What is Home Rule? Home Rule is basically forming a new township charter, or constitution, instead of using the existing governance rules set down by the state. Instead of the normal 3 person township supervisor committee, any number of permutations can be decided upon, and the main selling point, allows lots of issues to be placed on the voting ballot as initiatives or referendums.

Why are we voting on Home Rule? Basically, because the township supervisors voted to allow Walmart to Build a Super Center on Capehorn Rd. This is about 4 miles from my house. There are already 3 Walmarts within 20 minutes driving distance from my house, one of which is only about 10 minutes away. An article in the York Daily Record earlier this year outlines a lot of the complaints about Walmart. The article doesn’t appear to be on YDR’s site anymore, but the google cache is available.

What the Home Rule group wants, is since we can’t vote out current supervisors for a few more years, we can change the rules of the game and take a lot of the decision making away from them.

The meeting tonight was conducted by Ken Johnson, a representative from the Governor’s Center for Local Government. He gave a very good overview on what Home Rule does and does not allow. Home Rule does not allow law changes that would change or conflict with state laws. Home Rule does not give the Township any say over school board matters. Home Rule does not allow for recall or removal of Elected officials. Home Rule does not govern changes to zoning rules.

So, with all those restrictions, what is it good for? Home Rule’s main benefit as opposed to the tradition manner that a type 2 township is governed, is adding more community hearings and formally add petitions as direct method of adding a referendums to the ballot.

The ballot question I’ll be voting on in 2 weeks is this: Should the township form a commission to study the possibility of home rule, and submit a recommendation to form a charter in 9 months. If the commission does not recommend the township proceeds with looking at home rule, the issue is dead for the next 4 years. If they decide that the township should proceed, a number of public hearings will result in the drafting of a town charter, eventually a vote on that charter, and a transition period to the new rules.

Will all those changes prevent the Walmart from being built? No. The current supervisors could stop the Walmart development if they wanted. Home Rule won’t even get rid of the current supervisors. Even if the new charter eliminates the supervisor’s positions, they will still carry out their full term of office. The person from the state that gave the presentation on Home Rule indicated that it’s the electorates job to vote for people who they trust to do what is in the community’s best interest. Changing to a Home Rule charter won’t change that responsibility. That said, a charter with a formalized petition and referendum process would allow a bit of a end-run around whatever elected officials want, assuming you can get the votes.

The lawyer that is working with the Home Rule committee spoke a little at the meeting. He came off as a little rude, but I think that’s because he was having a bit of fight with the Township solicitor. He made some very good points and his website has a lot of good public works information.

So, what do I think of Home Rule? I really am not sure at this point. Home Rule allows the possibility of more referendums and petitions, which I think is a good thing. But if we elected competent Supervisors to begin with, there wouldn’t really be a need for a Home Rule Charter. Do I think the Walmart can actually be stopped, I sure hope so. I’d rather they build a business park so their would be some more white collar jobs in the area. Most of my neighbors and I commute to Baltimore for decent jobs. I definitely need to research this some more.

Relevant Links:

• More than you ever wanted to know about PA township regulation
• York Dispatch article on tonight’s meeting
• YDR article on earlier Home Rule committee meeting

The above is called foreshadowing. See, I did learn something in high school literature classes.

I managed to get to the top of the ladder and onto the roof, which all of a sudden seemed a lot steeper than I thought it would be. so steep, standing up didn’t seem to be a real posibility, so I proceeded to make my way to the top of the roof. About half way there, I realized something:

MY HANDS ARE ON FIRE!!!111!1!!11!!1!!onehundredandeleven!!11!

Not literally on fire, but I might as well should have been pushing my hand against a hot stove top. I spun around and sat down, thankful that my shorts didn’t appear to transmit so much heat into my buttocks and freaked out for 2-3 seconds. Ow Ow OW.

There wasn’t really anything else to do at this point by head back from whence I came. More Hand Burning commenced. I made it down from the roof, and began rinsing my hands under cool water.

In fact, I think it’s time for a little more of that. Ow.

