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I have some acute emotions today on Easter.  Poopsie did a great job creating an egg hunt for our kids and her sister’s kid’s in the backyard this morning.  Now they’re all at her parents’ house in Cochester having Easter lunch.  I stayed home.  Earlier I brought the kids over to say happy Easter to my father.  My Dad, who is several years older than one hundred,  insisted on boiling a few eggs with some onion skins to send home with us.

When I was a kid, I probably perceived Christmas as the biggest deal of the year, but in retrospect I’d have to say it was Easter because we travelled every year to Springfield Massachusetts where we dressed up and went to services at the Armenian Church where I was baptized.  I cherish those memories.  As I write I can recall staring at the ceiling fan during a long, boring service that I didn’t understand at all because it was conducted in Armenian.  The priest shaking his incense thing and the smell of it.

And I woke up to an Easter email from my sister’s granddaughter Tatevik in Yerevan who was my main translator when I visited in 2009.   And I’m reminded from that trip, about how so much of Armenian Christianity is based  on healing.  From my father’s grandfather- a priest who would heal the sick and lame on an island in Lake Sevan, to St. Gregory himself, who was released from a 13 year captivity at the bottom of a well, to heal and illuminate the Pagan king in 301 AD… To my father drawing on the strength of our family’s bible, to help him survive a Nazi death march to Mariupol Ukraine.

So I don’t know how long I’ll have my dad, but every day with him, and everybody, is a gift.  It’s been four years since my mom died.  Nobody’s got a lot of time.  Just believe in something.  Resurrect yourself in some way.  Do like Miro and make a “fresh start.”  I think I’m going to do something different with the look and feel of this blog pretty soon.  Don’t stop reinventing yourself, and never give up.

Happy Easter.

My apologies to Wanda and Kurt, I was only able to schedule, conduct, and and transcribe an interview with one of the candidates this cycle, and it happened to be Miro. That does not necessarily mean I prefer Miro over the other candidates for mayor. It just ‘is what it is’ in terms of what I was able to get done. For some reason I just haven’t seemed to have had the time to put into covering the mayoral race that I did three years ago. Oh wait… three years ago I wasn’t on the school board.  That’s probably part of the reason.

Click here to read my January 22 interview with Miro Weinberger.

You may have noticed how little I’ve been blogging lately. Very little. I’m simply hitting my saturation point with the number of things I can do in a day. I may have even conducted an in-depth interview with one of the mayoral candidates weeks ago, and have only transcribed a third of it. Tuesday the school board stayed in executive session late into the night, talking in circles about important decisions we had no business making at that hour. The morning is wiser than the night. When the clock hit 11pm I decided I had to go home and go to bed. Another school board member wrote to me the next day to attack me as having “failed in my fiduciary responsibilty” by leaving early. That is crap. Few school commissioners a have better attendance record than me and over a two-year term, almost nobody can stay to the end of every single meeting.  So sue me for being human and having to get up for work the next day.  I mean really!

Anyway… I have to run off to my demanding, high-stress day… I just want to send a shout out about my dad. I can’t say to my dad, because he doesn’t read blogs. I just want to say it to the world, that my dad is a great man with an incredible life story that has continued for well over 100 years. I hope he has a great day!

Click the image to visit Miro Weinberger’s campaign website.

Ugh.  It looks like there’s some action in the mayor’s race today.  Painful, disappointing, disheartening action that has been unfolding while I’ve toiled today at wherever it is I work.

Friday Kurt called into a live show on channel 17 and said it would be “morally wrong” to walk away from Burlington’s debt to Citibank, whether or not they are successful in their lawsuit to get the 33 million bucks they loaned the city back.

Today Miro pounced on the statement saying it put the city in legal Jeopardy.  Then Kurt accused Miro of going negative.

Kurt is still pushing the sale of BED, which is a bad idea.  Philip seems happy with Miro’s apparent willingness to scrap.

You know Miro has reached out to me in weird ways.  He left me a nice voicemail on the day of the re-vote.  He sent me a nice card (terrible, terrible handwriting) and he’s left a couple of comments on this blog.  But so far he has ignored my request to do an on the record interview.  To this point that’s just as well, since I still haven’t fully recovered from my nearly 2 hour long interview with Tim Ashe.  That transcription was 31 pages long.  It almost killed me.  I saw Tim yesterday at the school board’s legislative party held at Jill Evans’s house.  We had almost the whole school board there and only four legislators- Tim Ashe, Chris Pearson, Jason Lorber and Suzi Wizowati.  It was very nice to meet you Suzi.

