Farmer's Market

Here are some photos from the Farmer's Market on the Waterbury Green last week (with live music performance by The Carnegie Clapp Trio). The Farmer's Market is held every Thursday, 11am-3pm and was made possible through the tireless efforts of Marianne Vandenburgh and the Main Street Waterbury volunteer group. There is also a Farmer's Market in the Brass Mill Mall parking lot on Thursday afternoons. And I think there is one over near Lakewood Road as well.



Fruits, Vegetables, Flowers, Pies, Cookies, Organic Breads


Peaches!


Fresh Corn


Carnegie Clapp Trio

More Politics

I've now seen television commercials for both of the Democratic candidates for Governor. Based solely on their ads, it looks like DeStefano and Malloy are both scumbags. Aren't political campaigns great? ..... They leave me feeling ill. It's no wonder most people don't vote. It's too depressing.

Wonder Bread Thrift Shop

The Wonder Bread Thrift Shop on Meriden Road closed a couple of years ago. Today they started tearing it down. I don't know who "they" is. It was kind of a nice building. A little art deco in design.





Meanwhile, the gas station next to the thrift shop building closed a few weeks ago. I think it was a small-scale family business. I don't know why they closed. Maybe because there are larger gas stations on either end of the street.

I wonder if there's any connection to the Academy of Driving moving to Watertown. The driving school used to keep its fleet of cars just up the street and used this little gas station to fuel all its cars. That had to be a pretty significant portion of the gas station's revenue. The driving school moved the fleet to Watertown, because the owner didn't want to keep paying Waterbury's high property taxes on its cars.

Country Club Neighborhood Association

The Country Club Neighborhood Association should be ashamed of themselves. They're still bitching and moaning because four retarded people are going to move into their neighborhood. Come on! If they made this kind of fuss about blacks or an ethnic group, they'd be sued.

They seem to think that one house with four retarded people will destroy property values in their neighborhood. Please! That's the most absurd thing I've ever heard. In fact, it's the sort of thing racist white people used to say when blacks moved into their neighborhood.

One woman complained that they don't know the names of the people moving into the house, so they can't check to see if they're on the sex offenders register. WHAT??? Since when does being retarded mean that you're a sex offender? (This raises another issue for me--being able to check a sex offenders registry gives people a false sense of security; John Regan was sexually assaulting women in his nice neighborhood for twenty years without being on the register.)

The Country Club Neighborhood Association is the most prejudiced group in Waterbury right now. Unfortunately, they've figured out that you can't make the sort of accusations that they made back in June, so they've changed their focus. Now the "only reason" they're upset is that they think the purchase of the house was done improperly, as an inside deal. They've got the state attorney looking into the case. This disgusts me even more than I already was. Where's the investigation into the Neighborhood Association's amoral prejudice? Why are they able to get away with being self-righteous bigots?

Lieberman & Lamont

I haven't decided who I would vote for, since I haven't read up on the candidates yet (and I'm not registered as a Democrat; I think I'm unaffiliated, so I can't vote anyway). Lieberman and Lamont both have campaign blogs, and Lamont has a campaign profile on myspace (there's a Lieberman profile too, but it's not "real").
Here are the links:

http://liebermania.blogspot.com
http://lamontblog.blogspot.com
http://www.myspace.com/nedlamont

Not for walking

It seems like most of Waterbury is designed for cars, not pedestrians. Or, perhaps more accurately, the people in charge of the design and layout of city streets and sidewalks travel by car only. Every so often, I get it into my head that I want to ride my bicycle in town. I know I'm supposed to ride in the street in the same direction as traffic, but I don't trust drivers, especially since most of them tend to go 40+ in 25 mph zones. At one point I thought it would be safest to ride on the sidewalk, but that proved impossible. In the downtown area, the sidewalks are spacious and well-maintained, but everywhere else they're a nightmare. The potholes in the sidewalks are worse than the ones in the streets; weeds, trees and shrubs are overgrown and blocking maybe 10% of all the sidewalks; and then there are the telephone poles planted smack in the middle of the sidewalk. This is why you sometimes see people in wheelchairs and motorized chairs riding down the street--the sidewalks are unusable.

If you do find a street where there's a well-maintained, usable sidewalk, you still have the problem of walking alongside a road where traffic is racing by at top speeds. And there's no shade. For some reason, our city planners seem to hate shade trees. On the rare occasions when they do plant trees (like the ones on West Main Street near the 7-11, or the new ones on Grand Street), they're tiny little things that never grow taller than seven feet and have leaves that are so small it seems like they don't cast any shadow at all. If I could choose one thing to change about Waterbury, I would probably have shade trees lining every street. It would make the city so much more pleasant and would change its image in a positive way.

