I’ve never gone to the Washington Post website and typed my own name in before, and I found it an odd experience. I was moved to do so when I noticed some letters to the editor in today’s Post about an earlier story that I had missed about a Lt Whiteside. Honestly, I’m almost sorry I did – there are some things you’re just happier not knowing.

Elizabeth Whiteside isn’t a relative of mine as far as I know. She’s a local, a graduate of James Madison High School in Vienna. My father did most of his growing up in Miami after coming from Indiana. So Ms Whiteside and I likely share a common ancestor somewhere – Whiteside isn’t the most common of names – but if you need any proof of our distance from each other you needn’t look any farther than the fact that she was a valedictorian in high school and I was, well, attendance challenged.

I’m a subscriber on a genealogy mailing list that’s run by a fellow named Whiteside, and he tends to call us all “cousin.” It’s a little affectation I’ve never minded but that doesn’t mean much to me. It’s a name, and while I feel close to the people who gave it to me, it’s a million other things between us that make us close: experiences we shared, things we did for each other, things we have in common that go beyond a collection of letters.

So when I read Lt Elizabeth Whiteside’s story and what she’s been through and what she faces, I didn’t feel any kinship with her because we share a last name, or maybe a common ancestor a dozen births back. I read her story and thought about the stretches in my life when I wrestled with depression, the long stretches where things felt pointless or I found myself unable to cope with adversity. I never fell as far as she did, but then again I never achieved the way she did either. I had trouble in a job that involved sitting in a chair for a dozen hours a day, writing software so that factory workers could clock in on a computer terminal instead of with paper cards. She faltered after years of being a part of saving lives, stateside and on a battlefield, getting stellar marks from her superiors along the way.

I think about what and who finally got me to seek some treatment: some poor performance in a college class I didn’t much need, and a kind and firm word from my professor, Dr Leslie Northrup, who changed my life through a ten minute visit during office hours. It was a hard meeting for me to have, and I shared things that challenged my pride. Lt Whiteside chose not to reach out for help… because she was afraid they’d send her home from Iraq. I’m almost ashamed to think of my reluctance to humble myself when I compare it with how this woman decided to hang on to her own pain because she didn’t want to lose her ability to go on helping others.

So I’m pulling for you, cousin, and I hope that having your story told ends up helping you in some way. Perhaps your pain will once again help others, whether it be as a warning or a call to action. I called Senator Webb’s office at 202-224-4024 and left a message expressing my concern – perhaps some of the rest of you would as well.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

When I was in elementary school, in third grade students were permitted to start taking instrumental music lessons through the school district. I remember attending a meeting about it with my parents, and being absolutely enthralled with the sounds coming out of the flute.

My parents managed to fit another monthly expense into what must have been a pretty tight budget and I was handed a shiny new Selmer Bundy student model flute, which I dutifully carried back and forth to school for the next 14 years. I took it to elementary school band practice (and to this day remember every piece we played that first year), marching band in eighth grade, orchestra practice and school musical rehearsals in high school, and even auditioned for my college orchestra. By this time, I had to confront the fact that I wasn’t very good at music, but by then I had found plenty of other ways to scratch the artistic itch, and laid my flute aside in favor of other pursuits.

But being unable to throw away or even sell something that had been such an important part of my artistic education, my flute has been sitting in my closet for years now. Then yesterday, I got an email about an organization called Hungry for Music. HFM accepts donations of used musical instruments to be distributed, both locally and internationally, to children who are motivated to study music but can’t afford an instrument.

It seems like every other person I meet used to play the clarinet, or used to play the trumpet, or used to play the guitar. Don’t let your instrument collect dust; donate it to Hungry for Music. They’re scheduling December instrument pickups now, and my old flute is on its way to teaching some other child about art, discipline, responsibility, and how great it feels when they’re applauding for you.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

image courtesy of GreenPixie

By way of Consumerist we have a list of the nation’s worst offenders in the elder care system, 128 facilities singled out for “special focus.” Here in our area there’s two getting the skunk-eye from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Carolyn Boone Lewis Health Care Center in DC proper has been on the list for a full 34 months. You can see the full assessment here, but if I had to hazard a guess I’d say this is a facility on the short road to losing funding toot sweet. Some joyous little bits are a below-average percentage of residents getting flu and/or pneumococcal vaccines (60% & 19% vs District averages of 83% and 68%), below average number of RN minutes per resident (11min vs 30min DC and National average) and 18 health deficiencies cites, rather than the DC average of 15 or the National average of 8.

A nursing home is a place for people who don’t need to be in a hospital but can’t be cared for at home. Most nursing homes have nursing aides and skilled nurses on hand 24 hours a day. Some nursing homes are set up like a hospital. The staff provides medical care like hemodialysis, as well as physical, speech and occupational therapy.

Home care allows for a more personal, one-on-one relationship with the caregiver, to get it just visit the page. Seniors are able to remain as independent as they are able, rather than needing to turn over basic tasks to nursing home professionals. In-home care is often less expensive than care out of the home.

