thomas hardman (1958-2020)

Thomas outside Dunkin' Donuts in 2008.
Photo by the author.

Thomas Hardman, a longtime Aspen Hill resident, computer programmer, occasional political candidate, and moderator of several local Facebook pages, was found dead in his Gaithersburg apartment over the weekend. An autopsy reports that he had a heart attack. He was 62.


Thomas's friend, civic activist Cary Lamari, reported the news on Facebook last night. Lamari says he asked people if anyone had heard from him since he hadn't posted in several weeks, and filed a missing persons report. Montgomery County police conducted a distress call and found Thomas Sunday night. He was not married, and did not have any children.

From Cary's Facebook page:

Thomas was liked by many people on Facebook and in the Aspen Hill Community, He attended Robert Perry High school and has been a staple in County political discussion for many years. You could always find Thomas at meeting in the Aspen Hill Civic Association meetings and he had a wonderful historical memory of past events and developments in our Community...Thomas was a good and Moral person and will be missed.

Thomas was a big part of the JUTP community as well. Back in the early days of the blog, Thomas was a frequent commenter and a longtime friend of the blog, eagerly offering his thoughts over coffee at Dunkin' Donuts (and it was always Dunkin' Donuts).

From 1980s punk rock to obscure science fiction to Linux to the arcana of Montgomery County, Thomas always had a good anecdote to share and an eagerness to find solutions. According to his personal website, he received a patent in 2008 for an "invention in the field of computing and dataprocessing."

ten very silver spring (and montgomery county) things that happened this decade

Clockwise from top left: "The Turf" in 2006, Veterans Plaza under construction in 2010, the first Fenton Street Market in the plaza that fall, and the 2019 Silver Spring Jazz Festival. Click for a bigger version.

If you’ve seen the "Woman Yelling at a Cat"meme, you’d recognize the mural that sat on Ellsworth Drive for all of one day this fall. Normally, the meme is a photo of one of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, well, yelling at a cat named Smudge. Instead, the woman, surrounded by raging fires, has a speech bubble reading “I’M FROM D.C.!!” and the cat - now wearing sunglasses and a fur coat - has a speech bubble that just says “Silver Spring.”

this is the one we’ve been waiting for #silverspringwalls pic.twitter.com/3x3ll4Svnf

— dan reed, hot chocolate enthusiast ☕️ (@justupthepike) November 17, 2019

The mural was produced by DC-based artists No Kings Collective as part of Silver Spring Walls, a series of permanent and temporary art installations that went up in big-D Downtown Silver Spring this year, the first phase of a larger renovation project in the area.

But it also says a lot about Silver Spring at the end of the 2010s. It’s not just that Silver Spring had a big turnaround from the 1980s and 1990s, when the area was still in decline. It’s that Silver Spring came into its own as a place, with unique attractions and a distinctive culture.

People here might still say they're "from DC," but Silver Spring is giving them even more reasons not to. So, what do we have to show for ourselves after another decade? Let's take a look:

marc elrich wants to cut some of montgomery county's busiest bus routes

Some of Montgomery County's busiest Ride On bus routes could come less frequently this fall. County Executive Marc Elrich wants to reduce bus service to save money, reflecting a larger push to defund things that benefit the county's urban areas. The County Council will vote on restoring the bus cuts this Thursday.

A Ride On bus in Germantown. Photo by the author.

The seven bus routes affected serve major job centers like White Flint, major shopping destinations like Wheaton and Lakeforest Mall, and Upcounty communities with limited transportation options, like Germantown and Montgomery Village. Four of the routes, the 55, 49, 57, and 59, are among the county's busiest bus lines, together carrying over 11,000 riders each day, or about 15% of Ride On's entire ridership.

Elrich recommends reducing the frequency on all seven routes starting in September. Five of them would go from running every 15 minutes to every 20 minutes, while two other routes would come every 30 minutes instead of every 20 to 25 minutes. The cuts would save about $2.6 million, including $1 million in operating costs and $1.6 million for replacing three buses that would no longer be needed.

