🍟 Good morning, RVA: More park land, better bridge names, and shoestring fries

Good morning, RVA! It’s 52 °F, and we’ve got another day of weirdly temperate weather, and you should expect highs in the 70s served alongside some clouds. Just to make sure I’m not misremembering all the previous Novembers of my life, I went and pulled the historic average temperatures for November in Richmond. Typically we see highs around 65 °F in the beginning of the month—compare that to this weekend’s forecasted highs in the 80s!
 

Water cooler

Today, the Capital Region Land Conservancy announced that local residents have gifted them 3.5 acres of river-adjacent property, adding new green space to the James River Park System and protecting portions of the Buttermilk Trail forever. From the press release: “The Rogers have subdivided their property and donated 3.46 acres, including the entirety of the trail network located on their property, to the Capital Region Land Conservancy to be protected in perpetuity and be added into the James River Park System conservation easement upon transfer to the City of Richmond.” For whatever ancient and historical reason, portions of the Buttermilk Trail—which people use to walk, hike, and get rad on bikes—crossed over onto the private property of Josh and Carrie Belt Rogers. You can imagine that the idea of folks getting a little too rad and injured while on their property stressed the Rogers out. We should all be really thankful that they decided to permanently preserve the trail system as it is rather than putting up some fences and blocking access—something that would have been totally within their rights to do. AXIOS Richmond has a nice map of the new easement and location of the existing Buttermilk Trail.
 

David Ress at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that Councilmember Lynch has withdrawn her proposal to rename the Robert E. Lee Bridge to the Belvidere Bridge. While Belvidere Bridge probably makes the easiest sense as a new (and needed!) name for this bridge, the namesake Belvidere was a 1700s estate owned by William Byrd III—a rich white man who enslaved people. Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Paul Williams has some more on that history of Belvidere and some reactions from community members, if you want to dig in. I get it, like Lynch says in one of the aforelinked stories, “Richmond’s history is complicated.” Unfortunately for us, a lot of the names attached to our streets and infrastructure have disturbing histories that we’ve forgotten (or intentionally ignore), and its worth being thoughtful before attaching a new, long-lasting name to a thing. I think pumping the brakes on this particular renaming and switching to a community-driven process was a good idea. I also think that the City could just take down the “Robert E. Lee Bridge” signs today, and not wait for the results of that community process. I also also think we should just rename it back to the James River Bridge, its original 1933 name before the Lost Causers got ahold of it.
 

Charlotte Rene Woods, also at the RTD, reports that the Virginia NAACP has paid $20,000 to the state Attorney General’s office for a FOIA request related to the office’s “Election Integrity Unit.” These Republican-created voter fraud tasks forces typically find zero cases of actual fraud and mostly exist to create headlines. Given that the AG’s EIU is probably vaporware, who knows what will result from this request. Either way, that is a ton of money to spend on a FOIA.
 

Huge news! according to their instagram, shoestring fries are back Joe’s Inn: “Five years ago, on October 4, 2017 - we got new fries. People were upset, people were divided. Since then, we can all agree that much has occurred. While the world has changed around us — we haven’t forgotten those delicious golden skinny shoestring fries of yore. After an exhaustive search we have finally found a fry we can be proud of. And so, starting today (and beyond) we are happy to report that SHOESTRING FRIES ARE BACK!” This is personally exciting to me as, for my money, nothing beats sopping up the remains of an over-medium egg with crispy shoestring fries.
 

This morning’s longread

Fall In

Yep, still exploring time and calendars and seasons and phases. We’re all on a journey together, and I hope you’re enjoying it!
 

This leads to a question: Should one also change in conjunction with the seasons? By this I mean more than donning a natty scarf when the temperature drops below a certain level—I mean changing things about the way you eat, sleep, live, and work. Conventional productivity advice doesn’t really take up this question. One of the things, in fact, that irks me about such advice is that it tends to frame things in terms of daily routines, routines that are ostensibly the same regardless of the season. In other words, most productivity advice is seasonless. Here I’m thinking of things like Mason Currey’s engrossing 2013 book Daily Rituals and Tim Ferriss’s more tech bro-y late-2016 knockoff Tools for Titans. Now, I’m as interested in famous people’s daily routines as anyone. But at the same time, I feel it’s important to resist the tyranny of “the day.”
 

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Picture of the Day

Hitching a ride.