• Spent Valentine’s weekend in Philly with Meg. We went to Dave & Buster’s (which was totally Meg’s idea, not that I protested) on Saturday and to The Philadelphia Museum of Art on Sunday after staying at the Wyndham Hotel nearby. On Valentine’s Day I sent Meg a dozen roses at work. She received a few death threats from jealous old ladies at work, so I got that going for me.
• I’ve been sick since Wednesday night. What started as a tickle in my throat progressed to a nasty sore throat by Thursday morning. This rapidly changed into a runny nose that wouldn’t quit. Today, my nose is still a snot faucet, and I think it may be turning into a sinus infection. If I’m not better after some serious “stay in bed and drink lots of juice” this weekend, I’ll be hitting up a doc for some antibiotics, I guess. Anyone know if this Airborne stuff Stern has been shilling actually works?
• On a related note, I’ve been really bad about going to the Y and working out, but this head cold sure isn’t going to allow that. I don’t have as much of an excuse for the slacking before this past weekend though. If you don’t see an update Monday or Tuesday of next week about me going to the gym, yell at me, ok?
• I want to find a good Wifi card for my laptop that will work in linux. Looks like support for 802.11b is pretty stabilized, but things are more up in the air for 802.11g. Any one have a recommendation of a card they’ve found that works well? Maybe a combo card? 802.11a would be nice too, but entirely unnecessary. I’d really like one that works with Kismet too, so I can get my wardrivin’ on.
• My palm is still broken, but Meg took it by Circuit City today, where it was purchased from, and they said I still have a warranty, but I need to do some digging to find all the paperwork. That is going to prove to be quite the exercise, I’m sure. Paperwork is so overrated. I think I’d give up my left testicle (always been a favorite of mine) if I could never have to deal with marking dead tree with dark pigment in the vague shape of the iconographs that map out the sounds of my name, and have to file away, and remember the location of, said marked dead tree fragments to presentation at a later date. Why can’t I just get by with fingerprints, DNA swabs, retina scans and the ever present pan-opticon records of transnational corporations/governments to keep track of this crap?

  **Deep Breath** Ok, maybe not my left testicle. Maybe Wyatt’s left testicle. He’s not using ‘em. (oooh! Burn! Made sweeter by sheer randomness! (I was gonna say Ben, but he’s started to use his, or something.( more parentheticals! (wee!))))

• My Dad and I have been trying to fix* the leak in our upstairs bathroom, but it still leaks a little, so there is still a hole in the downstairs ceiling, and a new, nicely cut hole with a door in the bedroom wall opposite the bathroom. I don’t think Meg’s very happy with the “improvements.”
  
  *That means I’ve been doing a lot of flashlight holding. Except I can’t find my rechargeable flashlight. Who took it?
• staying at work to finish blog entries is crazy talk. I’m outta here.

Yesterday, I got a call from meg while I was on my way home. She took a bath after work to relax some. When she got out of the tub and went down stairs to find a wet ceiling. Not good.

So Meg called my dad for some handy man advice while I made my way home. He had her turn off the water main and put a bucket under the drip. When I got home my dad suggested that I poke a hole in now very soft ceiling to see if how much water came out. It went kinda like this:

me: *poke*
ceiling: SPLOOSH!

Ater the half second of shock that came from my ceiling basically peeing on me, I rushed around trying to get the bucket under the stream. We caught about a half gallon of water, and from the way the ceiling was bulging, it looked like the drywall had absorbed a few more gallons.

With running some water around the bathroom, we were unable to get an increase in the water coming out the new hole in my downstairs ceiling. I stopped using water and watched the usage gauge, and after an hour didn’t see any water used, so that was a good sign that the leak wasn’t in a pressurized pipe. My dad thinks the “S” trap on the tub wore out and when Meg emptied a tub full of water, it came loose. I accepted that explanation for the night, put a fire in wood stove down stairs to help dry things out and promptly tripped over the bucket of water, spilling it on the carpet we were trying to keep dry.

I soaked up what I could with a towel and called it a night.

What do we now know?

1. Meg needs a new after work relaxation technique.
2. One night with the fire burning does a remarkably good job of drying up carpets and hiding watermarks on the ceiling.
3. I need to cut a 2.5 feet hole in my ceiling at some point in the future.
4. I’ve never hung drywall on a ceiling before… it sounds…fun interesting
5. The upstairs bathroom is off limits to all activity involving running water.
6. I hope the dishwasher is still useable, or it’s going to be Eat Out/Paper Plate City for a while

More writing below, none about the above topics though.

