Dear Family,
I like almost everything about our neighborhood, but I’m grateful not to live under the tyranny of a homeowners association. We have an active neighborhood civic association, which I admire, even though I seldom attend the meetings. I believe I currently belong to the association, though I’m never certain. My membership frequently lapses because reminding people to pay their dues is not something the group is good at. Notwithstanding a recent 50 percent increase that jacked the annual dues all the way up to $15.00 (fifteen U.S. dollars!) per household, it doesn’t exactly pose a financial hardship. But paying them is never something I’m going to remember to do absent a nudge.)
There is much to like about our neighborhood civic association. It publishes an extraordinarily well-written and informative bi-monthly newsletter with topics ranging from the history of the neighborhood and local events to invasive plant species, noise ordinances, unleashed dogs, and parking restrictions. I have never contributed to the newsletter but I’m a big enough fan of it that I recently became the guy in charge of distributing it to all the houses in our little corner of the neighborhood.
The civic association sometimes expresses its views of what constitutes good neighborliness (in the most neighborly possible way). But unlike a formal homeowners association, it has no means of enforcing them. This is just how I like it and how things ought to be everywhere in America. If our neighbor decides to line the walkway between his front door and the sidewalk with cornstalks as high as an elephant’s eye (as someone up the street did years ago — one of many things I have come to sincerely love about our neighborhood’s unique character) then who am I (or some killjoy HOA) to tell him he can’t?
If the eccentric fellow on Cavalier Drive (a little less than a mile from us) wants to erect a UFO and alien statue in his front yard, what business is it of mine?
While we thankfully do not live under the oppressive thumb of an HOA, we do have the next worst thing: a small but determined group of pearl-clutching busybodies concerned citizens who will not rest until the county has installed a Speed Limit 20 sign on every block and every last intersection is converted to a four-way stop.
I don’t want to get too far down a rabbit trail here, but let me just assert once and for all that mankind’s six most horrific inventions of all time are (in no particular order): 1) nonfat milk, 2) cigarettes, 3) the internal combustion engine, 4) four-way stops; 5) weapons of mass destruction, and 6) speed bumps.
Nothing attests to a failure of road design quite like a four-way stop. It’s a traffic engineer’s way of throwing their hands up and exclaiming, “We can’t figure out how to make traffic flow safely here, so we’re just going to force everybody to stop. Even if there’s nobody coming, you still have to stop. Why? Because we hate you.”
As stupid and pointless as four-way stops are in a car, they’re ten times worse on a bike. The worst thing I’ve experienced as a cyclist is being hit by a car (multiple times). Almost as bad is being compelled to forfeit all of my hard-earned forward momentum to stop for no good reason. And unless someone’s actually crossing at the intersection I’m approaching, the presence of a stop sign does not constitute a good reason. Recognizing this, intelligent, forward-thinking jurisdictions like Washington D.C. and Idaho have enacted laws permitting cyclists to treat stop signs as if they were yield signs (which pretty much all cyclists do anyway, regardless of jurisdiction — as do most motorists for that matter).
(Actually, the world’s most forward thinking jurisdictions do away with stop signs entirely, mostly by opting for roundabouts over deadly 90-degree intersections, and experience far fewer traffic fatalities as a result. But that’s not how we roll here.)
Anyway, in our neighborhood (where we’ve lived since 2000 and which, to reiterate, I sincerely love) the same predictable pattern repeats itself every few years:
- A small number of likeminded concerned citizens band together to complain on the neighborhood listserv about how “everyone” drives too fast on one street or another.
- The concerned citizens petition the county to install four-way stops (as well as speed limit signs, speed humps and/or similar abominations) throughout the neighborhood. They would install a stop sign at the end of every driveway if it were remotely feasible.
- The county wastes a bunch of money commissioning a traffic study to investigate the concerned citizens’ complaints.
- The resulting study (almost) invariably concludes that, in fact, only a small fraction of motorists are actually speeding in the areas the concerned citizens are complaining about.
- In spite of the study, the county creates at least one new four-way stop and erects 20 MPH speed limit signs all over the neighborhood.
- The concerned citizens proclaim victory on behalf of children everywhere and, indeed, on behalf of all humankind. They then proceed to don bright metaphorical suspenders overtop their giant figurative belts by erecting “Drive like your kids live here” placards. These signs have zero impact on anything because: a) in most cases, our kids actually do live here, b) hardly anyone was driving all that fast to begin with, c) the relatively small handful of jerks who actually do treat neighborhood streets like a racetrack don’t care about never-enforced speed limit signs or reminders that there might be children in a residential area, and d) the neighborhood traffic fatality rate was already holding steady at 0.0 percent before the concerned citizens went on their rampage, and so there’s nowhere for it to go but up.
