in the House Chamber in the past, so this will balance out nicely.

What!?!

What!?!
Originally uploaded by mmahaffie.

He just looked so much like it was his truck, sitting there at the wheel.

Why We Worry About a Dry Spring

A Dry Spring
Originally uploaded by mmahaffie.

It was windy Saturday. We were at Kershaw Acres horse farm, near Milton. This is the neighboring field, in the process of blowing across Route 5.

We could use some steady, day-long rains.

Thinning The Blogroll

My blogroll is getting pretty long, and there are a few in there that have not been updated in a month or more. I think it's time to thin that thing out a bit.

• Butterfly Wings has been dormant since mid-December. Sha was one of the first to comment here, so I have had a sentimental attachment to her blog. I hope it comes back.
• Carnifex seems to have ended in January. I'm not even sure there's anything at that URL just now.
• College Democrats at UD last posted on February 1. Must be the pressures of classes?
• Cute Conservative, also at UD, also seems to have gotten back to her studies since the first part of February.
• Daily Finds is by UD Professor Pat Sines. She tends to go long periods between posts on this one. She's had nothing on this blog since early February. I do know that Pat tends to create special-purpose blogs and wikis for specific classes. That keeps her pretty busy.
• DelVoice, the edgy Delaware blog that just never seems to make it back on-line. Nothing since February 1.
• Delawired was going strong for a while. It came to a stop a month ago today.
• Delmarva United Homebrewers also seems to have snagged on March 3. Maybe they decided to post after each meeting and made the mistake of over-sampling and so never got to it?

I'll keep an eye on these blogs and add them back if activity resumes. I'm also on the look-out for other Delaware-centric blogs. Am I missing any?

Tracking the News Journal's Sprawl Series

The News Journal has begun a five-day series of articles examining the issues around growth and sprawl in Delaware. The headline of today's inaugural article, Runaway development overwhelming Delaware, gives you an idea of their thesis for the stories.

I'm hoping that this series will spark some useful discussion of the issue on-line. Some of that has already begun, with dt, of delathought, offering some proposals today.

I plan to track the series, and reactions to it that I can find, via del.icio.us. I've set up a tag-link page to track all items that I have tagged as "barrish-article." Cris Barrish is the reporter who has taken the lead on this series, so I think of the whole thing as Cris' article.

I'll be interested to see how much discussion this sparks.

Memory: Maine, Midwinter

Spring is here, days are brighter and warmer, and yet I found myself recently thinking back to a midwinter week-end in the early 1980'’s when I was a college student in Maine.

A group of us from Colby College took a week-end trip from Waterville, on the Kennebec River in central Maine, to Kezar Lake, in the west of the state. We held a gathering at the summer cottage of one of our classmates.

I don'’t recall whether there was much snow on the ground, though there must have been some. I do know that the lake was well-frozen; the experience that has stayed with me was out on the ice in a deep, dark night.

We arrived in the evening, made food, ate, then went for a night-time wander around the mostly empty summer cottage community.

We walked among scattered cottages to a small community center.

We played a loose game of bowling on the single lane in the community center. I remember that bowling lane as an alley of sharp white pine, with pins at one end and a ball at the other. We set the pins by hand, then stood back as Mark, the best bowler among us, rolled strikes. The echoing rumble and crash, surrounded by winter quiet, was wonderful.

We walked back on the lake. The ice was irregular and ridged, with snow banks and drifts. Several of us carried large-battery flashlights. It felt to me, a relative southerner, like an arctic expedition.

As we neared the wooded shoreline, we stumbled over a snowdrift and onto a cleared, level ring of smooth ice that someone had groomed for skating. In our boots and heavy coats, taken by surprise, we slipped and stumbled. Someone dropped a flashlight that spun across the ice, its beam flashing crazy patterns through our group.

Someone, I think it was Laur, lay sprawled in the center of the ring on her back, looking up.

"“Whoa! Guys, check this out!"”

We joined her. Lying on that flat ice, looking up, I didn't see trees or horizon or other folks. I saw sky. Clear, deep, star-filled sky.

Suddenly, the ice at my back felt ever so slightly curved. Just for a moment, I sensed the motion of the planet through that starry blackness.

I knew, of course, about planets and orbits and the universe. But it was that night on the ice in Maine that I understood at a deeper level that I am on the surface of a ball of earth and water moving through space.

That comes back to me now and again, whatever the season, whatever the weather.

It's good to remember where you are.

I Hope the General Assembly Passes This Legislation

My State Senator, Gary Simpson, has introduced a bill to name a local nature preserve after an old friend. Senate Bill 268 would name a nature preserve of 599 acres on Angola Neck the "Til Purnell Nature Preserve" to honor a woman I've known for almost as long as I've lived in Delaware.

I have shared in the past my great respect for Til and for her husband Skipper. I think that this act by the legislature would be a fitting tribute.

I was interested to see that Senate Bill 268 quotes (apparently verbatim) the Cape Gazette article about Til that I linked to in my post about her in July of 2005. I don't know that I've ever seen a bill that is mostly text from a newspaper story.

Unusual, but I think it works in this context.

Some of What We Found at the Botanical Gardens

I got a few decent shots from my brief wander through the Botanical Gardens in Washington DC the other day. I put 13 of them together into a Flickr Set.

I'm particularly proud of this one. I need my friend Sandy to explain to me just what flowers these are, though, before I can add that information here.

Update: Sandy tells me that this is one of the Phalaenopsis genus of orchids.

Here's an Idea I'd Like Delaware to Consider

In New York, it looks like drivers of low-emission, clean, fuel efficient cars are going to get a discount on tolls. A story on timesunion.com ( Green' cars worth greenbacks on Thruway) says that the state of New York will issue Green Transponders to cars that meet certain efficiency standards and that those transponders will mean discounts on tolls on the New York Thruway. My Prius and I would like that idea to spread.

Traveling

I've been on the road a lot lately, and I'm just about to head out again. I've had little time for blogging, I'm afraid.

This past week I was at a conference of the National States Geographic Information Council, NSGIC, in Annapolis. This is a group that meets all day and into the evening, with few breaks and little time to play on-line. Exhausting.

We spent much of Wednesday in Washington DC, where we hosted a legislative breakfast of national groups interested in the use of Geospatial data. Several of us visited our Congressional delegations to talk about policy issues related to geospatial data.

My friend Sandy Schenck, of the Delaware Geological Survey, and I had a quick meeting with a staff member in Senator Carper's office. We also had a little time to wander around Capitol Hill.


It was a very cold, but pretty, day. I took several shots of the Capitol and some of other sites around that area. Several colleagues and I wandered through the National Botanical Gardens, a green-house complex just across the way from the Capitol. I have a few shots from that visit that I still need to crop, balance and post.

Soon, I hope.

For now, Karen and the girls and I are headed south to Virginia for the evening for a birthday party for Karen's uncle.