Another View
Weekly update 7/3/2022 to 7/9/2022 #128
Vacations change after you have served in my role for a little while. Before I venture down this week’s rabbit hole though, let me share what I found in department reports for the week.
Water Pollution Control was able to finish up some concrete work on a major culvert project they have been doing on the southside of the city. This project was first identified during an inspection over a year ago and has been through several design changes to get the best finished project possible. The WPC team did a wonderful job of completing this project inhouse, and I can’t wait to get home to take a look at it in person. As they always do, they took care of several plant-related items as the week went on. They show on a regular basis that it takes a team.
Planning and Zoning has recently been working side by side with the Department of Homeland Security and the office of the State Fire Marshall to inspect various properties around our area. Over the last few weeks, they have also been working with the interns to get some of our older paper plans digitized for easier storage. Sprinkle in a dash of interdepartmental communication improvements and outside vendor conversations and you have another week of trying to build a better tomorrow.
Even without a tournament the weekend of the 4th the Parks Department was busy. They worked hard the week before to make sure the park was ready for the fireworks show. Then they worked the 4th to make sure things went off as smoothly as possible. Throw in the all-hands-on-deck day of the 5th to tear down and clean up and you have what is a long short week to host an event for the community. Thank you to all the partners, old and new, for helping the show go on.
I guess it is time to get back to how vacations change. Well, I guess it isn’t really that the vacation has changed, but more of how my perspective has changed. Recently, Zabrina and I took our annual baseball trip. Every year we visit different cities and different ballparks. For 2022 we hit seven games in seven days, which was our longest adventure to date. I have said it before I am sure I will say it again, but we all have the same problems on different scales. In conversation with different people during our trip, though, I discovered that we often go blind to the good in our own cities and towns. To test this theory I encourage you to grab a piece of scrap paper and jot down ten positives about our community. Now do the same thing with ten negatives. Which list did you fill up first? During our trip we often arrived at the next stop with time to explore. The majority of the days we would stay in a hotel within walking distance of the ballpark. Walking distance being around a mile or less. I pointed out to Z that we could easily walk many of our trips around Seymour, which are shorter than that mile. When we got home I put this to the test with a trip to dinner that was around a half mile. We did make the trip, but not without some grumbling before we left. Another stop along the way we parked around four blocks from the hotel. At home we would be upset to be more than a few spaces from our destination. I have several examples of little things that I have been guilty of overlooking right here at home, but instead I will leave you with a quote from Charles Dickens and if you see me with a new ballcap on please don’t hesitate to ask about where it came from. "Every traveler has a home of his own, and he learns to appreciate it the more from his wandering."