But I guess you can never be too careful.
Relatedly…
Biking through the neighborhood to work earlier this week, I encountered a school bus stopped on the opposite side of the street with its red lights flashing and stop-sign arm extended. I dutifully stopped my bicycle to wait for the kids to finish getting on the bus. Seeing me, the bus driver slid open his window, smiled and said only cars needed to stop and I could keep going. I don’t know whether he was right as a matter of law. He was certainly right as a matter of common sense, but common sense has no bearing in the tortured realm of concerned-citizen-helicopter parents. I didn’t want to get called out in the neighborhood listserv as some random jerk cyclist who doesn’t care about mowing down innocent children, so I waited it out.
It was just a few more seconds and I’d already incurred the lost-momentum cost of stopping anyway. No big deal. Anything for the kids.
Middle-Aged People Heath Update!
Crystal’s procedure to repair her herniated disc reportedly went well.
Crystal was told to arrive at 1:15 p.m. on April 16th for the 2:15 procedure at something called the “SurgCenter of Silver Spring LLC.” I’d never heard of it, and it sounded a little fishy to me and so I found its website, which features some lovely stock photography of downtown Silver Spring but little in the way of useful information.
Strike one.
My first thought was that it’s probably a mob front or something. (To be fair, that’s my first thought with almost everything, but these kinds of suppositions can be difficult to prove.)
She received an urgent call at a little past noon on the 16th asking if she was still planning to go through with the procedure, and if so, why she hadn’t arrived yet.
“I was told to arrive at 1:15,” Crystal said.
“No, your procedure was moved up to 1:00,” the woman on the phone explained. “You were supposed to be here at noon.”
“Somebody probably should have told me that,” Crystal replied. “We’ll come down now.”
Strike two.
It’s only about a 10-minute drive from here. We arrived around 12:30 and found a completely empty waiting room, apart from the woman at the reception desk. Yeah, this place is definitely a front for something, I thought. The receptionist was perfectly pleasant and handed Crystal the clipboard they always give you at the doctor’s office where they make you waste 15 minutes filling out a bunch of information they already have.
I accompanied Crystal back to the pre-op area and spoke briefly with a nurse, the anesthesiologist and the surgeon, who said he’d call me after the procedure.
So I left. I drove to the YMCA and lifted for about 35 minutes (35 minutes qualifies as an extended weightlifting session for me — at my current rate of progress I might be able to do 3 pull-ups by the end of the year, but probably not). Then I went to CVS to pick up Crystal’s prescriptions and headed home.
The doctor called around 3:00 to tell me the procedure had gone well and I could come down if I wanted to watch Crystal wake up.
She was mostly awake by the time I arrived — groggy but said she felt okay. The nurse hung out with us in the recovery area for the next 60 to 90 minutes while Crystal gradually came to. Wondering where all the other patients were, I asked the nurse whether he needed to be tending to anybody else.
“No,” he replied. “Crystal was our only case today.”
Totally a front for something.
We rolled out of there around 5:00 (I’m leaving some of the details out) got home and she went upstairs to lie down. A friend from church brought us dinner, which was nice but totally unnecessary.
I seem to recall being told that people feel immediate relief following this particular procedure. This does not seem to have been Crystal’s experience. I think she is feeling marginally better now than before the surgery, but she continues to walk with obvious weakness on her left side.
Hopefully she will continue to improve, but it makes me wonder whether the surgeon actually did anything at all — which he might not have if the SurgCenter is just an elaborate façade. Crystal has a follow-up appointment with him on Tuesday where she will presumably learn more, including when she can go back to work. I don’t get the sense that she’s in any great hurry, but who ever is?
In other sort-of related news, you’ll be happy to learn that I don’t have testicular cancer — the end result of a long and not-terribly-interesting story that began with some mysterious scrotal swelling and ended with three different women handling and examining me in ways I am not accustomed to.
The final woman was an ultrasound technician. My only previous ultrasound experience was during Crystal’s pregnancies, and the experiences could not be more different.
During Crystal’s ultrasounds, the technician would make playful comments about the developing fetus while moving the probe over Crystal’s abdomen.
In my case, there was a large sign in the room instructing patients not to ask the technician any questions or to draw any conclusions about what they were seeing. The monitor was turned away from me so I couldn’t see anything to ask about anyway. I just lay there, quietly and awkwardly, for what seemed like forever while she silently guided the probe around my scrotum. The only thing she said to me (other than “take your pants off” and “okay you can put your pants back on now”) was that she had “like five more of these today.” I think she was trying to put me at ease, but it didn’t really work.
Anyway, I got the results back from the radiologist a few hours later and it all turned out to be nothing. I’m attributing the swelling (which has since subsided) to a new bike saddle. Fortunately, I’m getting better at standing up before going over speed bumps (speed bumps are evil) so everything should be fine now.