This isn't the first time Elrich, who was elected last fall after 12 years on the County Council, tried to cut bus service. This winter, he tried to impose mid-year cuts on the same seven routes, which the county council rejected.

"I am frustrated that the county executive recommended cutting service for some of the highest performing Ride On bus routes," says County Councilmember Evan Glass, who serves on the council's Transportation and Environment Committee, which recommended restoring the money. "Reducing bus service on well-utilized routes will simply force more people into their cars and away from transit, thus inhibiting the county's goal of having a sustainable transportation system."

here are 13 reasons why Montgomery County has to make budget cuts this year

Montgomery County will soon start working on its budget for next year, and officials already expect that they'll need to make big cuts. While the county's population is growing, its tax base has been shrinking, which means that we're trying to pay for more services with less money. How did this happen? Here are several reasons.

1) 6116 Executive Boulevard

This Montgomery County office building has been totally vacant for five years. All photos by the author unless noted. 

This eight-story building, built in 1989, has been totally vacant since the National Institutes of Health left in 2013. As a result, its value has fallen 64% over the past decade and the building went into foreclosure in 2014 because the owners weren't collecting rent. It's one of 19 office buildings in Montgomery County that are either fully vacant or will be soon, all of which are outside the Beltway.

2) One Discovery Place

Discovery Communications' soon-to-be-former headquarters.

Twenty years ago, Discovery Communications moved from Bethesda to Silver Spring and helped usher in downtown's revitalization with a huge new headquarters that consumed four blocks and employed 2,500 people. However, they've slowly been shedding workers, and will move from Montgomery County to Tennessee and New York next year, with about 200 people remaining in Silver Spring. While the building has a new owner, no new tenants are on the horizon.

3) White Flint Mall



This was Montgomery County's fanciest mall, and it was slated to become a fancy open-air town center until department store Lord & Taylor sued the Lerners, which own the mall, for knocking it down–and they won. More recently, the county offered the 45-acre property for Amazon's new headquarters, and we know how that went. Today it's a big pile of dirt, though Lord & Taylor is still there.

wheaton's art parade shows how we can reuse vacant suburban spaces

This Sunday, works of art will take over the streets of downtown Wheaton for the Wheaton Art Parade. Now in its second year, the parade is a sign of how communities in Montgomery County are finding new uses for vacant suburban retail spaces.

One of the sculptures in the Art Factory, the former mall beauty school where pieces in the Wheaton Art Parade are stored. All photos by the author.

Earlier this month, I stopped by the Art Factory, a former beauty school behind Wheaton Plaza. Nestled between mannequins and barber’s chairs are giant sculptures, including a rainbow-colored chicken and a robot. A piece called “Narcissus” riffs on Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam by putting a smartphone in Adam’s hand as he takes a selfie.

Dan Thompson, executive director of the Wheaton Art Parade and a retired federal worker, wanted to bring local artists together. “The town doesn’t know the artists that are here,” he says. “Artists don’t know each other. You want to call a meeting with artists? They’re all busy scraping by.”

montgomery county says no new homes in silver spring because the schools are full

For decades, school planners assumed that families would move out to the suburbs once they had kids, and made projections for where and how to build new schools based on that. But as that trend begins to shift, Montgomery County is finding school enrollment harder to predict, which creates new challenges in and out of the classroom.

Paint Branch High School. All photos and maps by the author.

Like many places, Montgomery County Public Schools predicts how many students will enroll in local schools for the next several years, and if a school will have enough room or if it’ll be over capacity. Like many places, those projections, along with traffic predictions, can be used to stop new development.

This summer, Montgomery County’s planning department declared a “moratorium” in several areas, including Silver Spring, Wheaton, and part of Bethesda, because some schools are projected to have more students than there is space. This halts new development in those area until enrollment drops, the boundaries are moved, or additional classroom space can be found.

What families want is changing

How did this happen? In a recent Washington Post story, reporter Katie Shaver notes that Montgomery County Public Schools didn’t anticipate changes in how and where families want to live. The school system is seeing a lot of growth in close-in areas like Silver Spring and Bethesda, because more families want to live in urban, walkable neighborhoods where they can walk to shops, jobs, or transit.

