Delmar DustPan

The DUVAFILES (http://duvafiles.blogspot.com) on the 4th had a comment on the free lunches given Wicomico County Detention Center employees. For the five years I was an employee of Wicomico County at the Detention center it was true. The county pays about $35,000 a year to provide lunches to Detention center employees. Not just employees but pretty much anyone who goes into the officer's dinning room at lunch time and gets in the serving line can be served.

I looked at the Town of Delmar website (http://town.delmar.md.us) this morning and found it still had not been updated. Back in March or April of 2005 I brought this to the attention of Sara Bynum King, our town manager. At that time she said once the budget was approved attention would be given to the website. Obviously she did not tell me the truth. A properly done website can be an asset to the community. One that has three year old data on it is not only useless but reflects poorly on the town.

Yesterday I fired up my old Dodge Omni and drove to Dover to research records at the Delaware Public Archives. I gassed up in Laurel at $2.239 a gallon for regular. I should have waited until I got to Seaford and gassed up at the "Tru Blu" station which was selling regular for $2.189 a gallon.

I have been on a five year break from my family tree research. In the last five years remarkable free access to the internet genealogy data has been made available. I have never been able to justify paying the $300 a year membership to access the genealogy internet websites. I discovered the Delaware Public archives has free access to a genealogy website and the Wicomico County Free Library allows you to enter their website than pass through to another genealogy website. Now I can do some research from home. All the hours I spent trying to read microfilm records of census data and going blind doing it can now be done in a few minutes.

My heart goes out to the relatives of the miners killed in Tallmansville, West Virginia. It looks like the reporters there and on the network TV's are trying to stir up something. When people are griefing I doubt they need a microphone shoveled in their face asking them questions. The reporter I saw on CBS at the church site looked like some freak they shipped down from New York City. Heavy eye makeup etc, didn't look like someone from West Virginia.

The weather is still mild. The Delmar school system had a one hour fog delay.

Today is Trash Day in Delmar, Delaware. Not a day of talking trash - well maybe a little - but trash pickup day. Being a natural born scavenger, trash day and my morning walks are a great combination. The truth is the trash days following Christmas and New Years are poor pickings. The trash is mostly gift boxes, packaging, old wreaths, etc. It does however give you an insight into what the people of Delmar did between the last trash day and today. The trash today was mostly Christmas packaging material with a large amount of home improvement trash (drywall joint compound buckets, molding, scraps of boards, etc) and the usual Pizza boxes, empty beer cans and liqueor bottles (Delmar is not a wine sipping town - it is a straight blue collar town).

Until last July the Town Trash was picked up by the Town employees. The Town has now contracted with a private contractor - BFI- to pick up the trash. It is a vast improvement over the town picking up trash. Let's face it, as a resident you haul the trashcans to the sidewalk on trash day and by evening time you expect for it to be gone. When the Town picked up the trash about half the time they would reject it for one reason or another. If you had three trashcans and one had a trash bag protruding over the top of the trashcan the Town would leave all three trashcans with a note saying it did not meet their trash collection regulations. BFI just picks up the trash and it is gone. The other difference between municipal employees trash pickup and a private contractor trash pickup is the number of people involved. The Town had six town employees riding the trash truck. One was just the driver and the other five hung on the sides of the trash truck. BFI has two people, one drives until the next group of trash cans than jumps out and helps the other one load trash. So with six town employees freed up from trash collection for over six months why does the Town still look like a dump?

Our local paper and TV station reported the first local baby of 2006 being born. Once again the child seem to be illegitimate. Over the past 20 years only about 1 in 4 babies reported as first born of the New Year in our local area seem to have parents that are married. It certainly is not the child's fault but the parents can certainly be faulted. There is a continuing lack of responsibility on the part of people, who based on age should be adults but continue to act as irresponsible children.

For a few years I worked at the local jail. I continually would receive phone calls from mothers asking how they could improve their son's living conditions in jail. I was sorely tempted to tell them to leave their son alone and let him assume responsibility for his actions and perhaps he would finally become a man as opposed to a constant whinner who called his mother to get him out of trouble. I am not talking about the person with one arrest, but people who at age 21 had been in jail five times already.

My oldest daughter is returning to the University of Delaware today. With luck she will graduate this spring. Her mother and I will have paid over $50,000 for her 4 years of education. We have had to make numerous sacrifices for her to be there. A friend of my daughter was pregnant at 16. The state and federal government paid for her college education because she was a single mother. She finally dropped out of college when she was pregnant the second time. No doubt the government will continue to provide for her and her child so her, nor the fathers of her children, will have to accept any responsibility for their actions.

It is a pleasant day in Delmar today. As with most New Year days, it is quiet with little movement from the populous. The weather is excellent, temperatures in the 50's with very little breeze, that should be good for my fuel oil bill. In my morning walk in Delmar I saw most Christmas displays are still up. Since it is warm today I suppose later this afternoon I will see some people taking them down. Some people, who still have "real" christmas trees have put them by the sidewalk for Tuesday's trash pickup. The leaves and other trash is still in the streets, as the Town of Delmar has not sweep the streets in well over a year. I noticed some people have sweep the street gutters in front of their houses. I think it is somewhat wimpy of them since they have paid the town for street maintenance but they don't have the backbone to stand up and demand the town provide the services. It is like people who home school their children because they find the public school system is unacceptable. Instead of changing the school system they continue paying both the school taxes and the expense of home schooling. In my walk this morning I encountered a rabbit standing in the middle of the sidwalk. It didn't run away until I was within four feet of it. I was starting to have recollections of Jimmy Carter being attacked by the rabbit until the creature ran away.