Over a decade ago now, a couple of my friends who were doing quite well managed to rent a house down in Fox Mill Estates. It was a nice home in a similar neighborhood of nice homes, each going for half a million dollars or more at the time. Ironically, the house did not double in value in the intervening decade. Many of the more affordable larger homes near Reston are in or near Fox Mill Estates.
I remember at the time it was a neighborhood of well-groomed lawns and moderately upscale homes. It was the sort of place where you could picture men coming out the front door in the morning dressed smartly and hopping into a shiny BMW to drive to work, or to drive the two miles to the Park-n-Ride to catch the bus to the metro and the metro to DC. In this way, it felt a little sterile, a lot like Ashburn. It is a community of families, where the youngest adults are in their early to middle 30s and the oldest have children in high school. The families band together, especially when it comes to keeping others out.
My friends were the others. They did not fit into the neighborhood's idea of who should live in the neighborhood, and the owners of the house received continual complaints about renting to two clean-cut young men who parked their Subarus out front.
So a group of elitist parents who are afraid of the big, bad diverse South Lakes High School are again complaining, this time in the form of a lawsuit against the Fairfax County School District. Personally, I would like to sue the parents for the cost and bickering in the form of spending my tax dollars just so their kids can travel further and attend a whiter high school.
There is nothing wrong with South Lakes High School. It is a brand new facility with a teaching staff that is more capable and more challenged than that of the neighboring schools. Furthermore, the diversity offered, both economically and ethnically, is quite unusual in this part of Northern Virginia. If you want your student to be a clone of the lawyer's son next door, you should argue to have your children sent to Oakton High School. If you want your student to be creative, open-minded, and accepting, fight for South Lakes. What are the parents afraid of? The wrong element? If they instill proper values, there is nothing to worry about.
Where are many of the parents that are in the cross hairs of this controversy from? Somewhere around the southern terminus of Reston Parkway, right about in the middle of the area encompassing Fox Mill Estates. It sounds silly that they would rather have their children travel a dozen miles to a more crowded school with a static workforce and no reason to change and improve, rather than drive two miles to an invigorated South Lakes High School with new resources, challenged teachers, new programs, and community support.
Fairfax County has a nifty little document that shows typical deck building standards in an easy-to-use format, listed here:
http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/dpwes/publications/decks/details.pdf
The gist of it is per Figure 12, I probably have posts that are set in concrete below grade. Well, I know my posts are rotting at grade, so it's time to replace them, but the good news is I don't have to bring concrete up to grade like I thought I did. I should also put in new handrails while I'm at it, but that's a bigger job that will likely have to wait for another time. I will definitely have to do it before home sale date, though.
On the way to work today, I was thinking about how the United States likes to intervene in the activities of countries whose politics do not agree with our own. What is it about the abridgment of personal freedoms on the far side of the world that causes us to start spending tax dollars on bombs and sending away our young men and women to fight? Nobody else does. Is it perhaps the fact that most other countries remember a time when their own nation was ruled by a restrictive regime? If you think about it, you realize that France has been known to be communist, the United Kingdom survived for a couple of decades with rationing, South Africa cordoned off people into townships, and Japan was ruled by marital law, yet for the most part people survived, moved on, had children, and lived to see another day. Perhaps the fear of falling from freedom, being invaded, and having terrorist attacks is what drives us so much to worry about what goes on in other countries. The United States has essentially been the land of the free and the home of the brave for the last two centuries, aside from a period of time around the civil war, so we really have no idea what it is like to have our government change.
- 3 or more bedrooms
- 2 or more bathrooms
- Garage or carport for at least one car.
- Strong preference for off-street parking for at least two, preferably three cars.
- Extra room for art studio space.
- Extra room for home office, or a large enough "studio" space to share (would have to be suitably large).
- A guest room, or at least a home office or rec room space large enough for a Murphy bed.
- Outdoor entertaining space such as a deck or patio.
- Outdoor space suitable for growing plants, preferably vegetables.
This puts in the 3 or 4 bedroom, 2 or more baths, 2500 - 3000 square foot range, most likely in a single family home. Right now, we have all of this except the garage, one bedroom, and studio space.
Okay, so let's see how this goes. I have not figured out how to use this space yet. I am painfully aware that I cannot be as public with this blog as I was with the last one, even though my purpose in moving is to come to a more secure space. I'm considering using it for primarily fictional purposes, or perhaps to embellish my real life. Then again, things are crazy enough...
Have you ever walked in the snow well below freezing when it crunches beneath your feet? Have you been to central Europe in the winter with the snow falling, much as it does in the movie Amadeus? In 1992 Prague, it was possible to eat a meal fit for a king in a room resembling the ballroom from Russian Ark. This is something that came to mind recently. Last week I was having a drink at Zola, next to the Spy Museum, when I thought of it, and then again at the Metropolitan Opera. In some ways, it is an antithesis to other aspects of life.
My friend Mark I have known for nearly 24 years, ever since I sat behind him in 7th grade social studies. Mark is a foodie who has studied music, language, cooking, and restaurant management. We seem to see each other frequently now even though about 450 miles of highway, air miles, or train track separate the two of us. He was present in New York this weekend.
Andy and Hetty I have known for nearly 12 years and well for about 10 or 11 years. They are my closest foreign friends, even though they are barely foreign - UK and the US are barely different from each other. Unlike Mark, they did not study music, language, cooking, and restaurant management, but they enjoy food, wine, and travel. It was originally their idea to head to New York for Easter weekend, a presence they made courtesy of a free ticket from Her Majesty's Airways.
Morgan and I alternated our time in the city this weekend between the two of them and Mark, and sometimes interchangeably. Along the way, Mark brought along his friends, including Daniel who we had met previously. For me, the weekend was as much about how we immersed ourselves in the love of friendship as it was about the culture we soaked in, but regardless I was stirred by the great hall at Ellis Island, the dramatic scenery and singing of La Traviata, and just about the best meal ever at Boqueria.
