📅 Good morning, RVA: A landscape calendar, the Greyhound station, and expanding state government

Good morning, RVA! It’s 28 °F, and today, tomorrow, the next day, and the day after that you can expect highs right around 60 °F. Rain will most likely move in on Sunday and stick around for a couple days, but, unfortunately, those temperatures will not drop anywhere close to the Snow Zone. Celebrate this too-warm-for-snow weather with a walk or a ride in the public park nearest you.
 

Water cooler

Because my brain is a wide-gauge sieve, I have to write everything down or I forget it instantly. One of the tricks I’ve learned to help me fail less at life—I think from YouTuber and podcaster CGP Grey—is to use a second calendar called “Landscape” for tracking anything and everything time-based that I may want to remember for later. I use it a ton for Good Morning, RVA, which you can see in action here, and it definitely helps me remember when folks announce dates for delivering interesting PDFs or kicking off cool initiatives. That’s why I know that on September 20th, Governor Youngkin issued Executive Directive Number Five, asking the commonwealth’s Office of Regulatory Management to release a report about the “responsible, ethical, and transparent” use of AI by the state government no later than December 15th. I haven’t yet seen this report (although, I guess they do still have until the end of today), but, because thinking about AI is officially one of my hobbies, I will keep an eye out for it over the next couple of weeks and report back when I find it.
 

Richmond BizSense’s Mike Platania reports that a developer has filed plans to replace the Greyhound bus station in Scott’s Addition with a “two-building, mixed-use project totaling 650 apartments” and “nearly 11,000 square feet of retail space fronting Arthur Ashe Boulevard.” No word yet on the future of the Greyhound station, but somewhere, way in the back of my mind, I remember an old plan to relocate intercity bus service to Main Street Train Station? Maybe that could still be a thing, because we definitely do not want to move the bus station to a place that’s impossible to get to without a car (I’m looking at you, Staples Mill Train Station).
 

Patrick Larsen at VPM has a long piece about Richmond’s public gardens that you should read—if only to think more on how gardening is such a great metaphor for living life in a slower, more intentional way. I mean, check out this quote from VCU professor Meghan Gough: “Food is what’s there, but it’s community that’s really growing in those spaces.” Larsen also digs into the community garden that briefly sprung up in the circle at Monument and Allen during the summer of 2020 and talks to Bee, the gardener who tended that small plot. While that garden has since been turned over and replaced with landscaping, Bee has a good, if bittersweet, outlook: “But even more, I do appreciate what’s there now instead of what we had to replace…I would much rather look at it like a victory.”
 

The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Anna Bryson reports on the many, many resignations and significant turnover at the Virginia Department of Education since Governor Youngkin took over. The headline of this piece—which is probably not written by the reporter!—wants you to get mad at the number of VDOE staff and their salaries. Idk though! It’s not a very Republican position, but I’m totally here for the Governor expanding state government and increasing folks’ pay to attract talented and creative candidates. I’d be more here for it if those candidates weren’t dead set on using their day-to-day to destroy our public schools, of course.
 

Did you know the Richmond Kickers are the longest, continuously operating professional outdoor soccer club in the United States? I did not, and, even with all of those modifiers, that’s an impressive record. They just released their 2024 schedule (for their 32nd consecutive season), and it looks like a lot of fun. I keep wanting to be a person who likes soccer and supports the local soccer club, but, so far, I’ve failed to do that—maybe 2024 is my year!
 

This morning’s longread

The Many Garlics of My Childhood

I love introspective essays told through stories about food, and I love garlic. This piece combines both and made me want to go on hunting for garlic grown in Central Asia.
 

Today garlic is everywhere, and the stinky little bulbs make about $21 billion annually across the planet. China grows the bulk of it—nearly three-quarters of the world’s supply comes from there. It’s been growing there for thousands of years, but since it’s such big business, anything you buy from your supermarket sourced from there probably wasn’t harvested wild. If you happen to get a head or two from one of China’s neighbors to the west, it’s likely that grew wild, and the flavor difference is astonishing. Whereas most grocery store garlic in the United States tends to have a bitter, spicy taste to it, Kazakh garlic, for instance, has a nutty, earthy flavor without the sharpness of the stuff shipped over from China. If you’re able to try garlic from Central Asia, that, to me, is the real stuff. It’s organic, pulled from the ground, and has a richness to it that you can’t create in a lab. It makes you realize just how much we’re missing when it comes to flavor in America—not just with garlic but with almost any food item.
 

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Picture of the Day

A brass plaque that just says “Men”.