{"id":1714,"date":"2024-08-23T08:43:16","date_gmt":"2024-08-23T15:43:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/?p=1714"},"modified":"2024-08-23T08:43:16","modified_gmt":"2024-08-23T15:43:16","slug":"virgo-month-of-civic-leisure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/2024\/08\/virgo-month-of-civic-leisure","title":{"rendered":"Virgo month of civic leisure"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/IMG_8462.jpg\" alt=\"me standing in an empty town hall basement waving a small american flag. I have bright orange sneakers on\" width=\"800\" height=\"553\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1715\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/IMG_8462.jpg 800w, https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/IMG_8462-300x207.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/IMG_8462-768x531.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/IMG_8462-700x484.jpg 700w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Last year around this time I got COVID which I did not appreciate. This year is a bit more under control and as the Virgo Month of Leisure comes around I am looking forward to a few weeks of board meetings. I&#8217;ve talked about this a little bit before but not much. In short, being an elected Justice of the Peace, <a href=\"https:\/\/vermontjp.tumblr.com\/\">a position I&#8217;ve held since 2013<\/a>, contains a number of smaller positions. You can be a notary if you want (I am a notary), you can perform weddings if you want (I&#8217;ve done 31) and you serve on both the Board of Civil Authority (elections, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/iamthebestartist\/albums\/72177720319523553\">you can see my photos from the primary here<\/a>) and the Board of Abatement (tax\/water bill appeals). There are a few meetings, it&#8217;s mostly good.<\/p>\n<p>Over time people cycle on and off of this group and I&#8217;ve found myself one of the more senior members of it so I am the chair. I have mixed feelings about this. I am a little too spacey to run meetings well, but I have a good deal with my vice-chair that she will run the meetings and I will run the Zoom part of them. Randolph recently completed a town-wide reappraisal and nearly everyone&#8217;s property values shot up. This caused a certain degree of alarm. Because of the way taxes work (the town&#8217;s total budget divided by the total value of all the properties winds up being how much tax you pay) an increase in everyone&#8217;s property values doesn&#8217;t necessarily mean you pay a <em>lot<\/em> more taxes but you might pay some. It hasn&#8217;t been a great few years in terms of everyone&#8217;s income vs. their expenses, so many people are appealing the appraisal of their properties. We as a board hear these appeals. There are a lot of laws that tightly govern how we do these and it&#8217;s a lot to keep track of. We have six appeals, these each require a hearing, a property inspection, a second hearing and our little board of volunteers has to try to determine a new fair value of the property, or determine that the value the appraisers determined was already fair. One of the people appealing is our community hospital with their multi-million dollar appraisal. They brought a lawyer who was&#8230; feisty.<\/p>\n<p>All of this is to say, I&#8217;ve got a lot of admin and paperwork to be doing in the next several weeks and at least a few contentious hearings and all of it is on a fairly tight timeline. I want to do a good job. I want to sneak in some leisure. I want to get outside and welcome the incoming Autumn season which is by far my favorite. And I&#8217;m mostly writing this down here as an accountability step. I know the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/aug00b.html\">Virgo Month of Leisure<\/a> starts today. I know that, like always, I have a bit too many things scheduled in a bit too little time. And I know that I can get a bit too, as my friend Jenna calls it &#8220;Atlas-like&#8221; thinking it&#8217;s all on my shoulders. It&#8217;s not. We all help. It&#8217;s a nice crowd. I think we&#8217;ll do okay.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<a href=\"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/2024\/08\/virgo-month-of-civic-leisure\" rel=\"bookmark\" title=\"Permalink to Virgo month of civic leisure\"><p>Last year around this time I got COVID which I did not appreciate. This year is a bit more under control and as the Virgo Month of Leisure comes around I am looking forward to a few weeks of board meetings. I&#8217;ve talked about this a little bit before but not much. In short, being [&hellip;]<\/p>\n<\/a>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[679,680,284,544],"class_list":["post-1714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-uncategorized","tag-leisure","tag-relax","tag-virgo","tag-virgomol","h-entry","hentry"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1714"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1714\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1716,"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1714\/revisions\/1716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}