Monthly Archives: May 2014

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Let Me Plan Your Saturday For You

So many good things happening tomorrow…here are a few:

9:00 AM until 1:00 PM – Kids’ Equipment Day at the Town of Shrewsbury Municipal Garage, 211 South Street, rain or shine. (Sorry — I didn’t find out about this until today!)

9:00 AM until 2:00 PM – Free Electronics Recycling Day – Residential Drop Off and Recycling Center, 1065 Millbury Street

10:00AM until 4:00PM – REC Spring Garden Festival & Plant Sale at the YouthGROW Farm, 63 Oread St. Worcester. Much more than a plant sale — there are free gardening workshops, food, music, and kids’ activities.

11:00AM until 2:00PM – Canal District Farmers’ Market on Harding Street

12:00PM until 2:00PM – Albert Southwick book signing event at the Robert H. Goddard Library at Clark University

 2:00PM – CC Lowell storytime & free kids’ craft (Make your own “Wild Thing” paper bag puppet based on the book “Where the Wild Things Are”) – 258 Park Avenue

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Leicester Drive In opens tonight

If you have a hankering to watch “Captain America” and “Need For Speed”, you can do so tonight at the Leicester Triple Drive In, one of very few drive-in theatres left in the state.  Leicester now has three screens, but it looks like they’ll only be using one for this opening night.  The box office opens at 6:00, and the movies start at dusk.

Leicester Drive In

They’ll have movies on Friday & Saturday nights until mid-June, at which point they’ll be open every night of the week.

If there’s some rain tonight, remember that part of the drive-in “experience” is occasionally watching a movie while the wipers are going.

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CMRPC Farm Survey

Via Dominique DuTremble of the CMRPC:

The Central Massachusetts Regional Planning Commission (CMRPC) needs the assistance of area farm operators. As you may be aware, in 2013 CMRPC worked in eleven communities in our region – Barre, Brookfield, East Brookfield, Hardwick, New Braintree, North Brookfield, Oakham, Princeton, Rutland, Warren, West Brookfield (referred to as the Rural-11). As part of that effort, we mapped almost 700 working landscapes – farms and woodlots, and identified such action steps including:

• Develop a greater understanding of farmer needs and challenges
• Support Buy Local and agritourism programs,
• Support central Massachusetts agricultural educations,
• Promote technology and transportation infrastructure,
• Promote improved water and waste water management,
• Develop of middle and end user markets
• Explore regulatory reform in support of small farm operations.

The summary report and maps can be found on our website.

This year to continue the effort to support the agricultural economy of the eleven communities and surrounding areas and in particular as indicate in the above list of action items “Develop a greater understanding of farmer needs and challenges.” To do that, we need to understand the nature and scale of the farms in the area. (The latest USDA Ag Census figures won’t let us get down to the town level.) We ask that you take the on-line survey to provide information about your operation. We will be reaching out to farms in the region. A similar survey was done in Franklin County this past winter.

Online survey link

More info on the CMRPC website.

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Worcester Film Works Needs Your Help!

One of my absolute favorite things to do in the summer is Worcester Film Works‘ Movies on the Common.

In case you’ve never been, here’s what it’s like:

  • Arrive at the Common with children in tow.  They find other children to play ball with, or else play Frisbee to their hearts’ content and draw on the sidewalk with chalk when they need a break.
  • Ask yourself how the guys are consistently able to recruit such awesome bands whilst munching on popcorn (free with your Woo Card!) and drinking an ice cold Orange Dry that the children will swipe in another minute.
  • Wonder if it’s appropriate to sit on the WWII memorial.  Never arrive at a satisfactory answer.
  • Another great band; another Orange Dry that the kids will steal after they finish their ice cream.
  • See absolutely everyone you know in Worcester.
  • Watch a great movie.

It is so much fun and this is exactly what we need more of downtown.

WFW currently has a survey up to help narrow down the movies they’ll show this summer.  If you haven’t already, please take a minute to vote for your choices.  As long as your choices don’t include Dirty Dancing.

As we all know, these sorts of events don’t happen without a lot of hard work.

Here’s where the WFW crew could use some help:

  • publicity
  • finding bands to play before the movie
  • recruiting food/ice cream vendors
  • set up/break down
  • anything else you can think of!

Email Eric if you can help!

