Mayor Nutter gave a speech on November 6th 2008. To summarize this speech, it was about Philadelphia in general but the important part here is the budget of the city. We started the year in a $119 million surplus and are now in a deficit of $108 million, he has given salary cuts to everyone including himself, and he is cutting the bugets, “In facing this crisis, I have rejected across-the-board cuts because of their inherent unfairness” Nutter is doing some pruning, finding the programs that work and keeping their buget the same, and finding other places to make cuts:

“Last winter, we began a total review of all programs and spending, measuring everything against the yardstick of our core values: public safety, healthy neighborhoods, sustainable economic growth and improved education all delivered by a more efficient government with the highest ethical standards.

…

Our goal is to:
Preserve programs that work,
Adjust these programs to actual needs,
Find real efficiencies that can be implemented quickly,
Collect money owed to the city,
Rebalance fees for some city services to better cover our costs and
Share the burden of sacrifice that spending cuts require.

I believe that sharing the burden must begin with our schedule of business and wage tax cuts. After more than a decade of annual cuts, it would be folly to continue cutting in this dangerous fiscal environment.”

Now to take from this is that he says we must “share the burden” and I totally 100% agree, my friend Dave Speers has this awesome idea posted on ideablob.com and I for one would love to see it actually happen.

So the whole point of this post is to make you and everyone else reading aware of this situation in Philadelphia and all I am asking you to do about it is spare a vote for this idea on idea blob, thank you.

So failcamp happened like a million years ago, and I could not attend, and I promised a post about my greatest failure, well here you go, this is it, my heart is on the page:

I started playing sports when I was about four years old, and since then I have not stopped. I’ve played softball, soccer, field hockey, and basketball. I’ve always had a knack for sports, I can pick them up almost instantly. Softball had always been my sport of choice, after my first year I started playing up an age level. When I was about eight years old my dad took me to watch a softball tryout for the Gamblers which was a local travel team; after about five minutes of watching them I turned to my dad and told him that this is what I wanted to do, I wanted to play travel softball. When I was eleven I made my first travel team, the Doylestown Fury. From then on my goal was to play collegiate softball. I won’t bore you with the scouting process, but basically you have to market yourself well enough and be good enough to get college coaches to notice you. It takes hard work, determination and copious amounts of persistence, thank you dad.

In my junior year of high school I contracted Mononucleosis, and relapsed the same year. I missed 65 days of that school year. It’s still astonishing that I passed. It took me more than a year to recover from it. I graduated ready to finish the summer and start art school, I was going to play softball for Temple University. (Tyler School of Art is part of Temple University).

I was a walk on, and made the team. I was ecstatic. Words cannot describe how happy I was, especially because the first practice that we had was a scrimmage. I was the last batter, I cannot remember if it was the first or the second pitch, but I hit an out of the park home run, right over center field, with two RBIs. That is the only thing I will really brag about when it comes to softball. Well there are a select few other things but that’s not the point.

The training schedule was incredibly rigorous the team was up at 5:30am every day in the gym, the team would lift together, and then we would run. Morning practice would end right before 8am so we could get to class, My classes ended at 1:30 and I had to catch a 2 o’clock bus to the Ambler campus for practice. We would get back around 7 or 7:30pm I would put my equipment away and be back for study hall by the latest 8:30 and would be in study hall until it ended, which I think was 11pm. I would go back to my dorm relax, finish work that I did not get done in study hall or the bus, take a shower and go to bed. The team and I would do the same thing everyday. I should have known better than to let myself do that much physical activity. The third time I relapsed was in the fall of my freshman year of college. I had to quit softball for the first time in my life. My doctor told me that if I kept playing that I would end up in the hospital and do some long term damage to myself, he recommended that I never play again, at least at that level.

I was devasteted, to say the least, and to this day I cannot put to words how much it hurt to see the only true goal I ever had for myself wither and die.

To this day the greatest failure of my life is contracting Mononucleosis. I got it from a girl on a soccer team I was on, I gave her my water bottle to use because she forgot hers. She put her mouth on the spout, I didn’t care at the time, I did not think anything of it. A few weeks later she had to stop playing because she had gotten mono, and a week after that I came down with it. To this day I battle with the fatigue, getting sick easily etc., and I always will. This virus has stopped me from doing the one thing that was literally my life from the age of eleven on. It is still strange not to be playing, I miss it. I wish I could play for my college. I can however play with summr leagues as long as it isn’t too intense, but even then I tier easily.

I guess the only thing I can say that I really learned from this is that life happens. There are tons of things that are out of your control and you can’t be angry at them, you have to adapt. Come on people survivial of the fittest! :)

November 8th 2008, was one of the best days of my life, it was such an experience. It was the first Barcamp that I have ever attended, and I am really glad that it was where I lived.

I met a lot of really amazing creative people, who have got me really excited and inspired about everything. I am still trying to process the whole weekend because it was a lot to take in, but all I can say is, Roz Duffy, JP Toto, all the volunteers and everyone else that attended Barcamp Philly and make it so freakin’ amazing, you guys are awesome, thank you.

I am going to really write a serious post about all the stuff that has started to mull around in this head of mine but I’ve gotta buckel down and get some school work done.

I wrote this weeks before election day, I thought I had posted it but apparently I had not. Let me preface this with Barack Obama will be a good president, I wish him the best of luck in the economic struggle he has ahead of him. I am hopeful that the experience that Joe Biden brings to the table will balance out the lack of experience that Obama has. Now the post:

I hate that everyone thinks that they are experts on the election. I hate that there are a lot of people who try to jam their ideas and beliefs down my throat. I feel like I’m back in Catholic School.

I respect your decision of who you are voting for; I don’t try to change your mind. If there was one thing that I learned from my family it is that people are stubborn and they will think what they think unless you give them credible evidence to sway their decision. And even then most people are set in their ways.

So please you can tell me what you want, but don’t try to persuade me.

I’d like to share a story. Last Fall(Fall 2007) before the primaries I was going to register to vote. I was walking through campus and there was an Obama table with voter registration applications. I walked up and filled one out. The people there said they would mail it out blah blah blah. This was a school sponsored table for Barack Obama. I told my family I registered, my dad said he would tell me when my registration card would come in. I never got a call. The day before primaries I contacted my dad, assuming that he forgot to tell me when it came in, but he told me it really never came in the mail. By law you have to recieve your voter registration card 14 days after it has been sent, at least in the state of Pennsylvania. The only conculsion that I can come to is that those people or other people down the line, who endorsed Barack Obama or the democratic/another party, threw my registration away because I am a republican. I can see other arguments for this in their favor(like it got lost in the mail yadayadayada) and I would listen to them except that I know other people that this has happened to. So this makes me think that it wasn’t just an accident. And it really makes my stomach turn to know that there are people out there that would actually do something like that. Just because I am a republican doesn’t mean I won’t vote for Obama or any other party. It really grinds my gears that politics are so dirty, but I guess that’s life and that’s how it’s played.