Good morning, RVA! It's 47 °F, and it’s a bit chilly in my house! Highs for today (and for tomorrow) should settle into the mid 70s and make for some great outdoor hangs—as long as you’ve got an extra layer around for when the sun goes down. Sunday and Monday, though, look a bit cooler, and each day holds a pretty significant chance of rain. If you have them, adjust your grilling plans accordingly.
Water cooler
I haven’t written about it in this space yet, but there’s a big important primary coming up on June 20th—delegates, state senators, and Henrico County supervisors will all battle to the death for your vote and the chance to appear on November’s ballot. In fact, that battle has already begun and early voting for those primaries started back on May 5th. This coming Tuesday, May 30th, marks the last day to register if you wish to vote in said primary. If, for some unimaginable reason, you are not registered to vote (or you’re just new here), please make a plan to get that taken care of over the next couple of days!
The Greater Richmond Continuum of Care is the region’s “collaborative network of homeless service providers.” They’ve just dropped their 2022–2023 annual report, which is a short, easy-to-read PDF that’ll give you a broad perspective on homelessness in our larger, eight-locality region. I hate to give you homework over a long weekend, but I think this one’s worth it.
David Ress at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports on Chesterfield’s zoning ordinance rewrite, and, honestly, it’s pretty neat to hear a deeply suburban county want to focus on adding dense, multi-use neighborhoods to their housing toolkit. Of course, getting these new, denser zoning rules into the code is a necessary—but preliminary—step zero. The hard work comes in rezoning existing areas to allow for these sort of “walkable communities with homes and commerce.”
The COVID-19 Public Health Emergency has ended, disease levels are pretty dang low, and yet I still appreciate Katelyn Jetelina for keeping us updated on what’s happening in coronaworld. Tap through for some small, bite-sized updates—which, honestly, is about all I can handle from COVID-19 at this particular moment. It’s sort of thrilling and refreshing, but sometimes I don’t even think about respiratory disease pandemics for a while. I’m loving that for myself!
Axios Richmond’s Ned Oliver headed out to the Diamond last week and ranked a few of the Squirrel’s top best concession items. You’ve got the Dilldog, a hotdog served in a pickle instead of a bun; the Squirrely Fries; and the souvenir helmet nachos, about which he says “the end result is very close to regular food you might encounter in a restaurant” (and that is the best sentence written by a reporter I’ve read this week). Not ranked: Beers as big as your head, which, as Oliver points out, are “ounce-for-ounce...cheaper than you can get at the actual brewery.”
It’s the last weekend of RVA Bike Month, and I hope you’ve had the opportunity to participate fully and deeply. But we’re not done yet! At various points over the next handful of days you can form a Critical Mass, ride around the New Kent Winery, take a Tour de Taco, do a Bike Party (which, I’m intrigued by its lack of details), join the Great Queer Bike Parade, and sample a whole lot of vegan ice cream. With just a few events scheduled for next week, now’s the time to get out there and ride if you haven’t already.
Logistical note! I’ll be taking Monday, Memorial Day, off from this email newsletter. If the weather holds, you’ll probably find me in the yard or on a bike. If a downpour traps us all inside, I’ll most likely queue up a couple things from my watchlist, like Yeon Sang-Ho’s _JUNG_E_ and the new Dungeons & Dragons movie. If you have the time off, enjoy, and look for me back in your inbox on Tuesday!
This morning's longread
The Job Decision Matrix
I am definitely not looking for a new job, but using a tool like Trello to stack and sort what’s important to you seems like a useful exercise regardless.
Once you view your career trajectory as a non-linear progression akin to a series of interplanetary space missions you will realize that your perspective changes over time. At each stage of your career, the things you care about will be different. When I was graduating from the University of Arizona (Go Cats!) I couldn’t even spell “family”. The concept of caring about feeding a family was simply irrelevant to me. All I really cared about was the technical domain (GUI applications) I’d be working in and the stage of the company (established, but not big). Later in my career, I was married with children. Suddenly feeding a family was something I cared deeply about. As you work through your Job Decision Matrix focus on what is important to you NOW, not what you imagine might be important to you in the future, or what you used to care about.
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Picture of the Day
Meet Patio Patty.
