It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year!

Today marks the second week of Hartford's Festival of Light at their new Bushnell Park location. I'm not going to get into how underwhelmed you may have been for a free light show a couple weeks ago because someone once told me that opinions are a lot like...let's just say sphincters. Frankly, I don't get the big deal about strings of lights this year. Sure they're pretty, but they're still going on in Constitution Plaza and there's youtube videos all over the internet with fantastic displays. And I know the people bitching the loudest are the same ones that bitch about "nothing new" happening in Hartford. Well this is new. Don't be that guy. Don't be crotchety. Don't complain about stuff that you haven't even experienced yet just because it's not what you were expecting. Imagine if you were that way in the bedroom; you'd never get laid. Well, you would, but probably only by the Amish.

Anyway...Amish sex aside, I really need Hartford people to get to the park. It's all well and good when we get visitors to Hartford, but I want these free skates and beautiful displays to benefit the residents in high numbers. Working for the city for years, I've had people give me some ridiculous complaints (usually regarding parking in the wrong and getting ticketed) followed by the line that grinds my effing gears, "This would never happen in my town!" Yeah, it probably wouldn't. But I'm also not allowed to bring my nephews and nieces to swim in your pool for free in your town since I'm not a resident. You have no theaters, no residents in low-income housing to care for and generally nothing else to do in your town and you like it that way. I don't mean that to sound like a jab, but if you wanted to live in a city and deal with parking, crowds and establishments that stay open late, you would. And while people come into Hartford and complain about all that is wrong when they visit, the tax paying residents in dire straits don't even get to benefit from all Hartford has to offer. A single mother of 3 working 2 jobs can't afford to take her children to the CT Science Center in her own backyard. Some of my friends didn't even know about the Taste of Hartford until it was posted about in my blog.

I'm taking phase 2 of FOL as the City's way of saying "thank you" to us city-dwellers. Thank you for dealing with the traffic while people speed through your neighborhoods to make it to a UCONN game. Thank you for dealing with delays in bus service so people can publicly drink and barf in your streets for massive parades that very few of you will actually attend. Thank you for paying insanely high taxes to fix roads that many residents throughout the state will use. Your reward: a free ice skating rink in the park through January 6th. An additional thank you: free rental of ice skates!

Do not let this opportunity pass you buy! I want to see residents there! I want to hear how much fun we had skating around. From Barry Square to Blue Hills, the West End to Clay Hill, we are all Hartford, and we all need to take advantage of what our city has and not leave it all to visitors. This is our home. Let's live in it.

For more details, Real Hartford has provided the details from the Press Release from the City of Hartford's Communication Department.