onion rings
I suck at updating my blog. There, I’ve said it. I have big plans to be better about it, just not right now. While I’m not updating my blog, I’ll share one of my new favorites with you that does get updated:
http://oldpeoplefacebook.tumblr.com/
If you haven’t been here yet, you should go. Now. Why are you still reading? Go!
Freestanding ER in Julington Creek?
I wrote a letter this weekend and sent it to some local news stations and papers about a freestanding ER being built in Julington Creek by HCA. I wanted to share the letter here for a couple reasons.
1. Since I am being quoted, I wanted to make sure that my letter was accessible. It’s important to me that it be clear that I am not taking a position for or against the ER. Rather, I want more information and an opportunity for the community to collaborate with the developer to make this a true “win” for all involved.
2. If you share my concerns about the lack of information available about the transformation from doctors offices to a freestanding ER, please use this letter to email the news stations, papers, county commissioners, etc on your own to voice your concern.
Here is the letter:
I am writing in regard to articles published in The Times-Union and The Jacksonville Business Journal in April 2011 about a freestanding ER proposed by HCA to be built in Julington Creek Plantation. I’ve attached links to the articles storied below for reference. I’m hoping for an update on this project.
I see that www.cppi.com now has a sign up at the site and they appear to be the development company of choice for HCA projects. I’m quite concerned that this project may be moving forward without the opportunity for the community to ask questions or collaborate so that this project does not negatively impact the area.
There has been little media attention thus far as and what has been done has focused on the project being a “win” for the community without explaining the “win”. There doesn’t appear to be any coverage addressing the negative impacts an ER could bring when built in the middle of a family-oriented suburban community.
I’m hoping that some good coverage will help set my mind and the minds of the community at ease. Or enable us, through proper knowledge of the project, to be heard and make sure that as this project moves forward community concerns are addressed.
Some questions I have include:
1. Is the free standing ER project moving forward? This seems to be a drastic change from what the Doctors Village PR people promoted at the variety of family events and farmers markets hosted at that location. How different will it be in comparison to the village of doctor’s offices, cafes, and other family oriented services that was illustrated, described, and marketed to the community? Was there no rezoning required to change the project at this location? If rezoning was required, why didn’t signs go up alerting the community? If rezoning wasn’t required, why not?
2. How will a free-standing ER that backs up to homes and that will be in the path of the commute of (by my count) children for four different schools each morning and afternoon mix safely with the community?
3. Will there be noise restrictions on emergency vehicles? What about speed restrictions during school zone hours? How does this work in other communities where ER facilities and school zones mix? Will helicopters be permitted to land at this facility?
4. I’m surprised that Baptist South isn’t more concerned about this. That hospital is in the midst of expanding their ER. How will this project impact that ER which is right around the corner?
5. The Jacksonville Business Journal article by Matt Coleman references “St Johns’ medically underserved residents” Can you tell me more about this? Specifically, who is underserved, how, and how will this facility solve that? I’m confused as Kevin Turner’s article in The Times-Union tells us that this facility isn’t driven by a certificate of need as a regular hospital would be.
6. As I’m sure you’re aware home sales are sluggish at best in this area. Will a facility like this impact that positively or negatively? How and why?
7. The Times-Union article by Kevin Turner quotes Landau: “We’re certainly excited that the community is getting behind this project.” Can you tell me what community he is speaking of? I’ve know that concerned community members have spoken to crossing guards, neighbors, David Shoar (SJC Sheriff) when he was a guest on First Coast Connect, and school employees and no one seems to know about this project. Is it being kept quiet for a reason?
This may be a great thing for our community, but the lack of details and community education is troublesome. Please help me understand this project and its impact on my community better.
Thank you
Referenced Stories:
Just wanted to remind you how important it is to pay your taxes because they pay for my unemployment
Via someecards
Source: someecards.com
I’m pretty sure I know some folks who will want to print this out and save it for a rainy day.
Source: nevver
The Best Carrot Story You’ve Ever Heard
Start snapping your fingers an
d shouting “Cool!” because boy do I have a rumble story for you. It’s Sharks and Jets or Yooks and Zooks—or a room full of control-freaks, I mean moms, volunteering at an elementary school Valentine’s day pizza party. I’ll let you decide.
As a (not currently) working mom, I often want to attend school events or volunteer but until I got laid off I had to balance it with work. That meant I usually couldn’t do it. So in the spirit of trying to make the best of my jobless situation, I decided to volunteer at the school valentine’s day party. My daughter was so excited to see me. Watching her smiling and pointing me out to her classmates was great stuff and made it all worth it.
