YpsiFest is this weekend in Riverside Park

YpsiFest, a rebranding of the annual Heritage Festival, kicks off this Friday in Riverside Park. The event starts with a combination pet and baby beauty competition. The winners will get to march in the 2019 Ypsilanti Fourth of July Parade. Saturday's events start with Yoga in the Park. There will also be live music and a luminary parade in the evening. Sunday kicks off with another round of Yoga in the Park and finishes with the annual Kiwanis Rubber Duck Race. YpsiFest features some great events. It'll be interesting to see how this rebranding works.

Parkridge Festival this Saturday in Ypsi

Ypsilanti's annual Parkridge Festival is this Saturday in Parkridge Park. This family friendly event features live music, activities, and food vendors. Parkridge fest is a great event. It runs 11 am to 6 pm.

DIYpsi this weekend at Corner Brewery

DIYpsi is this weekend at Corner Brewery. And no, I will never call it Arbor Brewing Company Microbrewery. There are over 75 vendors and cover is just $1. DIYpsi is a great place to find local arts and crafts and just see some interesting artists. Think about it like ETSY, but IRL. The event runs Saturday 11-8 and Sunday 12-6.

Shoutout to Ypsilanti Ladies’ Literary Club in JSTOR Daily

The Ypsilanti Ladies Literary Club get's a nice shoutout in the JSTOR Daily. The article, Women’s Groups and the Rise of the Book Club, chronicles the rise of book clubs in the US. The article traces the origins of modern book clubs to 19th century women's clubs:

One of the first such societies, Sorosis, was founded in 1868, when several female columnists were barred from a New York Press Club event honoring Charles Dickens. Journalist Jane Cunningham Croly, who created the club with a circle of professional female colleagues, took the name from a botanical term: Sorosis refers to a type of fruit formed from an aggregate of flowers. Inspired by Sorosis and the New England Women’s Club in Boston, women across the nation began forming similar societies, from the still-running Ladies’ Literary Club of Ypsilanti, Michigan (1878), to the Ladies’ Reading Club of Houston (1885).

The image above is an undated 4th of July picture of the Ypsilanti Ladies' Literary Club.

H/T: EJ

Ann Arbor City Council Preview for August 9, 2018

Gentle reader, tonight we are going to be treated to something very special: a rare Thursday #a2council meeting. Here's the agenda.

The agenda starts of with an update on the project to annex the remaining township islands and then we move into a thick consent agenda with 26 items. CA-25 is part of the People Friendly Streets project and would approve the conversion of First Ave and Ashley to allow two way traffic. There is a bike caravan of supporters of this project meeting at the Farmers Market at 6:45 to ride to City Hall for the meeting.

PH-1/B-1 is on rezoning a 0.41 acre parcel at 2455 South Main from R4B (Multiple-Family Dwelling District) to O (Office District). PH-2/DB-1 is on a new site plan for 115 Research Drive.

C-2 adds conditions to the rezoning of the parcel at 1140 Broadway. Given the controversial nature of this project, the discussion of C-2 could be interesting to watch.

Gentle reader, what are you most looking forward to at tonight's #a2council meeting? We are well into campaign season so there may be some political fireworks. Make sure you tune in tonight at 7 to watch CTN's live stream and follow the blow-by-blow action on #a2council hashtag on Twitter.

An election night dispatch from Ed Vielmetti

At 10:30 this evening, I received an the following email from Ed Vielmetti:

Ben, for Damn Arbor if you choose.

Larry Kestenbaum is the Washtenaw County Clerk and Register of Deeds. I spoke to him just after 10:00 p.m. on election night at his office in the county building on N Main St in downtown Ann Arbor.

Kestenbaum reported that there was a "huge turnout" in this election, with more than 90,000 ballots counted so far county wide. Most of the ballots remaining to be counted at this writing are a bunch of absentee ballots, with Superior Township and the City of Ann Arbor still waiting for absentee votes to be counted.

The clerk's report is that the state senate race is currently "very close", with Jeff Irwin at a margin of +2 votes. Irwin has a big lead in Ann Arbor absentee voting to this point, with more Ann Arbor absentee votes yet to be counted.

Kestenbaum noted the phenomenon of "temporal displacement" in absentee voting, in which early voters don't incorporate late news into their voting decisions. He noted that Gretchen Whitmer had a large lead in the absentee voting over Abdul El-Sayed, suggesting that El-Sayed's late surge in popularity did not translate into absentee votes.