Little Patch

In the two years I’ve been at my job I have said goodbye to more than 10 people. I said goodbye to most of those people within the past year.

The latest person to vacate their desk was the Valley Stream and Lynbrook/East Rockaway heralds reporter, Anthony Bottan. He left to be an editor for Patch.com, an online, hyper-local news outlet that has been deemed our biggest competition. Even though Patch.com covers many areas that we do not, we are prohibited from freelancing for any local “patch”.

Anthony was the third person to leave for Patch. The fourth put in his two weeks notice today.

Dana Williams, who I miss dearly, left the Malvern/West Hempstead Herald to take on the Glen Cove Patch.

I haven’t applied, nor do I intend to mainly because I plan on leaving the state in the very near future. While a Patch salary would help me move out of my parents’ house, I have a burning desire for a life outside of Long Island.

Also (and I realize this may bite me in the ass), I’ve never been one to have my life tied to a leash held by my job. A perfect gig for me would be magazine writing. I’d have plenty of time to sit, research and bang out a 5,000-word human-interest story. The whole breaking news thing was really never for me. I have a very un-American approach to employment as I believe a happy and well rested worker, is a happy and productive worker.

Patch, in a lot of ways, is the anti-newspaper. The reporting is the same but it’s the online aspect that changes the game entirely. While there are plenty of online news organizations out there, it will be interesting to see how Patch fairs in the next few years. One concern of many of my coworkers is, when Patch’s money runs out (it’s primarily backed by AOL) what happens?

In all fairness, any business could see their money go bye-bye. That’s the “reason” why we haven’t gotten raises and my company has been around since the dawn of time. The first three years are always the hardest for any startup and considering the lack of advertising, it’s easy to say that the entire venture is going to tank.

I actually believe it will succeed once it can establish a reader base and constant advertising. I interned at Julib.com, a luxury lifestyle web-zine, in 2006 and the staff of six worked out of the publisher’s Upper West Side apartment. Shortly after I left, they moved into a formal office and seems to have exploded into a very successful niche news outlet. Just while I was there, we were doing gift bags for NY Fashion Week and a grand opening party with Sephora Wall Street. I learned a lot about an up-and-coming media in the short time I was there.

I’m interested to see how my own company reacts to the mass exodus of reporters and editors for the cushy gig that Patch offers. Word on the street is another print competitor lost so many people to Patch, they began giving raises.

I wonder how many people have to leave before someone wakes up.

Smooth Sailing

I left Chuck’s house in Smithtown at about 12pm on Saturday. That would give me an hour to get to Mammaroneck in Westchester County for my lunch with my friend, Katie. I knew an hour wasn’t enough so I let Katie know I’d be a bit late and flew down the Northern State Parkway toward the Clearview Expressway. I always avoid the Cross Island Parking Lot.

A few minutes late turned into an hour and a half.

I was cruising in the left lane of the Grand Central Parkway when one of those ever reliable traffic signs informed me that there was a car fire on my favorite bridge, the Trogs Neck.  I’d have to jump on the Cross Island to take the Whitestone, the exit for which was coming up in less than a mile. Considering my love for my new car and the horrible reason why I got it, I just couldn’t bring myself to pull one of the crazy moves that my 17-year-old self was famous for.

I ended up taking the Clearview to the  Long Island Expressway east in order to hook up with the Cross Island a few exits back*.

*Editor’s Note: By the time I realized I could have just stayed on the GCP to get onto the Van Wyke it was already too late.

I was welcomed with bumper to bumper traffic all the way to the Cross Island exit. Since I rarely take the expressway from the Clearview anymore I was pretty annoyed to find out that you can’t actually get to the Cross Island north from the eastbound side of the LIE.

I got off a couple of exits later on a road that I could have SWORN hooked up with the Northern State/Grand Central/WHATEVERTHEFUCKYOUWANNACALLIT but didn’t. I eventually got back on to the LIE west, which crawled until the exit for the Cross Island.

So, at 1:15 I’m on the phone with Katie, who is giving me the traffic update and apologizing for the craziness. Silly girl, she’s not on the road causing traffic. How is it her fault?

After crawling past the entrance for the Throgs Neck, I hit the gas and I’m back at 70mph. It was short lived, though, as I once again found myself rolling at 5 mph along the Whitestone Bridge.

Roll. Stop. Roll. Stop.

With a tow truck and ambulances in the distance, I figured there must have been an accident by the tolls holding up the flow of the already slow moving traffic.

At sometime around 2pm, already an hour late for my lunch with Katie, I was flying at 75 mph on 95 north.

So I ask you one question, blog readers.

WHERE THE HELL WERE ALL THESE PEOPLE GOING AT 12PM ON A SATURDAY THAT IT CAUSED THIS MUCH TRAFFIC????????

Finding Our Humble Abode

The hardest part about deciding to move out of state is finding a place to hang your hat.

Sure, there’s that whole employment issue, but with the cost of living so low, a minimum wage job could pay the rent. Finding a place to rent is where the problem lies.

Chuck and I are still deciding where in North Carolina we want to move. Raleigh was at the top of our list until the school district imposed a hiring freeze. It would be the best place to find a minimum wage gig, but with no chances of even finding work as a substitute teacher, what’s the point?

The plus side of Raleigh is that I know people in the area who can tell us what areas are great and which are the ghetto. My friend Jess in Durham ended up in a nasty apartment complex and ended up calling the police on multiple occasions, three of those times was because her place was broken into.