Ruxton Health Of Woodbridge is the only Virginia facility on the list and a comparative newcomer with only 18 months on the list. Their percentages also looked better with regards to bedsores, vaccinations, and other items. It’s when you get into the citations that this for-profit agency looks worse with 21 health citations and 6 fire safety citations, versus the average 8 and 3. Scarily, the few items that supposedly impacted “many” rather than “few” residents was their failure to “Store, cook, and give out food in a safe and clean way” and “Get rid of garbage properly.” Yuck.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

Here we see a team of AOC guys hard at work putting the finishing touches on the 2007 Capitol Christmas Tree, a balsam fir gifted to us from Green Mountain National Forest in the great state of Vermont.

Not to be confused with the National Christmas Tree by the White House, the Capitol Christmas Tree started out as a 24-foot Douglas fir from Birdsboro, PA, which stayed on the Capitol Lawn and was lit and decorated every Christmas from 1963 to 1967. Wind storm damage in 1967 caused the tree to die in 1968, so that the trees for Christmas of ’68 and ’69 were brought in from Maryland. From 1970 onwards, the Capitol Christmas Tree has been provided yearly by the USDA Forest Service, with trees gifted by a donor state. See the full list from 1970 to 2006 here.

There will be a Tree Lighting Ceremony on Wed, Dec 5th, 5PM, with Nancy Pelosi, Patrick Leahy, Bernie Sanders, and Peter Welch, followed by a Vermont-style reception at the Botanical Gardens.

The first Capitol tree I saw was from Idaho, and had potato decorations on it. What kind of stuff do you think should be hanging from a Vermont tree?

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

Santarchy!

Some of the best fun I had last year was putting on a Santa suit and joining 200 of my closest friends who I’d never met before on a trek around the district. If beer is proof that Grod loves us and wants us to be happy, Santa suits and candy canes are proof he’d like us to entertain tourists and small children while behaving like well-meaning mental defectives.

Seriously. Get yourself a Santa suit from Party City or Target or make one. Get a big old Santa sack, fill it with cheap candy canes and toys and be on the steps of the National Museum of Natural History between 1 and 2pm this Saturday. If it follow the path of last year – but who can tell? Thus the ‘archy’ part – there’ll be a little over two hours of wandering the mall and surrounding area, singing at the white house tree, followed by confusing the White House security guards when the pre-drinking picture gets taken. (Check out the look on the face of the middle guard of the three on the right. I’m going to go look and see if there’s a wikipedia entry for the phrase “what the HELL” and put this in there.)

Hope to see you there.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

Driving on Constitution this morning, I was amazed at the job the wind was doing to clear DC for Christmas. Leaves were everywhere in the city, ripped from the trees and flung around in little leafnadoes swirling and buffeting my little Jetta. I must’ve driven through a dozen between 14th and the Roosevelt Bridge, and again on Route 50 toward Fairfax. It couldn’t be more perfectly timed, though, with the National Menorah being lit tomorrow night for the first night of Chanukah, and the National Christmas Tree Lighting on Thursday.

There are lights and trees and other decorations in most of the office buildings downtown, and XM has started their annual five stations of Holiday music, and Capital Weather is even saying we might get some snow on Wednesday (don’t worry, just flurries, designed to bring beltway traffic to a screaming halt as all the drivers panic.) so it might just be the last moments of Fall being stripped from the trees by the 50 mile-an-hour gusts on this windy cold day.

Relax and take a deep breath, we’re in for a stretch of winter. Here’s hoping we get a 1996-esque blizzard.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

Garrett Graff has an amazingly perfect piece on technology knowledge of politicians in today’s Washington Post. Why is it that we tolerate know-nothingness regarding technology from our politicians? I would say that 70% of the country at least has an email address, and that at least 30% of our workforce use “the Internets” and “the Google” at least once an hour to do their job, and as such it’s a critical piece of American infrastructure, not entirely unlike the highways and bridges, or the medical system.

It is consistently amazing to me how people can heap disdain on technologies they know little or nothing about because they’re either “too important” or “too old” to make them work on their behalf. That’s also called “laziness” and “stupidity” where I’m from. Making excuses because you don’t know how something works is antithetical to how America should be run, and the kind of ignorance, if expressed in other fields of American life, would be treated as a firing offense come election time.

Garrett, thanks for bringing this up in such a public light. The Internet isn’t a place just for freaks and geeks and academics, nor has it ever been such. It’s high time that politicians woke up and realized that.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

Whose bright idea was it to arrange these wheelchair access ramps diagonal to each other on the Mass Ave island near Union Station? This is not easy for the disabled in wheelchairs, as they must either negotiate the ramps in an “S” pattern, or cross the steep sides of the ramp at an angle, or as I have more often seen, just skip the island altogether and go around it, rocketing across Mass Ave against traffic coming up from 1st St NE. None of these options are safe, convenient, or sensible.

Is this the kind of thing for which I should be submitting a service request?

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs