This Is Only a Test

Today I went to listen to emergency responders plan for a drill in June. The drill will be a fake car bomb at the Firestone plant on Chippens Hill and is designed to find out how Bristol Hospital, neighboring hospitals, EMTs and others work together in this type of crisis.
Laura Nagle, who is in charge of emergency planning at Bristol Hospital, ran the meeting. It will be her drill. If I was planning for an emergency, I'd want Laura on my side. She knows her stuff.
I wrote about the plans for the drill for Wednesday's edition of The Bristol Press (http://www.bristolpress.com/) so maybe you can check it out there.

Hope on Main Street

Today I popped in on my old pal, Mark Policki, who owns Bristol Cleaners and Custom

Tailors on Main Street, a few doors down from our new office at the Press.

Regular readers may remember Policki's plight - that he was having such a tough go of it in the lousy economy that he gave up the apartment he'd had for many years and moved in with family to keep expenses down and hang on to the shop.

Mark's usually smiling, so I wasn't surprised to see him grinning today, but he told me business was up a little bit. He said he had hope.

I was mighty happy to hear that. He's still there, has some new customers and figures things will improve a lot when the former mall site across the street is developed. He's guessing that will be about five years from now.

So if you have dry cleaning, bring it over to Mark. He'll learn your name and you'll feel welcome there. And we'll keep one more Main Street business from falling victim to the woes of downtown and the recession.

Those doors between my office and Mark's shop? Vacant.

Busway Banter

Mike Nicastro at the Central Connecticut Chambers of Commerce has an interesting post about the New Britain/Hartford busway on the chamber's blog late Monday. You can see it at: http://tinyurl.com/ykzcxy3

I still find the busway price tag of nearly $600 million -- that's more than half a billion of our clams, folks -- simply staggering for nine miles of road. That's the same price the state was talking about spending for an entire replacement hospital for the UConn Health Center in Farmington before a bunch of people got upset around here and put the kibosh on it before it killed community hospitals like Bristol Hospital.


Remember that fight?

Contract Talks With Renaissance Continue

Negotiators for the city and Renaissance Downtowns are still working to hammer out their agreement so work can begin on the former mall property. Let's hope things come together for the good of Bristol. I wrote about this for Tuesday's Press (www.bristolpress.com).

Sign of The Times? Nope. Sign of The Press

Guess who's getting a new sign for our new digs at 188 Main St.? Yup, The Bristol Press.

Guess who's paying for it?

Give up?

You!

And me.

Taxpayers, all of us.

The Bristol Development Authority approved spruce-up grants to the Press for almost $5,000 to cover 80 percent of the cost of the new sign and another grant for $73,000 to Tom Zipp, the landlord at the new Press building, for more improvements.

New tenants at the former Jake's restaurant who plan to open a new eatery are getting more than $60,000 to fix that building.

The fix-up cash is for downtown buildings only and it comes from money the state gave the city for downtown. There isn't much left, and time is running out to apply.

Read my story, which will probably be in Tuesday's edition of The Bristol Press (http://www.bristolpress.com/), for more info.

Youth Vernacular

I recently took the time to visit the Bristol Historical Society and look at artist Joe Keo's show, Youth Vernacular. Wow. It's really good!

I like all kinds of art, but sometimes I am really puzzled by some contemporary work. Joe's work appears simple from looking at it, but it's really quite deep. I was lucky to be there when Joe was there and he gave a little artist tour of the work. His explanations made the work make sense to me and I thought it was great. I'm not sure I would have had the same level of appreciation if I didn't have the benefit of hearing him talk about it.

I'm going to go back to read the little cards on the walls that he wrote for each work. I didn't have the time to do that then, and after all, I had the real deal giving me the explanation, so maybe they would help quite a bit.

A lot of his show is quite clever and all of it involves playing with words, except for the portraits of Joe's beautiful family. Those are just portrait paintings, and they're well done.

Joe was born and raised in Bristol and still lives here. He's a graduate of Bristol Eastern High School and the University of Hartford art school, where he earned top honors in sculpture. He's a smart, talented and funny guy. He's also a very nice young man. The photo is from his first year at art school.

The historical society is worth your support, too, by the way, and the Young Artist series there is really terrific. I hope you take the time to check it out.

The Bristol Historical Society Museum, at 98 Summer St., is open from 10-2 on Wednesdays and noon to 4 on Saturdays. It's free, but give them a few bucks to keep the lights on, never mind keep up the building. It's the only historical society Bristol has, so give a hand if you can.

Blog Boredom

Hey readers,
Bristol Blogging King Steve Collins says the chamber's new blog is boring.
I didn't even mention the chamber's blog to all of you because I'm bored with blogging.
I don't like the kind of comments Steve gets on his blog (some are intelligent, but... well, if you read them, you'll know what I mean), so I'm not exactly jealous, but then, without hardly any comments at all on Extra B.S., it's hard to believe that anyone is reading. At least Steve knows he has readers, sort of.
I run out of steam because this blogging stuff feels like a lot of Extra B.S. to me when there's no response from the blogosphere.
Steve said the chamber's blog is boring because it hadn't been updated in a week. Extra B.S. is worse -- no posts since March 23 -- but maybe Steve has more compassion for me, given that he knows how hard concentration has been in recent weeks with my stuffy head, or maybe he wrote off Extra B.S. a long time ago.
I'll give it another go, though. I'm not quitting.