Monday, October 31, 2011

A Different Day

We had a taste of winter over this weekend, and many of us responded by lining up in the nearest grocery store and buying milk and toilet paper (perhaps as input and output?) to tide us over the near nor'easter we could have had, but didn't.

My favorite part is how so few of us can be bothered to clear off the roofs of our vehicles before driving off instead creating those darling little portholes in the windshield (rarely in the back). We then barrel off down the street with self-inflicted tunnel vision and when we stop suddenly, all the snow on the roof slides down across the front window. Thirty seconds to help drive safer or just prove how selfish and short-sighted we are.
The Lady or the Tiger? To be frank, it never grows old, never.

This is the week before election day in America (lower case 'e' because these elections are for mostly local and regional government offices and not for national office) and here in Norwich, it's quiet, almost too quiet (like the week between Christmas and New Year's).

We get all the way to Wednesday and All Souls' Day (this, and Holy Innocents Day, I think are the saddest days in the liturgical calendar) before the first municipal meeting of the week and I have very little information about it.

It's the Emancipation (Proclamation) Committee (meets at five in Room 319 of City Hall) though you'll learn nothing about it from either the municipal calendar or the listings and membership rosters of advisories, authorities, boards and committees. I think they should meet jointly with the Chelsea Gardens Foundation, another less-than-public public committee (and co-recipient of Sachem Fund Board money, now that I think about it), but that would look like I was piling on. Which is, of course, exactly what I'm doing.

At 5:30 in the Kelly Middle School Library is a regular meeting of the (Kelly Middle) School Building Committee, whose October meeting minutes aren't on the school's website. Don't confuse it with the Building and Space Committee which is a course of a different holler and has even less current meeting minutes.

And at seven, in City Hall's Room 335, it's a regular meeting of the Republican Town Committee which, this close to Election Day, might be an interesting place to visit.

Everything listed for Thursday has been cancelled. Not the day itself, just the meetings.

Leaving only the One City Forum on Saturday morning, starting at nine, in the East Great Plains Volunteer Fire Department (upstairs over the engines) as a meeting this week in Norwich.

There is also a focus group in the Otis Library at 10:30-don't know if it's open to the public but suspect it is- to help shape what the library should strive to be for those of us who use it (and more especially for those who don't (yet)). When I look at the amount of money some who insist on a community center are willing to throw at a moribund mausoleum like the YMCA while we are simultaneously screwing over the Otis Library on funding, I shake my head (makes a noise like a bee bee rolling around in a box car).

If you don't think you can stop the politics as usual manner in which we so often do business around here, just keep doing nothing (except hand-wringing and loud lamentations), stay home and away from municipal meetings or post comments on news articles about meetings you don't attend and you'll prove your own point.
No one can take advantage of you without your permission, tacit or implied.
-bill kenny

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