These communities are also becoming very expensive because there’s a lot of demand to live there, and outside of a few areas, very few homes are being built there. As a result, many parents can’t afford to buy a house and are instead renting apartments, living with relatives, or even doubling up with other families to make ends meet.

wheaton woods residents are upset about plans to build rain gardens

Montgomery County has plans to build gardens that collect and clean stormwater on the street in front of homes in older neighborhoods. Residents, however, are up in arms.

A rain garden on Dennis Avenue in Silver Spring. Image by Montgomery County Department of Environmental Protection.

Whenever a new development is built, the developer is usually required to plan for getting rid of rainwater from big storms. They regrade the land so water flows away from houses, and often create a stormwater management pond where all the water can go.

Older neighborhoods frequently lack those things. Many streets in older neighborhoods don’t have good drainage, or have streets with no curb and gutter. After a storm, water can collect in people’s yards, causing erosion or flooding. Or, it flows directly from the street into a storm drain, collecting a lot of pollutants before dumping the water into local waterways.

Several years ago, Montgomery County started the RainScapes program to address this issue by building rain gardens on public property, including parks and schools, and giving private property owners rebates for building them on their land. Also called a bioswale, a rain garden is basically a landscaped area that’s designed to collect rainwater after a storm. They include a mix of plants, rocks, dirt, and even sand that filters the rainwater before it seeps into the ground below or is directed to a storm drain. Native plants give pollinators and other animals a welcome habitat.

People are mad

Currently, the county is working on plans to build them in Wheaton Woods, a 1950s-era neighborhood between Wheaton and Rockville where flooding is an issue. However, some neighbors are fighting it. One resident told Channel 7 that the gardens are dangerous because people will fall in them. Another claimed that they would hurt his property values, while a third worried that stormwater pollution will somehow end up in his yard instead.

this video shows you how to find the right MCPS school for your family

There are over two hundred public schools in Montgomery County, and if you're picking a place to live, it often means comparing the schools in different neighborhoods. How can you find the right school for your family? This video shows you how.

Recently, I interviewed Montgomery County board of education member Jill Ortman-Fouse about the best tools for learning about local public schools. While websites like GreatSchools.com assign each school a point rating based on test scores, they don't tell the full story.

Instead, Jill recommends taking a more hands-on approach. If you're curious about a school, schedule a visit, meet with the principal, or talk to neighbors whose kids attend that school. There are also a variety of online resources, including school websites, Twitter accounts, and Facebook pages, that list events going on at each school and can provide a first-hand look at what happens there.

And of course, Montgomery County Public Schools has a website with lots of information as well. Schools at a Glance is their annual report of data about every school in the system, with everything from test scores to teacher statistics to building information.

Are you trying to pick a school in Montgomery County right now? Have you picked one in the past? What tools did you use?

“move to the cheaper area” is good individual advice, but not a solution to our housing shortage

As house prices around Washington have risen over the past few years, everyone from friends to real estate agents offer the same advice: “Have you considered a cheaper area?” However, this advice really only works for an individual person looking for a house. Applied to an entire city, county, or region, this advice doesn’t work very well.

Wheaton may be more affordable than other parts of Montgomery County, but it's not guaranteed to stay that way. Image by the author.

Last week, candidates for Montgomery County executive spoke to the Greater Capital Area Association of Realtors, a group that represents real estate agents in the county and the District of Columbia. (Full disclosure: I am a member of GCAAR, though I didn’t attend the event.) As David Alpert wrote last week, each of the candidates were asked where they’d recommend a young couple making $100,000 per year should live in the county. Two of the candidates, Roger Berliner and David Blair, suggested that they look at Silver Spring or Wheaton.

Would our hypothetical couple actually be able to do that? $100,000 seems like a lot of money and it is, though it’s actually a little lower than the county’s median household income of $100,352 per year. But what can they actually afford here?

there's a mismatch between the houses DC area buyers want, and what's on the market

Ten years after the Great Recession, home prices in many parts of the Washington region have reached or even topped their pre-recession peaks. But will this trend continue? A look at a wide sampling of real estate websites says yes – but the mismatch between what buyers can afford and what kinds of homes are available could change that.

