53 beers on tap

Heat Advisory... not the one you may think!

As the heat indices are exceeding 100 here in the HoCo, the Miami Heat are getting ready to play against the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA Finals.  You know the Miami Heat; the most humble team in the NBA.  Remember what happened when an above -average small forward from Cleveland joined their team as a free agent last year.  It was a bit of an event.

Today, and for the next two weeks, we're all Mavericks fans. 

Happy Memorial Day

Wherever you are, Marshmallow Man is hoping you're enjoying a terrific Memorial Day!  Back to life, back to reality tomorrow.

County budget, new CA Board, monkey mania, etc.

Yes, I know my pattern of posting over the past few weeks hasn't been the steadiest.  It's been bursts of activity followed by periods of silence.

I, Marshmallow Man, pledge to do better in that regard.  And Memorial Day seems like a great time to do it.

Have to say, though, there's not a lot going on in the county right now that floats my boat.  The thing about the County's FY12 budget-- you know, a quibble over one-tenth of one percent of the total budget, and it's really not much of a quibble at that.  Let me be officially unimpressed by that.

Now, I have been enjoying reading about how the new CA Board reps are pushing the envelope a bit.  Especially Tom Coale, the creative force (and I mean force!) behind HoCoRising.  My take is that anything said in a public meeting is fair game to post on the Internet.  Now, when I was on the advisory panel to select the current CA President, some of the then-members of the CA Board disapproved of a certain nascent blogger discussing the goings-on of committee meetings on his blog.  So how much the times change in CA-- or not-- will be interesting to see.  I'll be following this one with great interest.

The thing with Frisky's wildlife sanctuary.  I've weighed in on this one before.  Well, I've learned much more about the aituation, and I'm happy to say that I've been to Frisky's myself and checked it out.

Western HoCo seems like a weird place for a monkey sanctuary (Howard County: no wineries, but we got monkeys, yes sir!) but the place seems safe and secure.  My opinion on Frisy's has changed.  I'm OK with it.  Sorry that some neighbors are freaked out by it, but buyer beware.

I think that catches me up quite nicely on the things I've been thinking about writing about over the past few days.  Enjoy your weekend!

After today, call me..... WARRIOR!!!

You'll all be happy to know that by the time you read this today, I'll have already made a perfect idiot of myself.  That's because today at 9:00am I'll be running the Warrior Dash down in Budd's Creek, Maryland.

For those of you without the energy or inclination to click the link, the Warrior Dash is a 5k run over trails.  OK, that's benign enough.  However, this run is also punctuated with 12 cool, badass obstacles-- crawling through mud, running through water, climbing walls, jumping over fire, stuff like that.  I love it!

I'll have to see if I provide a post-race report though.  Perhaps I'll just sit back and enjoy my warrior-ness!

How to spend your Saturday? Hmmm.....

For those of you looking for something to do today, I submit two possible options:

First, you could enjoy Wine in the Woods in Symphony Woods.  It's great fun and even if you don't drink wine, you can have a terrific time.

Option #2 is that you can enjoy Judgement Day.  That's right-- in case you haven't seen the billboards or otherwise caught up on the Net goofiness, a certain subpopulation of nerfballs think that today is Judgement Day.

Personally, I'm going to coach girls' lacrosse and hopefully ride my bike twice around BWI Airport.  I'm scoffing at the Judgement Day talk.  Besides, we all know the world ends November 21, 2012 anyway.

Rail transfer station-- not in HoCo, please?

I haven't weighed in on the proposed CSX rail transfer station saga that's been going on for some time, because I wanted to see if there's really any economic benefit to Howard County (or any jurisdiction) in having it there.  Well, turns out there isn't, I've determined.  So, let's put it somewhere else.  Elkridge has a lot of industrial property, but it seems to be that this transfer facility would be even harder-core industrial than Elkridge should have.

So I like this idea by the Howard County Council to do an independent enviornmental analysis to aid in the determination of the suitability of the Howard County site. 