For the first part of the event, we helped the kids with crafts. As lunch neared, the teacher asked us to step out into the common area and get lunch ready for the kids. Lunch consisted of cheese pizza, carrots, ranch dressing, and juice boxes. The instructions were simple: assemble 77 plates with 2 slices of pizza, some carrots, and some ranch. Have these plates ready to pass out to the kids. The pizza hadn’t been delivered yet, so two other moms and I started laying out plates, putting carrots on the plates, and squirting a small dab of ranch on each plate. You can call us: The Carrot Three.
While we were working we began to hear hushed whispers of concern. When they couldn’t take it anymore, they swarmed us. They were horrified. Horrified, I tell you. We had put the carrots and the ranch ON the plates? Oh. The. Horror. Think firing squad, but instead of mean men with guns it was moms with words. Words about carrots and ranch.
“What if the ranch touches the pizza?” one mom cried out in anguish. She knew, for certain, some kid would cry about ranch dressing touching pizza.
“Some kids just don’t like carrots!” Another mom, with a firm grasp on the obvious, informed us.
“Yeah, and some don’t like ranch!” her trusty sidekick added.
“My kid just won’t eat it,” another told us as if we were idiots for thinking any kid would.
By the way, my kid eats carrots. And ranch dressing. Sometimes together. Sometimes not. I’ll be thanking her tonight for not being any of the above children.
And then the mom who we believe to be the leader—Alpha Mom if you will, emerged from behind her squad of angry carrot cohorts. She was calm and firm. She had done this before and she knew how it should be done. Her posture, her voice, her sympathetic eyes told us that she could forgive us our crimes if we did things her way. Very slowly (to help us understand I think) she told us how she had handled carrots and ranch before. She was very serious. Perhaps she has “Expertise in serving carrots and ranch to children” on her resume and feels she needs to follow it through? I may be paraphrasing (or embellishing, whatever.) here, but it was something like, “Oh you poor stupid morons, you don’t put carrots and ranch on the plates. Don’t you know anything? You wait and ask the children if they’re like carrots or ranch on their plates. Who allowed you to have children?“
Maybe that wasn’t exactly what she said. But I know it was what she meant.
Well, here’s the thing. I don’t really care for alpha moms. I think they’re bullies and I think there is more than one way to do things. Even if that thing is something really hard—You know, like putting carrots and ranch on plates. So I pushed back. I told Alpha Mom that in our house you get what you get on your plate and if you don’t like it tough. I’m pretty certain she threw a secret signal for one of her minions to call child protective services, but I could be wrong. Oh, and also, I told her we were following the instructions from the teacher. She was not impressed, or maybe she was. Alpha Mom sized up me and the other two of The Carrot Three and decided the best way to handle this was to create her own nation. One free of carrots and ranch on plates. That’s right. She recruited some parent volunteers and together they went off in search of a corner of the common area where they could be free to serve carrots and ranch their way. And they did. We were astonished. Don’t worry though. The Carrot Three were not deterred for long. Know what we did? We totally told on them. You know, cause we’re the grown ups in all of this.
So I have a kind of theory that something happens when you cross through the doors of an elementary school. Maybe you revert back, in part, to the elementary school you? When I found myself standing at the teacher’s desk tattling on Alpha Mom, I couldn’t help but start to giggle. While everyone else could see grown up Holly, I felt like little Holly with her mismatched clothes and classic 80’s girl mullet was standing there fiddling with her jacket and not making eye contact.
You see these things depicted on TV and you laugh. You think it is fiction. And then you volunteer at your kid’s school and you realize that these things really happen and everyone is a barking freaking lunatic. What is wrong with people? Our underpaid, overworked, and dedicated teachers must think we’re a crazy unappreciative bunch when we can’t follow simple instructions. And don’t even get me started on not wanting to encourage kids to eat something healthy, like the carrots, simply by putting it on the plate. Jamie Oliver just made a mental note to rollover in his grave.
Too much for an interview suit? If I didn’t, you know, NEED a job I’d totally show up in this just for kicks. Can you imagine? I wonder if they’d even interview me or suddenly be unavailable.
From Founders to Decorators, Facebook Riches
“The graffiti artist who took Facebook stock instead of cash for painting the walls of the social network’s first headquarters made a smart bet. The shares owned by the artist, David Choe, are expected to be worth upward of $200 million when Facebook stock trades publicly later this year.”
Source: joeymcallister
It is not often someone comes along that’s a true friend and good writer. Charlotte was both.