New townhomes in Rockville. Photo by the author.

The conventional wisdom appears to say we’re not heading into another recession anytime soon. However, while Millennials are finally settling down and ready to buy homes, they will struggle to afford homes in places like DC due to high costs. In the coming years, climbing home prices will stagnate because buyers' income levels increases aren’t keeping pace with costs.

These three things suggest a recession isn’t coming soon

Real estate downturns tend to happen pretty regularly, notes real estate entrepreneur and Harvard Extension School lecturer Ted Nicolais. Going all the way back to the 19th century, real estate downturns take place about once every 16 to 18 years. Since the last recession occurred between 2006 and 2008, he predicts we can expect another one between 2022 and 2024.

since the great recession, east county's real estate market has diverged

Nearly a decade ago, the Great Recession wiped out house values across the region. Today, booming close-in, urban areas have basically recovered. But many further-out, suburban communities are still struggling. Here’s one example from eastern Montgomery County.

A 2000s-era subdivision in East County. Many of these homes lost value during the Great Recession and have yet to recover. All images by the author.

I grew up in downtown Silver Spring at a time when people were still moving away from urban centers. Twenty years ago, my neighborhood consisted of abandoned buildings and boarded-up stores, and in 1998, my parents started looking for houses outside the Beltway in places like Olney and Burtonsville, which seemed ascendant at the time. Besides, we were already driving to shop there. My parents found a little split-level house a mile from a new shopping center with a Target, Chipotle, and Starbucks.

My high school, Blake, opened that same year, and most of my friends’ parents seemed to have made the same move from Silver Spring and Takoma Park. New subdivisions were popping up with big, luxurious houses, lush lawns, and names like Briarcliff Manor and Hampshire Greens. In the older neighborhoods, houses were sold for the land so big McMansions could rise in their places.
I remember going to a party at the end of high school where we sat in a circle bragging about how much our parents’ houses were worth. I was the odd one out because my parents’ house had appraised recently at a measly $500,000.

An abandoned house in an East County subdivision in 2014.

But it wouldn’t last; the Great Recession hit East County pretty hard. Burtonsville Crossing, the shopping center where we hung out in high school, is almost completely vacant. Some of my parents’ neighbors, unable to make ends meet, resorted to running illegal auto shops out of their homes, inviting relatives to move in, or renting out their basements.

Meanwhile, downtown Silver Spring had a comeback as more people sought urban living. A major redevelopment project along Ellsworth Drive brought restaurants, shops, movie theaters, and a Whole Foods. Montgomery County poured millions into new public facilities, including a library, the Civic Building, and Veterans Plaza. In response, private developers built thousands of new apartments and condominiums, including the building I live in now, a converted bottling plant that was still operating when I was a kid.

Here's how the real estate market in East County has changed

The real estate market shows how Silver Spring has bounced back from the recession while East County has struggled. Here’s a graph showing average home values in 2012 and 2017 as they compare to 2007 levels. It shows the two zip codes inside the Beltway, 20910 (Silver Spring) and 20912 (Takoma Park), and seven zip codes (mostly) outside the Beltway: 20901 (Four Corners), 20902 (Wheaton), 20903 (Hillandale) 20904 (Colesville, Fairland), 20905 (Cloverly), 20906 (Aspen Hill) and 20866 (Burtonsville).

How 2012 and 2017 home values in East County stack up to 2007 levels. Click on all of these graphs to enlarge them.

Home values all over East County fell during the Great Recession. In zip codes 20903 and 20906, home values fell by nearly half between 2007 and 2012. This year, average home values in the eight zip codes outside downtown Silver Spring are 71% to 85% of what they were a decade ago. But in zip code 20910, which contains downtown Silver Spring, values are actually a little higher than they were 10 years ago.

Home values inside the Beltway have recovered, but remain lower elsewhere. 