We haven’t done much legwork for Winston-Salem, but with Chuck’s cousin living in the area and her husband being a local cop, finding a good place to live will be pretty easy. Jobs are an issue since the unemployment rate hovers around 10 percent, whereas in Raleigh and Asheville it’s a couple points lower.

Asheville was one of our favorite towns, but it’s also the one we spend the least amount of time in. We also don’t know anyone that lives in the area. While we plan to visit again in June for an extended weekend, there isn’t much we can go on when it comes to finding a safe place to call home.

Apartment listings on websites don’t exactly have an “Avoid places that will require me to have the cops on speed dial” option. Apartments may also look great on paper and then a quick search for reviews leads you to some disappointing information.

Take The Meadows for example. Sure it’s pretty and reasonably priced. A quick Google search leads me to this awesome review.

Now, most of the reviews on this site are a few years old and you can’t take everything you read on the internet as fact so where does that leave Chuck and me when we try to find a place to live?

I guess we’ll just have to wing it and hope for the best.

The Importance of Bored[sic] Meetings

In about a half hour I will be doing an endorsement interview for the Long Beach Board of Education elections on May 18. I did one earlier with the challenger and now I’m just killing time until I give the incumbent a call.

I admit that prior to working at the Herald, I had no interest in what was happening within a particular school district. Honestly, I still have no interest, but I do see the importance of being in the know. You can’t complain about the canceling of a program, the closing of a school or the approval of a teachers contract if you don’t keep yourself informed.

Most school districts do a couple of board meetings a month and they are the most boring thing you could ever put yourself through. Unless there is a particular issue that invokes some sort of community uprising, like the closing of a school, most of these meetings are uneventful and could go long into the night.

These meetings do provide the information a resident needs to make solid decisions when it comes to voting for a budget, bond or board trustee, but most often these meetings are sparsely attending with most of the audience consisting of district staff.

Since Long Beach are the only meetings I go to (because the nature of my work doesn’t really give me the opportunity to go to my own district meetings) I can’t really vouch for other districts, but I find it incredibly irritating when a crowd of parents show to up to watch their kids get a certificate for some wonderful thing they did, then leave once the presentation is over.

It’s irritating because A) I wanna go home toooooo!!!! and B) despite how much you love your child, his or her honoring at a board meeting is not the most important thing happening and you should probably stick around for the actual meeting. You are going to be the first one to complain when the board makes a decision you don’t approve of.

If you’re lucky enough to have a hyper-local newspaper that does extensive coverage of the meetings, then the next best thing is to at least read the paper. But, your best bet is to go to the actual meeting since not all papers cover the meeting. While I head to every Long Beach board meeting, I don’t write a story about the meeting itself and usually take the information to write a much larger story. We have too much news and too little space to sum up a boring meeting into 500 boring words.

Now that many of my friends are buying homes and planning families, I hope that they will suck it up and attend a night of torture that are school board meetings (city council, village board or town council should also be attended for the same reasons). You’ll probably feel like you just wasted two hours of your life that you’ll never get back, but when elections come along, you won’t have to rely on your local newspaper to tell you who to vote for. You can make your own educated decision.

Hidden Gems

Last Saturday, Chuck and I wanted to enjoy the beautiful weather so we did something we’ve been meaning to do for a while. We headed over to the Vanderbilt Museum and Planetarium in Centerport for a little educational fun.

We saw a Beatles laser show at the planetarium last year for Valentine’s Day, but prior to that visit the last time I stepped foot on the property, I was in 2nd grade at Merrimac Elementary School and we were on a field trip.

Aside from the planetarium, which seemed so much more grand 20 years ago, the waterfront estate also houses the Spanish-style mansion of William K. Vanderbilt II and his exotic collection of artifacts from around the world. You can also visit the marine museum, curator’s cottage and gardens.

A few of the water from the courtyard of the Vanderbilt mansion.

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With so much to see and do, I anticipated plenty of families and braced myself for an afternoon of screaming children.

I was wrong.

Most of the visitors were adults, either young or old, and randomly a grandparent would be escorting their grandchild who was barely able to walk. The place was empty.

We toured the mansion a bit, but did not pay for the official tour that would take us through the rooms. For an extra $5, I wish we had. We lingered through the gardens and examined the plethora of dead animals and sea life on display. We planned to attend the 4:00 showing of Journey Through the Solar System, so we didn’t have enough time to check out the marine museum.

The lack of a crowd made for a nice, peaceful afternoon, but I was somewhat disappointed when Chuck and I were two of eight people in the projection room for a really interesting show about the stars and planets. One of those eight was the girl telling us where the emergency exits were. Was it even worth the money to run the show?

The entire visit cost $13 each ($7 for the admissions pass and $5 for the show). With people moaning about saving money, this was a pretty cost-effective Saturday afternoon. Not to be a total nerd, but it actually becomes an educational cost-effective way to spend the day. I really couldn’t understand why more people weren’t there.

Last year, the museum made news when it struggled to stay afloat. The dwindling endowment was hit hard when the market tanked. A quick search on Google didn’t show any recent articles pertaining to how it weathered the year, but I can’t imagine things are going great considering the lack of attendance on a beautiful Saturday afternoon.

Some of the things I will miss about Long Island are these hidden gems that continue to go unnoticed by the general public. I’m not sure there’s much of an appreciation for places like the Vanderbilt Museum and I’m afraid that if Long Islanders continue to ignore these places they will eventually disappear.