Tomorrow the school board will vote to send a double-digit tax increase to voters.  I don’t know if I can support that.  I have this very strong suspicion the school department is wasting money.  For example, nobody seems to know what the “Magnet School Coordinator” does for 100K.  Also we want to buy laptops for every kid whether they already have one or not.  I think that’s probably a waste.  We could lease laptops to the 25% of kids who really need them at a low rate for a fraction of the cost.  And compliance with act 60 is great and everything, but maybe we could spread the pain of taking on take on the cost of  non-teacher retirement over two years instead of one.  That actually was the plan right up until the last minute.  Oh and did you know the school department’s diversity director got a ten thousand dollar raise last year?  And it’s really hard to get a handle on exactly what he does, too. [cut to the Bobs from Office Space: "What would you say it is that you do here?"];  If diversity and equity were truly embedded in the culture of the Burlington School District, we wouldn’t need a separate diversity office (125K), now would we?  Those policies and attitudes would be manifested through our regular old HR department.

Wednesday the Ward 7 Democrats will  caucus (7PM at Burlington College/Catholic Diocese) and will be looking to run a school board candidate.  Yikes!  I hope they just support me, but do I have to call myself a Democrat?  I thought school board races are supposed to be non-partisan!  I’m gonna have to show up there with my petition and hope for the best.

If you liked the Cross Report,  the October 12, 2010 Burlington Audit Task Force, Final Report might also interest you.  Thank you Lea Terhune for sending the link.

Has Airport Commissioner Miro Weinberger answered a single question on what’s going on with the airport?  He should be explaining what’s going on with that in detail.  He’s an airport commissioner- running for mayor.  Where is the link to the story or video where Miro accounts for this?  Somebody put it in the comments please, because I haven’t seen it.

Instead I have to get my news from the Federal Aviation Administration.

Weinberger’s campaign is obviously very well funded and the photography on his website is super slick and professional.  But what the heck is going on with the airport, commissioner?

In a letter dated November 2 the FAA accuses the city of overpaying the city of South Burlington and its own Public Works department.  I haven’t been able to figure out the airport thing.  The best I can tell Jonathan Leopold took a gamble by building the airport parking garage with about 20 million in pooled cash and didn’t put out the bonds to pay it properly, because….uh…. maybe he thought he would get a better interest rate down the road?  Or maybe he thought he’d save the city a few bucks by using cash pool money interest free for a while but then the market crashed and then we couldn’t sell any bonds at all?  Something like that.

You know, Jonathan also just plain forgot to bond 1.25 million for the school department that was approved by the school board and the city council.  Just plain didn’t get to it.  Now there’s a 1.25 million dollar hole in the school department’s budget that I as a school commissioner will be expected to explain.  I will be asked to explain a whole lot more than that when school budget goes to the voters in March, too.

So whose job is it to explain the tens of millions of dollars the airport is in the hole?   Commissioner Weinberger?

Matty Tanner and Patty Leahy

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Did anybody else hear gunshots coming from the direction of Colchester in the early morning hours before the sun came up today?  I did.  About three times in an hour I heard someone out there unload several rounds.  Could it have been hunters?  I don’t think a typical shooting crime would follow that pattern.  Nevertheless, it reminded me of my one semester at Temple University in north Philadelphia, where I frequently heard gunshots at night.  That was the fall of 1991.  It was sort of a prolonged seminar in American inner city race race relations.  The bar on campus there didn’t bother with ID, which was nice since I was only 18 at the time.  The subway rides from North Broad Street to City Center were tense.  The cafeteria had mice running around in it, and the lunch tables were segregated to a person white or black only without any signs or somebody telling you what to do. 

I made friends with the security guard who guarded the door of the student apartment building I lived in.  Don’t ask me his name.  It was twenty years ago.  But he was this friendly midde-aged black guy who alway smiled and shared some wisdom. He’d always ask me “Whaddaya say Haik?” which meant ‘what’s the good word?’ or ‘what’s new?’ -a form of hello modified to be more engaging.  He told me that when he used to guard the library he could tell who belonged there and who didn’t by looking at their shoes.  In a nutshell college kids had much better shoes than the members of the surrounding community, who might be trying to get into the library to defecate or bathe or sleep or steal.  The clothes kids wore back in the grunge era weren’t quite as helpful in making the distinction, apparently, but the shoes were the tell. 

Anyway Temple was expensive for me as an out of state student, it was far from home and let’s face it- I wasn’t going to be a film maker, which is what I was supposedly there to learn how to do.  I decided to cut my losses after the first semester and came home.  I took continuing ed classes at UVM, then enrolled.  Then quit to sell sandwiches.  Then joined the city council for a couple of years, then went to India, then Austin Texas for a year where I took some classes.  Then back here where I went to CCV.  Then UVM again. 

I did finally end up with a couple of diplomas to add to the one I got from Burlington High School in 1991- the year I pulled eleven percent in the mayoral race- toured Europe- and went to Temple in Philly.  I got an associate degree from CCV in 2001 and a Bachelor of Art degree from UVM in 2003.  I know the joke- A lot of people take twelve years to get a degree- They’re called “doctors.”  Or do doctors do it in eight?  I don’t know. 

What I do know is that I’m glad I did a bunch of stuff before I had kids who are now awake and will need me to feed them soon…  Thanks for taking this stroll down memory lane with me- which somebody out there literally triggered.