Homes inside the Beltway have been more valuable than those outside it for a while now. But the gap in home values has increased over the past 10 years. This graph shows the average home sale price per square foot, as a way to even out differences between houses of different sizes and styles. In the summer of 2007, the price per square foot in zip codes 20910 (Silver Spring) and 20866 (Burtonsville) were fairly close, at $363 per square foot and $304, respectively. Today, they’re $384 and $257; in other words, a difference of 50%.

Those who bought homes in East County before the housing boom, or at the bottom of the market, may have recovered their investments or even made a little extra. But those who bought at the top of the market saw their gains wiped away.

Homes in far-flung zip code 20905 linger on the market longer than homes closer in.

Another measure of demand is the number of days a house sits on the market. During the Great Recession, houses across East County languished for months due to a lack of buyers. In early 2008, the average house in zip code 20905 sat on the market for nearly six months. Demand returned, but not equally. In early 2017, homes in the 20910 zip code spent just 22 days for sale, compared to 59 days in 20905.

There's a huge opportunity in East County, but things need to change

Like many aging suburbs, East County is caught in the middle. The kids I grew up with have either moved to urban areas closer in, or moved farther out to newer suburbs in Olney or Howard County, aided by new highways like the InterCounty Connector that made it easier to commute longer distances. East County is a long drive from Montgomery County’s biggest job and shopping centers, which are all along Rockville Pike and I-270. And the local schools struggle with a negative reputation compared to their counterparts in more affluent areas.

New townhomes in downtown Silver Spring, where home values are higher than they were in 2007. 

Yet the fact that homes here are much more affordable than in other parts of the county could be a big opportunity. Nationwide, some three million Millennial homebuyers have been shut out of the housing market because of high prices and a lack of supply. Millennials are open to living in suburban areas, but want stuff they can walk or bike to.

More neighborhood connectors are needed in #EastMoCo to provide options to get to stores when kids demand pancakes at 7 am. @MCBikePlan pic.twitter.com/Op1q3DTMbf

— Growing East County (@GrowingEastMoCo) July 15, 2017

Providing that lifestyle in East County is imperative to drawing people and investment to this area, just as it did in Silver Spring. Montgomery County’s plans to create a walkable town center and research park in White Oak and a new village center in Burtonsville will bring the amenities people want, while a new BRT line on Route 29 will provide faster, more reliable transit. Combined, the two will give East County access to jobs, shopping, and economic opportunities.

East County has waited decades for the kind of prosperity the rest of Montgomery County takes for granted, and at great cost. Hopefully residents won’t have to wait much longer.

student protests in montgomery county show why public space matters

Suburban communities designed for cars don't always have obvious places for people to gather and assemble. So when students at several Montgomery County high schools and Montgomery College walked out of class in protest this week, they headed onto highways and into shopping malls— and their community supported them.

High School Students pouring into the streets of Downtown Silver Spring. #blair #nomoresilence pic.twitter.com/OlERN3qe8Y

— Jake (@nochilljake) November 14, 2016

not quite an apartment, not quite a townhouse: meet the stacked townhouse

A cross between apartments and townhouses, the "stacked townhouse" is becoming a popular house type among DC-area homebuilders and buyers. While they're great for urban neighborhoods, a quirk in zoning means they're most common in far-flung suburbs.

This townhouse in Arlington is actually two houses (note the two house numbers). All photos by the author unless noted.

Also called a two-over-two or maisonette, the stacked townhouse is basically a rowhouse divided into two two-story units, one over the other. Both units have doors on the street, usually in a little alcove, making it look like it's one big house. The garages are tucked in back, on an alley.

This house type is what some architects call the "missing middle," not quite a house, not quite an apartment, but a good alternative housing choice in places where the only options are a detached house or a high-rise.

Historically, lots of cities have rowhouses divided into multiple apartments: Boston's triple-deckers, Chicago's two- and three-flats, Montreal's plexes. In those cases, each building generally has a single owner who rents out the other unit. They don't seem to have been common in DC.

here are 12 very silver spring things that happened in 2015

The revitalization of downtown Silver Spring has been going on for over a decade, but it seems like momentum has really picked up within the past year. No less an authority than Bethesda Magazine even called Silver Spring "Montgomery County's version of Brooklyn," noting all of the awesome locally-owned business that have opened here in the past year, from record shops to microbreweries.

