depending on where you live in mt vernon your apartment/house may come with alley parking! otherwise there are a lot of garages around, and street parking can get tough but is never completely impossible (saying this as someone who's used to NYC parking, so only having to walk a block or two is an unfathomable luxury)

have you like, ever worked in food service before

the rawlings conservatory asks for a donation of $5 but it's voluntary! it's super beautiful and druid hill park is also a great place to wander around on a nice day

a job is a job; a side hustle is what you take on when your job(s) doesn't pay you enough to get by but demands so much of your time that you can't just tack another one on. the last time i worked part-time (on top of two other jobs to make ends meet while i was in school!) even the most flexible employers demanded double the availability for what they actually scheduled me for, and somehow were great at always scheduling me on the days/times i'd notified them i would never be available (due to the two other jobs thing) but since they'd already made the schedule it was now my job to find someone to cover me. and this was pre pandemic when the getting was pretty good! shockingly, as the economy has taken a nosedive, conditions for workers have gotten even worse, so even us 30-somethings who've gotten something steady and are used to being treated even marginally better than dirt—like, even my worst part time jobs at least didn't give me problems when i needed to go to a funeral, which seems unthinkably luxurious now—may not have experienced the need to find something both flexible and supplemental in this way.

trouble with a lot of those is how inflexible and demanding they are. i do not miss working BOH where every spare moment had my phone blowing up like "can you come in", my shifts never actually ended when the schedule said they would, and if i got scheduled for a day i couldn't work and couldn't find someone to cover for me i'd just get fired. like sure, it's work! but definitely not what i'd call a "side hustle". i definitely don't miss it.

i will scream about how concrete bollards should be the bare minimum for a protected lane any day, love concrete bollards

omg yeah concrete bollards or something that can't be driven through please, i've literally never been able to use this bike lane bc there's always at least one car just chilling there

for real. this has major "the shop manager just stepped out of his new car to tell everyone the company's making record profits this year! not for you guys on the floor though, you know how bad the economy is, we just can't find the money to give any raises."

it's extremely possible to do this in a system where there's never been a larger disparity between the income of hourly workers and the income of owners/managers. they'll cry poverty if they can't buy a third vacation home while skilled workers are struggling to find a job that won't break their bodies and will still let them pay rent. add that into the refusal to invest in training or entry-level jobs for newer/younger workers and you've got a labor force that's retiring/dying out and no new takers because people have bills to pay and don't want to be treated like they're disposable. i'm a skilled tradesman and i deal with this as my day to day reality. places are desperate for skilled workers but won't pay us enough to live on, they'll brag about record profits but deny us raises because of "the economy", they overwork what small labor force they do have so we're all even more overextended and prone to injury while they refuse to hire or train up new people, and that penny wise dollar foolish attitude is gonna end up hurting them even more than it hurts us when that unsustainable cycle finally catches up to them.

a lot of phone trees will hang up on you now if you do this too much. it's beyond infuriating.

i love the people, the architecture, that i don't need a car here and love what bike infrastructure we do have! hate the dearth of public transit & bike lanes, cars in the bike lane, and people who act like they're gonna get kniferobbed to death if they go outside

i hope they build a bus stop right in front of your house :)

i'm guessing you personally prefer and are capable of taking your car everywhere, but what about the elderly, the blind, the epileptic, and the many other groups of people who are unable to drive but need to get around? do they just not get to live in your town? (or if so, do they just have to be housebound or dependent on asking favors of people to get anywhere?) public transit gives people independence and access to their community, there should be much more of it everywhere.

also like, how is having to see a bus different than having to see constant car traffic, cmon

coming in on the flip side of this—if you're buying a vacant, gutted place for ~$10k and have the budget for renovation, why not rehab it? a lot of row homes are on the market already in the $150-$200k range, you get to rehab a building and do some architectural preservation while also making a home that's customized to your taste, and your neighbors benefit by not having a vacant next door anymore. like, of course it's a big undertaking, of course there can be unexpected costs, but in the end the estimates are coming in around the price of a move-in-ready home. if you like a project and like the location, why not?

here's a pretty helpful twitter thread about what the actual contents of the spill were and what to monitor water quality for, if you're really concerned.

also contains a fairly bleak reminder that hazmat freight accidents happen like… insanely often in the USA and just aren't reported on very much. a huge hazmat truck just crashed like two days ago and dumped dioxins all over a watershed area! this has just been happening for ages bc our infrastructure is a mess! shockingly, despite this accident, rail is still our best bet for transporting hazmats… when the track is actually maintained and the workers aren't being screwed over (this east palestine disaster is pretty much a direct result of the union rail workers being completely screwed after they just tried to organize all of those rail strikes—a situation like this was exactly the sort of accident they were organizing to avoid, because they know the conditions Norfolk Southern et. al. forces them to operate under are not adequate or safe).

i definitely wouldn't stay in that motel unless i was really desperate, but there's also the biddle st inn not far away in mt vernon thats pretty tiny but mostly rents to traveling nurses and med students

there's a huge sober community here! also one of the few biking communities with a huge sober presence. i'm not part of it myself, but among the people i know that actually makes me an outlier which is pretty cool.

i'd advise against this because if they're negligent/unwilling to keep a building up to code they're definitely going to drag their feet and cut corners about wood stove maintenance (and installation!). offering them an "easy" way out that has a high risk profile solely for the tenant if done wrong is basically asking a landlord to do the worst job they can for the least amount of money and put your own life in as much danger as possible. i know wood stoves are generally very safe and efficient when installed and maintained well, it's just the "installed and maintained" part that seems to be the uphill battle here. pull code on these slumlords and bleed 'em dry, they deserve every headache you can give them.

the fact that there aren't any physical machines to pay cash and the website is super broken (and i don't want to give a parking company my email???) is also the worst!! i almost got a ticket while sitting in my car and fighting with their site because they've got parking attendants who circle like sharks bc of ekiben pickups

if you contact their volunteer-specific email address (i believe it's volunteers@barcs.org) you can probably find out if they have a reptile/non-mammal specific program! they definitely do fostering and there are several volunteer positions that don't interact directly with animals so there's always something you can do

i'm still on the hunt! generally i don't get homesick for much food-wise since baltimore's got some pretty great food, so i wasn't going in trying to be a hater, but their cannoli were so sweet they made my teeth hurt and i was so disappointed

another italian new yorker here--super unimpressed with their cannolis. and i was so excited from their reputation, so it was such a letdown! their sfogliatelle were okay though

honestly next time go to the mills along falls rd (light rail stop in woodberry + a short walk, or grab an uber to the slightly further mill no. 1 for cosima!) if you want a really cool and unique view. not many cities have a big chunk of forest and a river with waterfalls in the middle of them!

cyclists need to follow the flow of traffic--they can take the full lane but have to go the right way! that's super dangerous for everyone involved.

an important thing to know about narcan is that there's one dose per package! there's no test spritz. don't try it out to see if it's working if you need to administer it to someone--if you spray it to see if it works, you just lost your dose. just stick it up their nose and spray, one and done. there is no danger in giving naloxone to someone who doesn't need it, and it works immediately so people should feel confident in their ability to use this and potentially save someone's life. naloxone is about as close to a miracle drug as it gets.