Quiet Declarations

Two weeks ago a friend and I visited a small business in Wheaton, Maryland, called Barry’s Magic Shop, whose owners have been serving their community for 31 years. We visited because we had heard a rumor that the town of Wheaton was in the process of using the power of eminent domain to seize the land and demolish the building. What we discovered was considerably more disturbing than what we were prepared to find.

The journalistic acccount of how a one-man development plan is destroying a livelihood is ably told by Jacob Grier at Eternal Recurrence. Jacob also reports the response he receives from his inquiry to the county executive. Keep in mind as you read that what’s left out, because of difficulty in corroborating with multiple sources, is a back story of political antagonism and backroom dealing that’s incredibly disturbing when considering what the consequences are for the affected individuals.

For additional information, I encourage you to read the comments and click on the links. If you have a medium of communication that would be appropriate to tell this story, I sincerely hope you’ll pass it along. A huge thanks in advance to those of you who are able to spread the word and make this particular instance of eminent domain abuse as difficult to implement as possible.

Yep, as several of you kind readers have pointed out, that’s just about how long it’s been since my last post. What do I have to say for myself, you might ask? Not a whole lot. In case you’re interested, though, here are a few of my less-than-exciting excuses:

1) I took on an additional role at work that’s essentially doubled my workload;

2) When the weather got warm, I decided to stop spending all my free time on the computer;

3) I got behind in my extracurricular reading and thus didn’t feel like I had a whole lot to say;

4) I spent some of my weekends, usually reserved for playing catch-up, out of town;

5) I prioritized the needs of friends who were moving apartments or required other assistance;

6) I’ve been avoiding my blog as a passive aggressive retaliation to frequent server issues;

And then there’s the big reason: I expect to re-launch this website very soon, and I keep putting off posting in hopes that I’ll get around to it. I’m moving to a new hosting service, new blog software, and quite possibly a new URL. This will enable me to restore comments and trackbacks (finally!) and to add some enhancements to my website, which I also expect to get a minor facelift. I just haven’t gotten around to doing it yet.

One other thing I’ve discovered after two years of blogging is that it’s hard to stay motivated without a clear purpose, which I may have lost with the passage of time. I never intended for this to be an online journal — in fact, when I started blogging it was intended to help me while I was looking for a job! I frankly don’t have the time to do the research and then write the lengthy posts I’d like to write when I try to speak convincingly on an issue. I want to keep writing and communicating, and far more frequently than I have been, but I’m still debating internally about how I want to do that exactly.

Should I make several short (2-3 lines and a link) posts a day on whatever pops into my head? Group blog with several writers to add frequency and point of view? Try to become an authority on a very specific topic or topics? Except for the fact that I refuse to allow this to be the e-diary it has occasionally drifted toward, I’m still largely undecided on this question. Comments are still down, but if you have a personal preference please email me with your comments as I’d love to hear them.

I’ll be traveling significantly in July so don’t expect much from me, but I expect to re-launch my site sometime in the next month, and when I do I plan to return with a vengence!