I consider this project to be a value engineering step by the council.  The timing of this process is such that the National Enviornmental Policy Act review can't be evaluated separately by the county, so the next best thing is that the county do it's own thing.  The advantage is that if the county does the review, who knows what revelations that review may uncover that the federal review won't?  I kind of trust local expertise here.

Is a blog party without MM REALLY a blog party?

I hope everyone enjoys tonight's blog party, co-sponsored by the Howard County Library and Howard County general Hospital, tonight at Union Jack's.  Unfortunately, unless the weather gods intervene, I will be unable to attend.  Instead, I'll be coaching my daughter's lacrosse team, then going to watch the two-hour season finale of "The Mentalist".

Should the weather gods intervene and require practice be cancelled, however, Marshmallow Man will be in the house!  Sorry I didn't RSVP for this one, HoCo blog powers that be; but my attendance at this event indeed relies upon the fickle finger of fate!

If not at this one I hope to attend the next event.  Cheers!

 

PS-- The answer to the question posed in the title is yes!  Dadgum it!  ;  )

Tolls are going to take a toll

Whoa... how the heck is this going on?

So I'm glad Patuxent brought us this article about proposed toll increases being brought by the Maryland Transportation Authority.  But I gotta say, this article is a bit of a head-scratcher.

First off, why is this toll increase being proposed now?  Why not during the legislative session?  Isn't toll revenue considered as a source of the state budget?  I guess I should know the answer to this question, but I don't.

While we're at it, shouldn't the General Assembly be proposing increases in tolls, not the Maryland Transportation Authority?  That's a rhetorical question.  I'm sure the MTA has the authority to raise the tolls.  I guess the better question is: should they?

Not commenting on the validity of the proposed increases at this point-- to be honest, haven't considered them fully yet.  But I do have to give an official shrug of the shoulders at the process involved in considering and implementing these increases.  Seems to me this is a major source of state revenue and that the process should be more transparent and open.

Cousin stepping down

Yep, I haven't posted in a week.  Where have I been?  Really long story...no, I mean, REALLY long story.  Not sure yet if it'll have a happy ending.  Maybe when I can figure it out either way, I'll share it on this blog.

Anyway... this article tells the story of HoCo Schools Superintendent announcing his plans to step down.  Reading posts on a certain listserve concerning Howard County public school education issues (I'll leave it to you, dear reader, to deduce the address of the listserve) it sounded as if Dr. Cousin had decided to embed himself at headquarters on MD 108.

Au contraire, mon frere!  All Dr. Cousin says of his planned date to leave is that it for sure won't be any later than the last day of his contract in June, 2012.  He doesn't specify how soon he could possibly be leaving, which is a smart move on his part.

I accept the fact that Dr. Cousin is able to work full time and that he's able to ably contribute in his position by doing so.  So unless his medical condition deteriorates, I'm all in favor of letting him continue to do his job.  Meanwhile, what will apparently be a nationwide search will be undertaken in order to find a new Superintendent.

I truly wish this had gone better for Dr. Cousin.  But all that can be hoped now is that he has a productive remainder of his tenure, and more importantly, that he regain his full health.

At least we'll HAVE wineries in the HoCo

In case you missed it last week-- and you know what?  I almost did!  A bill to allow wineries in Howard County was approved last week by the County Council, and the County Executive is sure to enact the legislation.  If you want to see the article about it you need to go here to read all about it.

I've long supported the idea of having wineries in Howard County, and all in all, I'm very happy the bill has finally been passed.  But, to be honest, I think too much was done to satisfy the residents out there in the all-powerful "rural West" of the county-- which really is only about 1.3 of those two adjectives.  Meaning that it is West, but it really is not all that rural.

Specifically, I have problems with the restrictions on the types of roads wineries can be accessed from, and the limits on the number of visitors wineries can have for events.  There shouldn't be any restrictions on either, IMHO.  The only restriction the vast majority of businesses have in this county on the number of customers they can serve is called fire code.  And that's what it should be in this case.

Of course, the irony is, that very likely, most of the visitors to any Howard County winery event will be from the "rural West".  Although I'm sure some out there would love to see the rest of us banned.