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CWW: Friends of Worcester Public Library book sale

On Friday, May 16, and Saturday, May 17, from 10am-4pm in the Saxe Room at the main branch of Worcester Public Library, the Friends of WPL will hold our Spring book sale.

Just as George Russell is your city councilor (no matter where you live), the Friends of Worcester Public Library are your friends whether or not you live in Worcester.

When you pay (incredibly low) yearly dues to the Friends, or make book donations, or purchase from the Food for Thought Cafe and Bookstore, or buy bags full of books at our book sales, you support the Friends’ many programs, including museum passes and the Give and Take bookcase at Union Station.

So come on down and buy a lot of books.  If you come on Saturday between 2-4pm, I’ll be working the sale and will talk to you about anything you want (as long as “anything you want” involves street signs or the finer plot points of Knots Landing.)

 

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The Huguenot Line

Huguenot Line

Apologies to the Maginot Line — Charlton & Oxford aren’t at war.  Oxford was settled very early on by Huguenots — French Protestants.  There are still remains of a Huguenot fort in Oxford.  And like the surname of André Maginot, the Huguenot settlers wouldn’t have pronounced the final “t” in their name — not that you’d know that to hear modern New Englanders pronounce “Huguenot” like “astronaut”.

wormtown-fleet

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Opera in Worcester

Last night, the great Juliet Feibel of ArtsWorcester asked Mike and me last night where one can find opera in Worcester.

We went to BarOpera at Ralph’s a couple of years ago, and it was as awesome as you can imagine.  I’m terribly disappointed it didn’t continue.

An event that seems similar is the Mad Men On Tap opera performance at Nick’s, which will be on Friday, May 16.

The singers at Mad Men On Tap are from Greater Worcester Opera.  We’ve seen some of their shows (Die Fledermaus was especially good, but I have a weakness for Strauss Jr.!) and this May/June they’ll be presenting Cosi Fan Tutte, or How I Met Your Mother:

Opera Worcester also presents operas at the Hanover Theater once or twice a year.  We saw La Traviata a couple of years back and it was good.  They’ll be hosting Opera Providence‘s production of Pirates of Penzance on October 18 this year.

Worcester County Light Opera is a bit less light opera and a bit more theater and musical based these days, but is well worth checking out!

If you can get to Boston, there’s quite a bit of opera there —

Guerilla Opera is presenting the world premiere of Ken Ueno’s Gallo. (It will also be livestreamed on May 22.)

Boston Lyric Opera and Boston Opera Collaborative usually have seasons that include both classics and new operas.  New England Conservatory students often present concerts of songs from opera and lieder, as well as the occasional fully or partially staged opera.

And Odyssey Opera‘s offerings excite me to no end!

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What’s wrong with this picture?

Second Street just got a new street sign:
Second Street Moonscape

Let’s forget for a moment that the replacement was unnecessary (the old sign was very legible).  The $50-$100 it cost DPW&P to send someone out to replace the sign would have been much better spent filling the holes in Second Street, some of which you can see in the photo, and that’s just the first few feet of that street.

EVERY sign needlessly replaced in the past decade represents money that can’t be spent filling potholes or fixing streets.

(And, yes, this is a segue to remind folks to read the FY15 city budget.  Ask yourself why we’re budgeting nearly $350,000 for street signs and street painting and only $105,000 for pothole repair [p.194 of the budget].  I’ll try to get some budget posts up before the hearings commence.)

While we’ve been replacing perfectly good signs, Lake Avenue is still bottlenecked & awaiting a major repair — here’s a photo from the other day (a Sunday!) in case you’ve forgotten the plight of the forsaken Worcesterites down by Lake Quinsigamond:

still waiting

We can get tens or hundreds of new street name signs every year, but the northern end of Lake Avenue must endure a temporary traffic light and one travel lane for YEARS.

The city can even order up  some custom heart-logo mud flaps for its trucks (which, admittedly, are AWESOME):
custom mud flaps
…but we can’t shore up a collapsing a road or fill the craters in all of the rest of the roads.

It would be VERY popular with the electorate if the City Council in its wisdom (and common sense) were to impose a moratorium on DPW&P’s sign replacement efforts until such time as all of our roads are passable.  How often is a public policy issue a win-win choice for politicians?  This one is it, folks.  No one really cares about street sign replacement, but EVERYONE cares about the condition of our roads.  Let’s get our priorities straight and focus on the necessary items instead of wasting time and money on what isn’t necessary.