I attended Assemblywoman Barbara Lifton's Town Hall meeting last night, and I'll have more about what she had to say soon, but what struck me most last night and what's still echoing through my head is attendance. Not counting Lifton herself and an aide, there were nine people there. Last year's Town Hall had more like 25 or 30, though...
Time seems to be the key ingredient that determines whether or not things happen in Dryden, and undoubtedly everywhere else. It's not just time spent actively working on a project, but also time spent driving, planning, and preparing. (I don't deny the importance of money, but that money is often used to buy time, or to supplement it.) Volunteering is...
It's been a while since I posted a question. Good ones are hard to come up with, especially if I want to keep them brief. I've been thinking about the many organizations in Dryden. Some are formally incorporated, others are part of government, schools, or churches, and some are just people who know each other in neighborhoods, or temporary gatherings...
At last week's Planning Board meeting, Jim Crawford asked a lot of questions about sidewalks, especially around the hamlet areas. Sidewalks are a regular request for Varna, though apparently not as in demand in Etna. I walk around a lot on my property - sitting still is difficult for me - but I don't walk from place to place very...
If you're reading this site (and didn't find it through a search engine), odds are good you get at least some of your Dryden news from this site. This site, in turn, gets news from the Ithaca Journal, Dryden Courier, The Shopper, WHCU, Cortland Area Tribune, Cortland Standard, Auburn Citizen, Elmira Star-Gazette, sometimes the Corning Leader, from going to meetings,...
I don't mean how many turrets your house has, or if it has stone walls. I'm asking about the isolation level of many of the places people live - my own included. In doing petitions last week, I visited a lot more houses that I'd never seen from the road. Some houses are on side streets, and some are down...
It's a little late on a Monday to be asking a question, but the question still seems worth asking. I spent Saturday afternoon walking up and down 366 (and then driving through Etna) carrying petitions for Democratic candidates. While I've known my neighbors on both sides of this house (and have no neighbors across the road), this was the first...
It seems like starting each week with a question is a good idea. I've been noticing a lot more when I buy things in Dryden and when I don't, and the distance I've been willing to drive has been shrinking. When we first moved to Ithaca, we spent a lot of time in Corning, including shopping trips, because we knew...
"Where do you live?" feels like a good starting question for a weblog based on a particular location. For some parts of the Town of Dryden, especially the villages, I don't think it's a difficult question. In a lot of other cases, as Dryden has houses all over, it depends on context and a sense of what's close, or not....
Most of what I've been doing here for the last seven months has been reporting. Making information about Dryden available seems like a good thing to do, and I plan to continue doing that, hopefully at a faster pace than I've managed these last few weeks. I'd like to add something different, though, something which invites readers to think beyond...