Here are some excerpts about old-time Waterbury from the National Magazine published in 1857:
"...its beautiful Centre square and its quiet shaded streets lined with handsome residences, presents an appearance quite unique for a manufacturing town."

"Do not look at the sidewalks; they will not bear inspection."

Even 150 years ago, the sidewalks in Waterbury weren't any good. I think there was a time period, between then and now, when they were well-maintained and designed for pedestrians, but now that "everyone" drives to wherever they're going, they've been neglected. Those of us who either want to or have to walk are out of luck. Bicycling works so long as you don't mind getting yelled at by passing drivers who think you shouldn't be in the road, and so long as you don't mind that there's no where to lock your bike if you go into a store.

New Addition

Alexander Calder, Giant Critter, 1976

Here's the new Calder statue in the courtyard at the Mattatuck Museum. I LOVE this statue! It exudes joy and happiness. Everyone in Waterbury should go see it. (Go now!)

Fire

I really loved this house on the corner of Johnson and Chestnut Streets. The fire was earlier this week (fire photo swiped from a friend's livejournal), and was probably caused by faulty wiring. All the residents were safely evacuated, and the owner has insurance, so I guess the main loss is architectural. I wish I had a better photo of it before the fire (pre-fire photo swiped from assessor's website), but the house still had its original wood decorative siding. Now it's going to end up covered in vinyl siding, like the light gray house next to it (which is its twin).

I really really hate vinyl siding (and aluminum, etc.) on old houses. The original wood siding on Victorian houses is usually very decorative and beautiful, while the modern siding is hopelessly generic, mimicking clapboard siding more typical of an entirely different style of architecture. There are some great WWI-era houses over near Washington Park that originally had stucco siding, but are now sheathed in vinyl and don't look anywhere near as cute as they did with the stucco. I know I'm a hopeless architecture geek, but when houses have their original siding (maintained), they look so much better than they do with modern siding added.

Too Hot!

At least it's not to humid as well. But it's still pushing 100, and probably more if you're baking in direct sun. This is the time of year when my favorite invention is the air conditioner.

Earlier this year, when it was cold and dark out, I posted photos of Waterbury in the summertime. Now that it's insanely hot out, here are some photos of when it was cold and snowy!




Thanksgiving Day, 2005 - dark, cold, snowy!




Old factory buildings on North Elm Street, December 4, 2005





Snowstorm on February 12, 2006. The long-haired cat stayed out in the snow longer than the others. The fur on the bottoms of his feet finally proved useful.






The Feb. 12 snowstorm dumped three feet on my driveway. By the time it finished coming down, I couldn't see my car.

That was weird...

A huge thunderstorm just rolled by, making an incredible amount of noise. At one point the thunder was so loud I wondered if the building was going to get hit by lightning. But when I looked out the window, it was still sort of sunny, and there was no sign of rain.

Wifi Hotspots Redux

The Republican-American ran an article today about coffee shops with wifi access for customers. The article's writer, Tracy O'Shaughnessy, focused mainly on a place in Cheshire and a discussion of telecommuting in general. Tracy noted that Starbucks makes you pay for wifi, whereas the local coffee shops usually give you free access. She also listed a "sampling" of area wifi hotspots. The only one she listed in all of Waterbury was Brass City Buzz. She also listed one in Watertown, one in Southbury, one in Woodbury and one in North Haven. North Haven? I'm not even sure I know where that is. Somewhere north of New Haven, I suspect. She really should have listed more. John Bale on Grand Street in Waterbury. I've heard that the new (and very delicious) Pizza Cafe on West Main Street in Waterbury has public wifi. The Bronson library has wifi, but I don't know if they let the public use it. Most McDonald's have wifi, but like Starbucks, they make you pay to use it.

I'm not really sure what the purpose of the article was. Maybe it was just to let people who don't use wifi know that there are people who do. For people who want to know where they can go to get free wifi access, it was close to useless. A better article would have been one that has a comprehensive list of wifi hotspots, indicating which are free for customers, and reviewing the different coffee shops. That would have been a great article--or at least one I'd like to read!

Romeo & Juliet in Library Park

Shakesperience Productions' Second Annual Shakespeare in the Park.
Picnic on the lawn with the timeless tale of love, action, and family feud, Romeo and Juliet. Resident artists join with actors in our community to bring this classic work to life.

A unique sound design, the Waterbury Clock Tower, and a warm summer evening provide the perfect backdrop for our innovative and visceral production. Bring your own picnic or reserve a box dinner from the John Bale Book Company & Café by calling (203) 591-1801.

