Silver Spring News 'N Notes

So after three days of electricity-free living, my power was restored early this morning through a procedure that took Pepco technicians all of five minutes to perform. I can’t really blame them all that much this time around – they did preemptively trim back the branches in front of my house earlier this year and I think I was just unfortunate to end up as a low priority case in their outage triage. Plus last summer I was out of power a full five days, so I suppose this can be considered progress.

Not looking forward to spending another dark evening at home last night, I checked into the downtown Silver Spring Courtyard, which had me feeling like a visitor in my own hometown.  The hotel does have a hell of a location, plus where else can you enjoy such splendid views of the majestic Silver Spring Towers?

Anyhoo,

- Based on a rumor of Lego Architecture sets being available at half price, and considering I was essentially living next door at the time, I decided to give the Borders clearance sale one more shot last night. I really shouldn’t have bothered. At this point most anything even worth contemplating purchasing has already been snatched up, and half the remaining inventory is miscellaneous garbage (perfume??) they hauled in from some warehouse to try and unload on vulturous bargain-seekers.

- Speaking of which, DTSS' store is not on the list of former Borders locations whose leases are to be purchased by Books-a-Million, so if the space is to continue to host a bookstore, it will have to do so under the auspices of another bookseller.

- Concepts for the new apartments to be constructed on the ashes of the 2nd Avenue Post Office have been released. They look nice enough I suppose, though the fact that you will be living next to the train tracks isn't really highlighted in these images.

(I don't know how Silver Spring is supposed to survive on one single tiny post office. They say no one uses the Postal Service anymore, yet somehow whenever I am forced to go to the post office I always end up waiting in line.)

- In other development news, preliminary work on the construction of the the Ellsworth Condos Apartments at the corner of Ellsworth and Cedar finally appears to be underway. It looks like their "Last Word" marketing slogan from so many years ago may have been prophetic. It's about damn time. It's shameful that a lot in such a prime location sat empty for all these years.

 

- One of the benefits of being a Pepco refugee is that I ended up eating out more frequently this week that I likely would have otherwise. The outage motivated me to finally get over to Forest Glen to try the new Pacci's Trattoria. I don't consider myself foodie enough to conduct proper restaurant reviews,  but I will say what I had (pictured) was pretty good. Like any new place, there are kinks to be worked out, and it'd probably help if they had additional wait staff to cover the entire restaurant, but that will no doubt all come in due time.

mmmm... ravioli with bolognese sauce