The majority of the rest of the day was spent raking leaves. The backyard is mostly done, but I had to stop because I ran out of curb to put the leaves on and ran out of daylight to see the leaves with. Hopefully I can finish the leaves before the weekend, but I don’t have high hopes. It is generally dark by the time I arrive home. why did they decide to stop DST right when it would be useful? Sure, there is light when I wake up, but damn! can’t I have some when driving home from work? stupid artificial time manipulations. </rant>

Oh, and I killed another rake. He was a good rake. not nearly as entertaining as Stubby Jim, The Rake Who Is A Pirate, but a good rake. Only his handle broke, the strong metally bits are still strong, so maybe I will just put him in stasis until future technology can revive him, and replace his weak wooden handle with some sort of liquid metal cyborgy handle.

Fiberglass might be cool too.

While I was raking, Dave and Lon stopped by to steal use some bandwidth and play WoW. Looks like a fun game but I am not going to pay $12 a month to make my wife mad at me. I can do that just fine by myself.

Sunday we went to the late service at church, and I spent most of the time bitting my tongue as the pastor gave a sermon involving a very literal interpretation of Genesis. Next time I get to talk to him, I need to ask how old he thinks the planet is. I’m scared of the answer.

After church their was a meeting about the youth group leadership, and how they want help, which didn’t seem to go anywhere, that was a little disappointing, but we did at least decide to try again at a time that hopefully more people can attend.

The rest of Sunday was spent cleaning house, which it was seriously in need of. Hopefully we’ll do a better job of keeping it up. I skipped playing AU to get everything done, but it was worth it have a clean house and a happy wife. Hopefully my character won’t be drugged like he was last time I skipped a session.

Scott and Brenda from church came by and we had a nice dinner. I made Pad Thai Chicken, which was yummy. Then I futz around with Scott’s visor and got his medical reference books setup correctly. It was a nice evening. Tonight, my parents are coming over, and we’ll cut a hole in a door, and I’ll fix the disaster I made of mom’s website. Note: running SQL update statements without where clauses is a bad thing.

Outside, gave the lawn its last mowing for the year. I Hope so anyway. Not that I should complain, Meg did most of the mowing, at least once I got the mower started she did. I was planning on preparing a flower bed to be planted with bulbs for the spring, but then realized I needed a shovel to do this. Now, I do own a shovel. It just happens to still be at the river house. So now I own 2 shovels. One at my house and one at the river house.

Since this particular plot of land that our house’s previous owners had designated as a flower bed appears to have never grown anything but a small, sickly blue spruce, and since our development is a partially wooded lot, I needed to add a lot of bone meal to the soil.

Wow. What a horrible run-on sentence. Let me try again:

This “flower bed” is one only in name. It looks to have never grown anything but one sickly blue spruce. This is mostly due to our lot being partially wooded, and the soil being mostly clay. To help remedy these two factors, I added bone meal to the soil.

Ah, much better.

After turning over the soil to mix in the bone meal and provide some much needed aeration, Meg got to work on planting bulbs. I got started on cleaning up the early leaves that have dropped. Within minutes, my rake handle broke. I gallantly tried to continue on, using my now stubby rake. Immediately, my rake, which I had named “Stubby Jim: The Rake Who Is A Pirate” just moments earlier suffered a horrible accident. Stubby Jim broke at the plasticy bit that holds the rakey bits to the handley bits, ruining his pirate dreams forever..

Now, having suffered two rake related disasters in such a short time, I almost gave up. After a brief memorial service for Stubby Jim, I was off to the hardware store once again.

This time, I got a rake that was all metal rakey bits up until it became all wooden handley bits. No plasticy weakness in this rake of champions, no sir.

I think the previous owner of this house hadn’t raked up leaves at all last year. At least I hope so, because hardly any of the leaves appear to have fallen from our trees yet, and I filled an 11′ x 14′ tarp with leaves.

(I hope got my ‘ and my ” correct. I don’t want to make a mistake of Spinal Tappien proportions. I mean the bigger one, if I’m wrong. )

Anyway, If my presumptions about the previous owner of my house are wrong, and he did actually rake his leaves, I am going to be in a mess of trouble when we get closer to winter and the rest of these leaves drop.

After the leaves were taken care of, I put netting over the blubs to keep the squirrels away. Then I started watering the newly planted bulbs. When I get the hose out, I kinda go nuts. Besides watering the bulbs, I cleaned some spider webs off of the fence, and washed off the shed. And then the sidewalk. And then the driveway.

I almost washed off the mailbox for no good reason before I decided it was time to put the hose down slowly and walk away.