What I could do for Martha Stewart
I got a subscription to Martha Stewart Living for Christmas. If you know me, that’s just funny. I’m pretty much craft challenged. Really though, I am loving the magazine. I can appreciate other people’s ability to be crafty and keep their homes organized down to the wrapping ribbon. Try as I might, I just don’t seem to possess whatever it is that one needs to pull off either of these things on a regular basis. My desire to be crafty comes in goes in manic spurts and my house is in a constant state of what I like to call organized clutter. Organized because I can almost always find what I need in the clutter. After looking for it. For a while.
Years ago I was at a friend’s party and noticed she had a bowl of rocks on her coffee table. It seriously served no purpose but to just be a bowl on her coffee table that was full of rocks. I commented on her well-placed, accent piece, bowl of rocks by telling her that I didn’t get the bowl of rocks gene. Apparently her cat didn’t either, because he peed in it sometime later but that’s a story for another blog.
So here I am unemployed (somewhere between weeks three and four to keep up with previous posts) and flipping through my first couple issues of Martha. And like always, I’m tempted. I see a project and think, “Oh, I could do that.” Uh, huh. But I know what will happen. It’ll start out well – I’ll find all the supplies easily, create a crafting station at my kitchen table, and be all ready to get up and craft the next morning. I’ll bound out of bed, grab a cup of coffee, and commence to crafting.
Twelve hours later
It’s very possible I am still in my PJs, the coffee is cold and forgotten somewhere under a pile of fabric, paper, glue gun discards, and Band-Aid wrappers. It’s likely I haven’t brush my teeth or put a bra on. But I have sat at my kitchen table for some ridiculous amount of time wrestling with some craft project that looks nothing like the photo and has probably injured me a few times. Someone (read my husband) will have had enough of me ignoring everything else and will suggest I not waste any more time. This won’t end well for him. I will have a near breakdown and he’ll walk away with his hands up. Fueled by anger, frustration, or my own stench I’ll buckle down. I may decide to exchange the cold coffee for something stronger. I will breathe deep and look at the instructions one more time. Somehow I’ll figure it out and something that looks vaguely like the craft will emerge. And then I will momentarily declare myself a crafter and make loopy suggestions about what I’ll do differently “next time.”
So, here is where this gets really very fun folks! My track record with crafts and my new subscription gave me an incredible idea. Publications, like Martha Stewart Living, that feature DIY crafts NEED me. Really, they do! I can be comic-relief and a cautionary tale all at once. I will be a translator. A translator for the DIY crafting challenged. This may be my calling in life. I’m envisioning a regular spot that features me bumbling my way through one of the projects in the current issue. Something like “Remedial Martha for the DIY Challenged” or “Calamity Crafter.” If it were a video, Martha could even do some sort of crafting play by play, “Holly folded left when she should have gone right and that’s how she missed the pocket.” Or something. Martha and I will, of course, become fast friends, I will become a hero to the bowl of rocks gene deficient, subscriptions will soar, advertising rates will double. Everyone wins. Now I just need to convince Martha.
Unemployed: Week 2
Holly Bourquin, you just got laid off! What are you going to do next?
Go to Disney World, duh. Don’t get judge-y on me, the trip was planned before I lost my job and it was nice to escape from reality for a few days.
I made a conscious decision to put my current set of circumstances aside for the trip and have fun with my family. I decided the best way to dive in would be to be my daughter’s partner in crime. As it turns out, that meant I was on the hook for the water rides on this trip. Did I mention that it was cold while we were there? After getting hit head on with a wall of frigid water on the rapids ride in Animal Kingdom, I decided to buy myself a pair of pants. Fancy velour sweat pants with an embroidered Mickey on the side. When I came out of the store, wearing my new pants, I informed Mike that from this point forward these pants would be known as my Unemployment Pants. You have to say Unemployment Pants in a booming adventure cartoon voice. If you haven’t done that yet, go back and do it now, I’ll wait.
[Holly drums fingers, whistles, smiles knowingly at her Unemployment Pants]
OK, so they’re not Pajama Jeans and I am sure some of you were hoping I’d actually buy and wear those. But I promise you, Unemployment Pants (did you use the voice?) are better. Why? Because I said so and because they have all the qualities unemployment pants need to be functional and fanciful for the out of work. They are that shiny velour sweat suit material that promoted sweats from around-the-house clothing to an all-occasion clothing standard for moms, college girls, and people who star in Real Housewives shows. They have a Mickey embroidered on the hip, which I can only surmise serves as a constant reminder that they came from the happiest place on earth. Therefore, the wearer must be happy when wearing them. And let me tell you, I am happy wearing them. Unemployment Pants (no cheating, read it right), are stretchy, cozy, and complete with an elastic waistband so if I decide to let myself go to hell they will grow with me. Would you do that for me? I didn’t think so. These pants are loyal. They are in this with me to the end. I love you, Unemployment Pants.
