I have returned…

Just a few thoughts on my time away. I saw in my e-mail I have some good political news to comment on, but that will be tomorrow. Wasn’t expecting to return after 9 p.m. but I did.

I went back to the old hometown to see my family who all happened to be gathered there. It’s been two years since the last time I went to Toledo and I found that not much has changed.

  • The first thing I saw when I drove into the city limits coming in off the turnpike was the three little lit Christmas trees on the triangular traffic island. I guess it’s the mayor’s idea to brighten up the city. But the second thing I saw was all of the potholes along the city street and thirdly was the still uncollected leaves along the curb. (Toledo does leaf collection every fall, generally twice. They’re a little behind this year apparently.) Priorities, people, priorities.
  • One thing that didn’t change is something they need in Salisbury – a good used CD store. I took part of my Christmas money and bought 18 used CD’s for just over $60 with tax. I anticipated making the stop and had to buy another rack to start the next hundred with.
  • The other thing I was happy to find in Toledo that doesn’t exist here is from their local Pepsi bottler. My co-workers know that I drink (plenty of) diet Pepsi at work and prefer to drink it from the 24 ounce bottles – generally I buy them at Giant. (By the way, I see more people I know there. Why is that?) Anyway, here I’m pretty much stuck with regular diet Pepsi but in Toledo they also bottle the caffeine free diet Pepsi AND diet Mountain Dew in that manner. So get on it, Pepsi of Salisbury. Now I know someone else who bottles those and I’m not planning on driving a 1200 mile round trip again for awhile.
  • Finally, something both political and a little closer to home. It occurs to me that all of the money the state of Maryland spends on running generally empty light rail cars around the Baltimore and DC metro areas could be far, far better spent on putting a third lane on I-70 between Frederick and Hagerstown. I got slowed up bigtime by traffic going in BOTH directions. Yes, it’s a holiday weekend but most transportation designs are based on traffic at peak times. It particularly makes me shake my head in disbelief when you take 5 or 6 lanes of traffic coming west out of Baltimore and northwest from DC and choke them to 2 lanes going west. A brilliant engineering feat – not.

Like I said up top, I got two or three interesting e-mails that will deserve comment (or maybe further comment since I was completely out of the loop as far as local blog reading was concerned). I’ll go through all of that tomorrow and get both you, my readers, and I back up to speed.

Author: Michael

It's me from my laptop computer.

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