Crazy Feats of Endurance
Ari now holds the family record for the longest distance covered on foot in a single day.
The old record was 50 miles, shared by Ari, Sophie and me, based on a one-day hike the three of us did on the C&O Canal towpath in October 2019.
The new record is 100 kilometers (a little over 62 miles) following Ari’s 20-hour trek (again on the C&O Canal towpath) from Georgetown to Harpers Ferry on April 20th.
The event was the Sierra Club’s “One Day Hike.” I had stumbled across it last year while biking along the C&O Canal. I asked someone at one of the aid stations what was going on. He told me about it and literally my first thought was, Ari would love this!
I told Ari about it. They excitedly looked up when registration opened for the following year’s hike, set an alarm for the precise moment registration opened, and was among the first to sign up.
The best way to learn about the experience is in Ari’s letter. Here is a very abbreviated version of how it went from my perspective.
The hike began at 3:00 a.m. at Thompson’s Boathouse in Georgetown. Ari needed to arrive by 2:15 to be equipped with various things, including a GPS device that would enable me (and others) to track their location as they progressed along the trail.
Saturday morning is when I usually do my weekly long run. Since it was technically Saturday morning, I decided to leave my car there and go for a quick 13-mile jog around D.C. It was overcast (and a little rainy) but I still got to see some pretty sights. (I already knew it, but it was nice to be reminded that Washington is just as beautiful in the dark as it is in the light of day.)
I got back to my car around 4:30 a.m. drove home and went back to bed for a few hours.
During most of my waking hours that day I was unhealthfully obsessed with tracking Ari’s progress along the trail. Fortunately, my temple shift forced me to be separated from my phone from 11:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m., otherwise I might have stared at it all day. I rejoiced in seeing Ari’s forward progress, worried whether everything was okay when they spent more than a few minutes at aid stations, and died a little inside as I watched their progress slow over the closing 20 miles. Every 15 minutes, it seemed, I would re-do the arithmetic in my head: If they can just cover the final x miles in y minutes per mile, they’ll make it before midnight.
At no point did it appear as though they weren’t going to make it. Finally, at a little past 9:00 p.m., with Ari perhaps 7 miles from the end, Crystal and I jumped in the car and began the hour’s drive up to Harpers Ferry. We parked at the community center that functioned as the finish line. I then promptly abandoned Crystal, leapt from the car and started jogging back up the course to try and find Ari.
We found each other just past the John Brown Wax Museum, 2 km from the finish.
While clearly tired, Ari was still going strong. Being able to walk the last mile-plus (almost entirely uphill) in with them made me as happy and proud as I can ever remember feeling.
They may be crazy enough to do it next year. I guess we’ll see.
In much less impressive endurance event news, I had a great time pushing my friend Kevin at the Under Armour Sole of the City 10K in Baltimore earlier this month. Along with watching my children cross finish lines, this remains one of the most satisfying things I do.
Also, for what it’s worth, I just registered to run the Deseret News Marathon in Salt Lake on July 24th — in advance of the Willis reunion later that week. So if anyone wanted to join me…
(Most of) The Kids are Coming Home!
Sophie is officially done with finals and flew home from BYU on Thursday. She’ll be here for a couple of months until she travels to Latvia for a six-week study abroad program.
Sophie is heading to Latvia primarily in search of Russian speakers. The official language of Latvia is, you know, Latvian. But owing in part to Russia’s historical inability to keep its hands to itself, there remains a sizeable Russian-speaking population there, and what with there not being all that many friendly countries left where a nice American girl can go hang out with Russian speakers, Latvia it is.
Speaking of “friendly countries,” this might be my favorite map juxtaposition of all time:
Being a happily ignorant American who doesn’t know anything (I couldn’t tell you for sure whether Latvia is red, blue or neither on the graphic above — looks like it might be both red and blue, but those Baltic states all kind of run together for me), I have suggested that Sophie prepare for the trip by familiarizing herself with episode 11 of Seinfeld season 5 — the one where George’s interest in a particular woman prompts his hasty and fraudulent conversion to the Latvian Orthodox Church.1 It probably won’t help much, but it’s no worse than most of the other advice she’s been getting from me all her life.
Next week, Grace will be back home as well, which delights us to no end. I have no idea what she or Sophie plans on doing for work, but I expect they’ll figure something out.
Love,
Tim
Managing Editor of The Famlet Monthly
- According to the commentary track of the Seinfeld DVD box set, which I’ve only watched about 100,000 times, the episode’s writers settled on “Latvian Orthodox” because they thought the name sounded funny. They didn’t even realize it was an actual religion until after the episode aired and they got mail from the church thanking them for the publicity.