Mom on the Run: The Next Chapter
The tickle starts low, and way in the back of my throat. I try to ignore it. I swallow, once, twice, hoping to soothe it, sweep it away. I clear my throat, gently, carefully. But the tickle grows, deepens, intensifies, and bang! The cough erupts like a volcano.
I survived the frightful hip replacement surgery and want to share a couple of observations with you.
I knew Potomac Hospital when we moved here in 1988. The original facility was built in Woodbridge in 1972 and was one of the last hospitals built from a grass roots movement and not by a business. In 2009, Potomac Hospital merged with Sentara Healthcare and it’s been a powerful change agent since then.
Publisher’s note: Peter Candland invited me to a cafe and offered his take on the Prince William County Board of Supervisors and the upcoming budget season. He ordered a soda and I had coffee. Here’s a bit of our conversation.
In recent weeks, Peter Candland has lost more than he’s won – but that hasn’t kept him from trying to change what he calls a “good ol’ boy” system in Prince William County politics.
One of the first rules of writing is to write about what you know. I confess, I do not follow that rule very often. If I did, I probably would have exhausted my writing skills three years ago, when I first began writing for Potomac Local. I tend to write more about what I feel and then attempt to add some factual, useful content and some helpful links so by the end of a column I know more than when I began. I hope it works that way for you when you read it, too.
Sometimes the “knowing” and the “feeling” are not compatible. Monday morning, I am going to Sentara hospital for a hip replacement. Almost everyone knows what that is, but I suspect not many of us actually know how that is done unless you are one of the 285,000 patients per year who undergo this surgery.
Mom on the Run: The Next Chapter
My eyes narrow as I pull on my workout pants. Hey …
It seems no matter what we do, snow wins! This latest snowfall, forecast to be 4-10 inches, was much closer to the minimum than the maximum. VDOT was prepared with over 4,000 vehicles to clear snow and treat the 17,000 miles of roads in Northern Virginia. VDOT provided us with a tool to track the snowplows and ascertain where the plows had been and would be going. You can search (after 2” of snow) by zip code or street or address.
That VDOT page has everything needed to declare war on snow. You can view the mobilization plan, road status and resources right on that page. There’s even a legend to help you identify the many graphics that determine road conditions. With VDOT boasting 4,000 pieces of equipment, we all feel confident that no matter what nature throws at us, we can handle it!
I had a pretty amazing experience this week when I attended a MIDCO (Mid-County Civic Association) meeting with about 75 other interested citizens!
Why is that amazing? Well, typically the number of citizens attending a MIDCO, NAA, (Neabsco Action Alliance) OLRCA (Occoquan Lake Ridge Civic Association) or a LOCCA (Lake Ridge Occoquan Coles Civic Association) is around 25 people. There were so many people in the Occoquan Room at the County Center that we had to move to another, larger meeting room on the other side of the building.
First we brought independent local news to Prince William and Stafford counties. And now we’ve launched the region’s most powerful locally-maintained and insightful real estate tool.
Prominently featured at in the top main navigation section of our website, the Potomac Local Real Estate section features listings for home sales and rentals, commercial properties, land, as well as market trends and statistics for Prince William and Stafford counties and the cities of Manassas and Manassas Park.
Mom on the Run: The Next Chapter
The couple is standing over by the abs chair, studying it intently. The man and the woman are middle-aged, perhaps a little older, and each is wearing a faded, loose white t-shirt, long baggy shorts, and stiff, new-looking sneakers. His wire-frame glasses have slipped down toward the end of his nose. Her hair is frizzy and she looks generally rumpled.
Wednesday night I attended the Prince William Committee of 100 forum. The program, titled, “Can You Rest in Peace in Prince William County?” was in direct response to recent events involving the discovery of burial sites at the proposed location of Prince William County’s 12th high school near the intersection of Va. 234 and Hoadly Road.
I have been interested in this topic since the flurry of activity that began (for me) in early November and wrote about it once, then again when I recapped the information that led to this point in a previous post.