Now I've been to Brooklyn, and I don't know if this is an apt comparison (though it's not the first time!). But it's pretty clear that 2015 has been a big, game-changing year for Silver Spring. Let us count the all of the people, places, and events that made it happen (in no particular order):

Hanging out at Denizens. All photos by the author unless noted.

will leggett cut corners to get BRT moving?

Despite a big funding setback last week, Montgomery County could start building bus rapid transit after all. But to do so, it may have to do it on the cheap. That could mean making BRT less useful for transit riders.

BRT in Alexandria. Montgomery County might get this sooner rather than later. Photo by Dan Malouff.

Montgomery County officials have been looking at building rapid transit routes for buses since 2008, and approved plans for a countywide BRT network in 2013. County Executive Ike Leggett had proposed creating a transit authority that could raise taxes to pay for building it, but yanked the idea last week due to opposition from some community members.

Yesterday, he announced that the county would build one or two of its planned BRT routes in a "less costly" fashion. One way to cut costs is by taking out dedicated lanes that give buses a way out of traffic. But doing that would make BRT slower and less reliable, discouraging people from using it.

what if montgomery county gave BRT a temporary test run?

Last week, Montgomery County pulled its proposal for building bus rapid transit, citing community opposition. How can the county win people over? By getting something on the ground now and doing a trial run.

How can we get streets like Colesville Road better transit sooner rather than later? Photo by the author.

After several years of discussion, the county approved a plan for a network of dedicated bus lanes in 2013 with strong support from residents, business leaders, and transit advocates. Soon after, County Executive Ike Leggett proposed creating an Independent Transit Authority that could build and operate transit in the county and raise taxes on its own to pay for it. Today, the department of transportation runs transit service, using money from the county's budget, which the County Council sets each year.

Leggett's proposal drew an unlikely coalition of opponents, from civic organizations who were against BRT in the first place to groups worried about government spending. Meanwhile, initial designs for BRT on corridors like Georgia Avenue proposed unnecessarily massive road widenings that would have removed dozens of homes and businesses, which naturally angered many residents.

how did silver spring get its boundaries? and how would you define them?

You could ask five residents what Silver Spring's boundaries are and receive five different answers, ranging from a neighborhood near the DC line to a city the size of the District of Columbia itself. But how did it end up this way to begin with? The answer involves a railroad, zip codes, and possibly Marion Barry.

Silver Spring, as the Census Bureau sees it. Image from Wikipedia.

Unlike northeastern states where every square inch of land sits inside a municipality, or western states where cities compete for territory to access natural resources or tax revenue, much of Maryland and Virginia are unincorporated. Part of the reason is that counties in these states can perform functions like zoning and schools, reducing the incentive for communities to become a town or city.

Silver Spring is one those places. As a result, most definitions of Silver Spring fall into two camps: one I call "Little Silver Spring," or areas near its historical center, or "Big Silver Spring," which comprises most of eastern Montgomery County. To find out which one is more dominant, local organization Silver Spring Inc. will have residents draw their own boundaries in an interactive event at Fenton Street Market this Saturday.

wheaton plaza owner successfully blocks pedestrian path, saying it'll "bring crime"

All over the region, malls are opening up to their surroundings, whether by redeveloping in a more urban format or simply creating more street connections. But in Wheaton, neighbors are fighting mall owners who want to close off a popular footpath.

Mall owner Westfield doesn't want this desire path to become a sidewalk. All photos by the author unless noted.

The neighbors call it Mt. McComas. Rising above McComas Avenue, it's a giant mound of backfill from the construction of Wheaton Plaza in 1959. Today, it's a meadow where deer roam and a well-worn dirt path delivers shoppers to Costco and Dick's Sporting Goods. Commuters use it as a shortcut to the Wheaton Metro station.

A new new residential development on the property was originally going to include a paved sidewalk, but mall owners Westfield successfully blocked it due to concerns that it would bring crime into Kensington Heights, the neighborhood south and west of the mall.

