what's up the pike: endings and beginnings

Buses line up outside the Fairland Center in Fairland last January.

I'm nursing my first mosquito bite of the summer, which is surprising, because it's already time to go back to school. MCPS opened its doors today with more kids than they anticipated; as he toured schools across the county this morning, superintendent Jerry Weast noted some of the biggest jumps in enrollment were in Silver Spring. It's a time of endings and beginnings - even if you don't have kids, or know kids, or like kids, you can feel the change in season. As our schedules change, so do our routines and priorities, and we can see it in a shake-up with some of our most established local bloggers.

- On Saturday, photoblog Silver Spring Daily Photo published its final image. Just shy of two years old, SSDP compiled over six hundred photos of anything and everything in the Silver Spring area. But keeping it up became "more of a chore than a pleasure," as blogger John (which may be his name, or one I made up, I'm not sure) writes.

- Meanwhile, Rethink College Park, which has written about growth and politics in Maryland's biggest college town, may also be ending soon. With all three of its main contributors out of school and out of town, co-founder David Daddio wonders if it has a future. RTCP was one of a bumper crop of blogs (including this one) born right before the mid-term elections in 2006; since then, its work has been recognized by the Gazette, Money Magazine and Planetizen.

- But while some blogs may leave, new blogs may come to fill the void. This week, we learned about life in (scenic) Wheaton, a new(ish) blog by a resident who calls her hometown "hands down the most exotic place I've ever lived." While I've called Silver Spring home since I was three, I always got excited about going up to Wheaton, whether for the mall or for the glorious Chinese food that surrounds it on all fronts. There's an ongoing fight over chains vs. local stores in Downtown Silver Spring, but for the time being, Wheaton's got it somewhat worked out, I suppose.