I’m going long in arks.

Seriously, people, what is going on with the rain out here? We have had deluging thunderstorms every day this week. There was a stranded van on my commute this morning. On Route 2A in Burlington, for heavens’ sake.

On Monday this week, I was picking up some things at the Walgreens in Arlington Heights, which has the World’s Smallest Parking Lot™ — and shares it with a Trader Joe’s and a Starbucks. The parking lot abuts the Minuteman Trail, which runs alongside some six feet below street level between the parking lot and a field behind. On this particular day, there was a lake about fifteen feet across in the middle of the parking lot, of unknown depth. I skirted it carefully as I parked my car, but when I got out I heard a noise like a waterfall. And I realized that there was a storm drain in the middle of the lake, which connected to an overflow pipe that emptied out beside the trail. Well, there must have been a few hundred gallons a minute going through that pipe:

(That’s the overflow pipe on the left. The lake in the background is the bicycle trail.)

It was raining so hard on Monday that Mass Ave flooded in Arlington Heights in front of the Panera. There were still sandbags there later in the week. And it was raining harder than that this morning.

All I’m saying is, when I start to see animals coming up the hill to get to higher ground at my office, I’m cornering the market on gopher wood.

The Fennell roast

Fennell, with iPhone and pipe, at the partyI had a bit of driving to do this weekend; I traveled from one Arlington to the other, from Massachusetts to Virginia, so that I could help Craig Fennell celebrate his impending nuptials. It was a great time, quite mellow as these things go. Lars Bjorn and his wife Erin were great hosts, and I got to spend time with quite a few folks I hadn’t seen in years (Kevin Dixon, John Duncan, Ananth Kadambi, Ben Johnson, Dan Roche, and even Guido Peñaranda) as well as some folks I hadn’t met (mostly the rest of Craig’s bandmates in Wonderjack, as well as his brother and sister). It was a great evening, and my only regret was that I had to drive sixteen hours (eight each way) to be there for only sixteen hours.

(It’s kind of funny that, even with gas at $4 a gallon, the car was still the cheapest way to go this weekend; $50 cheaper than Amtrak, $150 cheaper than JetBlue. I don’t think that will be the case for too much longer, though.)

Anyway, it was a great time and there was much reminiscing. I wasn’t in the VGs with Fennell, Dan, Ben, and Ananth, but had enough common experiences that we stayed up talking until late in the night about music. I’m looking forward to hearing the Imogene Heap cover that this year’s VGs did–we all passed around Fennell’s iPhone so we could hear parts of it, but I think it probably will sound better over speakers.

Arlington infrastructure

Doc Searls has a nice photoset of Arlington’s infrastructure as seen from the most infra structure of all, the remains of the rail line that forms the Minuteman Trail. He also points to a blog about the trail that makes for interesting reading.

Doc and his commenters have done a lot of digging on Arlington history, and made some good observations about the town, such as the homemade curbing in many streets (legacy of our “private road” peculiarity).