I knew when we started the trek north we'd probably be swapping this:
View from the Younger Daughter's deck, April 15, 2012. There are roses blooming in a neighbor's yard, although they're hard to see without enlarging the photo.
for this:
View from our back porch, April 19, 2012. Siberian squill is blooming under the apple trees, but it's a little hard to see when it's covered with fresh snow.
I would have been perfectly happy to stay in Texas until the summer heat and humidity drove us north in early May, but the US postal service has this ridiculous rule that they won't hold mail for more than 30 days -- and our 30 days were up yesterday.
Sorting through the accumulated mail had its amusing moments. The S.O. is going to hit 65 soon so is being inundated with advertising from various insurance companies all trying to sell him Medicare supplements. AARP must be mailing several a week. For a change, the junk mail from insurance companies is outpacing the junk mail from Capitol One and the junk mail from various political fundraising organizations. No new Obama bumper stickers -- maybe the campaign's computers have figured out that if I didn't send them money after the first dozen or so Obama 2012 stickers that they've given me, I'm not likely to send them money now.
We've set dates for the move back north several times since first landing in Atlanta in 2007, but this is the first time I've started selling the furniture as that date grew closer. I'm advertising on an electronic bulletin board at work -- I was a little skeptical about how effective that method would be, but I think it's going to depend on the specific item. I tried selling a china cabinet that way a couple years ago and had no luck, but this time around a small chest of drawers had potential buyers in less than 2 hours. I had to scramble after work to get the thing emptied before the buyers came over to pick it up.
I'm going to try advertising the china cabinet again. It's not really my style, but, like most of our furniture, it was a yard sale find that I figured would serve its purpose until I found the mid-century modern cabinet of my dreams. If it doesn't sell this time around, it's going to Goodwill, along with a number of other items that we won't have a use for at the retirement bunker. Moving is always a giant pain in the ass, so the less that we actually have to schlep on to the U-Haul, the better.
You have to be 52 inches tall to operate a go-kart solo at Kartway in Eagle River, Wisconsin. The grandson made it by a hair.
Illinois is an incredibly boring state to drive through, and apparently the construction on I-90/I-39 through Rockford is never going to end. As far as I can recall, it's been a construction zone continuously since 1990.
The cheapest gasoline between here and Upper Michigan is being sold in Indiana.
Kentucky is a remarkably clean state. So is Tennessee. Either people don't litter much, or it gets picked up really fast. Or both.
Waffle House pays its employees in cash. Really. On payday they're handed an earnings statement telling them what their gross pay was and what's been taken out for various deductions (e.g., income tax) and given their net pay in actual U.S. currency. No check, no electronic deposit, just actual money. What a radical concept. (And, for what it may be worth, the Waffle House at Exit 110 along I-24 in Tennessee is hiring.)
I finally had a waffle at a Waffle House. It wasn't bad. Considering that I've been eating at Waffle Houses since 1969, I guess it was about time.
Reenactors exist who actually portray the winning side in the Civil War. Up until I stopped at Stones River National Battlefield, every Civil War reenactor I'd ever seen was dressed in butternut gray and worshipped at the shrine of the glorious Lost Cause. Stones River had a group of Union infantry reenactors demonstrating infantry tactics, which seemed to involve standing upright and serving as human targets while firing at the other guys, who presumably were doing the same thing -- if that was standard practice, it's moderately amazing that the death rate from gunshot wounds was as low as it was considering how many rounds were fired in a typical battle.
Georgia still has the worst drivers in the country. Had a totally smooth trip home until I got south of Ringgold, and then all the crazies behind the wheel started coming out of the woodwork: the jackrabbits who want to zigzag at 90 mph because they absolutely cannot stand to be behind anyone at any speed, the morons who want to imitate rocks while crawling down the hammer lane, the idiots who can't figure out just which lane they want to be in so try to straddle two, the distracted fools with cell phones in hand . . . the usual suspects were all out in full force.
Our mailman's idea of a "hold" order for mail delivery is still to keep cramming it into our mailbox until nothing else will fit. Fortunately, it's a large box, although some of my magazines are looking a tad wrinkled.