Library Park, Grand Street, Waterbury
Thursdays - Saturdays, June 22 - July 1st
6:30pm
Free Admission
($5 Suggested Donation)

Minimum Wage

This isn't really local news, but it certainly affects a lot of people in Waterbury. Congress voted against raising the minimum wage in the US. Minimum wage has been stuck at $5.15 an hour for nine years. Nine years. Think about it. The price of gasoline has doubled in the past three years. Over the past nine years, the cost of living overall has increased. Nine years ago, a nice two bedroom apartment in this area could be rented for $500 a month. Now it's more like $800 a month. Electricity costs more. Heating fuel costs more. I think it's safe to assume that costs will continue to rise, yet our Congress thinks it's acceptable to keep people at $5.15 an hour. If you work 40 hours a week at minimum wage, your annual income is just over $10k. Guess what? That's officially poverty! Kind of makes you wonder why anyone would bother getting a legitimate, legal job.

Meanwhile... this same month, the same Congress decided that it was perfectly okay to take their automatic pay raise of $3,300. In the past ten years, their salaries have increased 26% (according to USAToday). They give themselves 26% more, while giving the struggling poor nothing.

Flood Damage

I'm sure there's more to the story than I know about, but as I've driven through Waterbury since June 2, especially in the days immediately following the flooding, it seems like the trouble was with the city's sewer system. The places where I've seen parts of the road washed out look like the wash-outs occured along the drain system. On some streets, it was almost like sinkholes developed every place where the road had a patch (in other words, places where utility crews had opened up the road to do maintenance work). Earlier this spring, before the big June 2 storm, other heavy rain storms were pushing the sewer system past its capacities. I saw a lot of manhole covers with water bubbling out of them. This season's rains didn't seem to be particularly worse than any other year (not counting 1955!), so why was there so much damage?

Make Way

I went to Walmart about a week ago, and took the road entrance that slopes around and down, taking you directly to the Walmart. As I drove down that road, I suddenly saw a mother duck and her babies crossing the road. I stopped my car so I wouldn't risk running them down, and then I watched while the babies tried to get up over the curb. It's a relatively high curb, not a problem for the mother duck, but the little ducklings had a hard time. There were maybe a dozen of them, and for the most part they were able to swarm up over the curb by jumping up on each other's backs. The last duckling, however, had to make it up over the curb on his own. The mother duck and her swarm started walking away, but then she realized that one of her babies wasn't there. The poor little duckling was distraught and panicky. He kept jumping, but couldn't make it up over the curb. At one point, it looked like he was going to run back across the road, where they had come from. I honked my horn, and he went back to the curb next to his mother. The mama duck, realizing what the trouble was, settled down on the grass to watch and wait, while the rest of her babies squirmed around next to her. Finally, after many, many tries, the little duckling managed to scrabble up over the curb and rejoined his family.

If only I'd had my camera with me!

Deployment

Waterbury's National Guard unit is having a send-off ceremony on Thursday before they leave for Fort Dix and then Iraq. Also on Thursday, there will be assorted ceremonies in Waterbury to commemorate events from the Revolutionary War (someone dressed as George Washington will show up at the Green on horseback and give a speech, wreaths will be laid on the graves of two soldiers buried at East Farms Cemetery, etc.).

Sort of a weird coincidence of events.

Guard Deployment

About 70 National Guard members from Waterbury are about to be deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

A send-off ceremony for the 143rd Combat Sustainment Support Battalion is scheduled for Thursday at the Waterbury Armory. The soldiers are expected to be deployed for up to 18 months.

The battalion, which deployed to Bosnia, provides support to combat-ready forces such as personnel administration support and operational and logistical support.

More than one thousand Connecticut National Guard soldiers are deployed in the U.S.-led coalition's war on terrorism.
(from WTNH)

Good luck!

Last day...

Today I move to my new apartment. Earlier in the week, AT&T assured me that my internet connection would work as soon as I moved in. A couple days ago, a different rep from AT&T called to say that DSL service is not guaranteed and that they weren't sure if I would have DSL at all in the new apartment. It's in Waterbury! in the city! not out in the boondocks! Because someone at AT&T filled out the wrong form, or punched the wrong button, or maybe because they're crazy, the earliest I will have my service restarted is on the 14th. So today is my last day with internet access at home. I'm already having withdrawal pains. Yes, I am addicted. Maybe a few days without internet will help me beat the addiction. Probably not, though. I'll just get hooked again as soon as I have DSL again.

Power Outage

Portions of downtown, most noticeably around the intersection of West Main Street and Thomaston Avenue, are without power today. I'm guessing this is why there aren't any copies of the Republican-American available anywhere in town, and why their website is down. Normally I don't buy the paper, but today is the first day I start apartment-hunting, so I was really eager to pick up a copy. Hm. Maybe if I drive up to Torrington I can find one. I think they have a separate press there.

Just before the storm...

Storm clouds rolling in from the right... lightning, thunder, torrential downpour about five minutes after this photo was shot.