Neighbors disagree. "Walking is a MUCH preferable way of getting there for the new home residents and everyone nearby," wrote neighbor Karen Cordry in a letter to the Planning Board. "Cutting off this access point is a big concern for us."

see the lives of physical therapists at walter reed in "run, don't walk"

Annoying commutes, scribbled-down phone messages, baked goods: it’s just another day in the office for Adele Levine. Her workplace is just like any other, except completely different. She’s a physical therapist at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, tending to wounded veterans returning from America’s conflicts abroad.

In her new memoir, Run, Don’t Walk: The Curious and Chaotic Life of a Physical Therapist Inside Walter Reed Army Medical Center, published this April, the Wheaton resident describes the final days at the military hospital in Northwest DC before it closed in 2011 and relocated to Bethesda. (You might remember her blog Life in Scenic Wheaton, which often covered the same material before she pulled the plug in 2009.) Through a series of loosely-connected episodes, Levine takes us inside a place that at once feels very strange and very familiar.

The real stars of the story are her patients, who carry not only physical scars but emotional ones as well. We spend a lot of time with Cosmo, a chain-smoking, foul-mouthed 22-year-old double amputee who sneaks off-campus shortly after arriving to catch a Metrobus downtown to see the White House. Levine doesn’t spare us any detail in describing their injuries or the long and disheartening path to recovery.

She also doesn’t hesitate to illustrate the often surreal experience of working at the nation’s premier military hospital, where regular visitors include famous actors and openly weeping congressman. Levine notes that the job has given her a unique perspective on the outside world, which especially shows in her side gig doing physical therapy for well-heeled civilians in Chevy Chase.

But Run, Don’t Walk is also a story about work, and all of the office politics that it entails. You don’t have to be a physical therapist in a military hospital to relate to stories about chatty coworkers or about half-baked office bonding activities, like one supervisor’s idea to take everyone on a day-long retreat at Mount Vernon.

It’s also a story about Levine’s own personal transformation, one that parallels what she does with her patients. When the story opens, she’s a directionless twentysomething whose classmate in physical therapy school gave her a datebook after being late one too many times, and forced her to update it. We see her fall on her face a lot, whether it’s in trying to motivate soldiers who saw their best friends get blown up, or a spontaneous attempt to renovate her condo in a weekend that culminates in stealing a rug from Home Depot.

But over time, Levine gains confidence in both her work and herself. It’s these stories, about Levine’s world outside the hospital, that left me wanting more. We catch fleeting glimpses of it, like her relationship with her ailing father, or a budding romance with the woman who’s now her partner, but only near the end of the book.

I can imagine how easy it would be to write about being on the receiving end of the War on Terror and ending up with either 300 pages of snark and cynicism or a political rant. But Levine manages to take what could have been a very heavy, difficult read and make it accessible and often quite funny. Yet Run, Don’t Walk still is an emotionally resonant story about a woman tasked with repairing others who ended up fixing herself.

see "led zeppelin played here" for free tomorrow night

Tomorrow night, you can see Led Zeppelin Played Here, a documentary about the rock band's alleged 1969 show in Wheaton, for free at the AFI Silver Theatre. All you have to do is say you read this blog!

45 years ago, depending on who you asked, rock band Led Zeppelin may or may not have played their first show in the United States at the Wheaton Youth Center on Georgia Avenue. In March, the County Council decided to tear down the 1960's-era recreation center, which hosted a number of famous acts we can actually prove.

But the legend lives on in Led Zeppelin Played Here, a documentary directed by Silver Spring resident Jeff Krulik. Best known for his 1986 documentary Heavy Metal Parking Lot, set at the now-demolished Capital Center in Largo, Krulik interviews musicians, writers, and fans who were around at the time, but can't agree on whether or not the concert actually happened. It's an interesting look at the creation of local music scenes, which propelled rock bands from humble recreation centers to massive sports arenas.

This summer, the movie will head off to film festivals in Australia, Montana, and Los Angeles, but not before finishing up a one-week run at the Silver, including a showing tomorrow night at 9:45pm. Tickets are normally $12, but thanks to a gracious offer from the director, you can get in for free. Just mention "Just Up The Pike" at the box office!