Good Morning, RVA: Official spring

While it might not feel like it, we’re now in official spring.

March 21, 2016; 7:07 AM • by Ross Catrow

Photo by: Martin LaBar (going on hiatus)

Good morning, RVA! It’s 37 °F now, but we’re totally back! Today we’ve got highs in the mid 50s followed by the previously springy temperatures from last week–and we’ll hold on to those for the foreseeable future.

Let’s all get back to walking around the Fan and smelling the flowers.

Water cooler

I guess the Westhampton is really closed? Gregory Gilligan at the RTD reports that there aren’t any showtimes this week, which is true. I mean, we all knew this was coming, but it’s still sad now that it’s actually happened.

Also in the RTD, a quick review of the early options for the bike lanes planned on Main and Franklin. These guys provide a link between the Fan and downtown and, according to the city’s bicycle master plan (164 MB PDF, watch out!), were supposed to be physically separated from traffic with barriers, pylons, or parked cars. Only one of the current options does this. Luckily professional bike people were on hand at last week’s public meeting to say these things to the planners, so we’ll wait patiently to see what the next round of revisions looks like.

Charlottesville’s vice mayor is calling for the removal of the city’s Robert E. Lee statue–a statue that was erected in 1924 (54 years after Lee died). Scroll down in this piece we ran last year for a sidebar about what was going on in the United States when monuments like this were being stood up.

It’s Apple event day! At 1:00 PM they’ll hold their annual spring keynote, and you can stream it right here. Expect some smaller phones, a beefier iPad, maybe some new watch bands, and a bunch of software updates. MacRumors has the details.

Here’s the very first tweet ever tweeted, 10 years ago today. I’m so glad they got the vowels back.

Sports!

Whoa what a sports weekend that was!

• #1 Wahoos live to see the Sweet Sixteen and the second weekend of the tournament with a win over Butler, 77-69.
• Rams mounted a double-digit comeback but couldn’t hold on to beat Oklahoma. They lost 81-85, but things look bright for Coach Wade’s second season–which now feels like a million years away.
• Hokies fell to BYU, 77-80, ending their unexpectedly successful season–so successful that Coach Buzz Williams’s name has been mentioned for several coaching vacancies.

This morning’s longread

Why do we work so hard?

An interesting, slightly different perspective on how we’re all working all the time.

Yet the more seriously we thought about it, the less I liked the idea. I want hours of quiet to write in, not days and weeks. I would miss, desperately, being in an office and arguing about ideas. More than that, I could anticipate with perfect clarity how the rhythm of life would slow as we left the city, how the external pressure to keep moving would diminish. I didn’t want more time to myself; I wanted to feel pushed to be better and achieve more. It wasn’t the stress of being on the fast track that caused my chest to tighten and my heart rate to rise, but the thought of being left behind by those still on it.

This morning’s Instagram

In only one year, consider me as a veteran.

A photo posted by RA$PY (@_raspy_) on Mar 20, 2016 at 4:01pm PDT

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March 21, 2016 7:07 AM 0