🚲🚲 Good morning, RVA: Nothingburgers, farmers' markets, and urban trails

Good morning, RVA! It’s 44 °F, and we’ve got another lovely day on deck. Expect highs in the 70s and a strong desire to take your lunch outside. Rain will probably move in later tonight and last through most of tomorrow.
 

Water cooler

Mel Leonor at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports on the Governor’s new COVID-19 guidance for employers. I think these brief, general, “hey man, do what feels right for you” regulations, if you can even call them that, are mostly nothingburgers while cases and hospitalizations continue to decrease. However, should we see a rise in cases and severe outcomes due to a new variant (for more on this read Katelyn Jetelina’s latest), the Governor’s going to be in a real tough spot. I do hope he gets to continue his meaningless victory lap, though, because I don’t know if I can handle another coronawave at the moment.
 

As spring continues to do its thing, I continue to get excited about plants poking up in the yard, planning this year’s garden, and spending too much time asleep in a hammock. Along those lines—if stuffing bags full of leafy vegetables, sticky doughnuts, and other local fare is part of your spring routine—the folks at RICtoday have put together this useful map of some of the farmers' markets in town. I notice a lack of pin points on the city’s Southside and East End, which surely doesn’t reflect reality, right? In fact, it reminds me of ORD. 2021–360, which just passed City Council last month and grants a special use permit to Second Baptist Church (3300 Broad Rock Boulevard) for the purpose of hosting a farmers' market. Read through Second Baptist’s applicant letter for a good look at how they hope the market will impact the nearby community.
 

Richmond BizSense’s Mike Platania reports that the forested lot next to Movieland has sold to developers. I’m torn between wanting everyone to keep building houses on every piece of land we’ve got and a strong desire to turn this space into some urban mountain bike trails, sort of like the Belle Isle skills course.
 

Do you want to be inspired? Read this piece by Ben Paviour at VPM about teens advocating at the General Assembly for better mental health resources. Whenever I talk to young people, I encourage them to get involved in the legislative process—especially at the local level—exactly because of stories like this. Nothing generates media coverage of an important issue like smart young people asking our elected officials to do better. The critical next step, though, is for other folks (less young or not!) to take action once they’ve been inspired. So: If you’ve got a minute this morning, email your state legislators a link to this article and ask them to support Sen. McClellan’s work to include funding for some of this work in the final budget.
 

Another Ever Boat is stuck—the Ever Forward this time—and has run aground in the Chesapeake Bay. Ali Sullivan in the Virginia-Pilot has the details, including the important fact that the Bay is not a very narrow shipping lane that can be blocked by a single boat and delay shipments of PS5s to the entire world.
 

This morning’s longread

A Case of Zoom Dysmorphia

A good piece by Anne Helen Petersen about what it means to look at your own dang face all day long on Zoom calls.
 

Part the problem of Zoom Dysmorphia, then, is that no one is supposed to look at their faces all day. But the deeper problem is that women are trained to dislike those faces — not because they don’t look like their own, but because they don’t look like the ideal: supple but not plump, smooth but not shiny; made-up but not overly so; alert but not aggressive; listening but not overly-eager, not too pale (for white people) and not too dark (for POC) — with nothing about their demeanor, their accessories, their hair, or their teeth that reads as “unprofessional,” so often code for “looks poor,” “fat,” “not straight or cis-gender presenting,” and/or “Black.” For people who aren’t cis-gender white men, professionalism entails endless maintenance.
 

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Picture of the Day

Two bikes locked up to the bike rack I installed in my side yard—an exciting day for me!