I am feeling remarkably cheerful this morning, although I'm not sure why. It was not a particularly fun week at work -- had to do substantive editing (aka major rewriting) on a couple papers to save the authors from potential embarrassment. One schmuck conflated domestic ferrets with black-footed ones, which is a rather wince-inducing blooper when the critters are completely different species. It would be knd of like confusing coyotesand cocker spaniels (both canids, but for sure not the same canid), and definitely not something any thinking person would want sliding into print.
The author, of course, did not fall into the thinking person category. I'm not sure if he's pissed because I changed his precious prose or because I, a nonbiologist, spotted what is an elementary error, but pissed he was. Too bad. I don't particularly care if he makes a fool of himself, but I'm not letting junk science slide into the journal. I have no clue how the blooper slid past the peer reviewers, although to be honest I'm not sure I would have picked up on the error if I hadn't edited a couple of the articles cited in the reference section and knew they didn't say what the author was suggesting they said.
One of my little obsessive-compulsive fact-checking things tends to be the references -- I've never been too keen on authors who sprinkle a lot of citations through an article, dropping numbers here and there like fresh cilantro on a tostada, but clearly don't know what's actually in the stuff they're referencing. I'm not sure if you'd call it tertiary citing or what, but I see authors all the time where something gets cited because somebody else cited it because somebody else cited it. You have to wonder just how long it's been since anyone went back and looked at the original paper. Sometimes it's a token genuflection (must bow in the direction of the Great Man who did the seminal work in this field) and sometimes it's the result of a quick lit search that pulls a list of titles -- and the author says, Aha, this one sounds like it applies to what I did! and plugs it into the citations list without ever bothering to look beyond the title (or to make sure it's in a language he or she is likely to be able to read; the fact the title is in English on PubMed doesn't guarantee the article itself isn't written in Swedish).
Then, on top of dealing with idiot authors too dumb to realize copy editors exist to make authors look good, we've been working short-handed. One of the other editors has been out sick since before Christmas, and it's beginning to catch up with us. We started falling far enough behind schedule on getting things into production that the Editor-in-Chief actually pulled a few things from the Table of Contents to shrink the size of an upcoming issue and give us some breathing room.
So why am I in a good mood?
Captain Jack is back. The Captain is a battered, definitely been through the wars feral tom that's been hanging around this apartment complex since we moved here in 2007. He's a domestic shorthair with Sylvester coloring, a broken tail, and torn ears, is missing an eye, and is covered with scar tissue. He's like an old pirate, hence, Captain Jack. You can tell this guy is a scrapper -- and you can also tell he stays busy. Every time we see feral kittens around, they're miniature versions of Captain Jack.
He's been looking like he's led a tough, adventure-filled life since I first spotted him several summers ago. I'm not sure just how many lives he's burnt through, but it's got to be several. Every time I see him around, I wish I could adopt the dude -- he's earned a soft pillow and a peaceful retirement -- but he's definitely the most feral of the semi-feral cats that call this complex home. There are several clowders living in the crawl spaces under the buildings. The manager tolerates them because he figures they keep rats and mice away. Some of the other cats are mellow enough that they might make adoptable pets, but the Captain doesn't have much use for people.
About a year ago, the maintenance man spotted the Captain sprawled next to the driveway. The cat looked really, thoroughly dead. Didn't move. So the maintenance man got out a shovel, tried sliding it under the cat, still no movement -- he had to grab him by the tail to drag him on to the shovel. The cat remained totally limp. Then he walked across the street and flipped the "body" over the chain link fence into the patch of woods there.
The next day the cat was back, looking like he always did.
I had been thinking maybe this time the Captain was gone for good -- I hadn't seen him around for a couple months -- but when I left for work Thursday morning, there he was, sleeping under my car, no doubt nursing sore feet and a hangover and regretting the latest tatoo.
Between the book I'm reading -- So Cold a Sky -- and Ranger Bob's historic weather observations from the Apostle Islands, I've got a bad case of homesickness. I'm really missing Winter.
I'm not sure when the above photo was taken -- I have a vague memory of it being around the end of March in 1997, but I could be off by a month or two. It might have been April.
And, yep, that is a 1970 Ford F-100 sitting there. There's also a 500-gallon propane tank in the photo. It's between the dog and the truck.
I managed to sleep through the excitement, but the neighbors tell me the crash was fairly loud, especially at 1:30 a.m. The driver kind of overshot his usual parking space.
They're pulling the sliding patio doors and putting in French doors. I'm thinking next winter the heating bills are going to be a lot lower than they were this year.
I was wrong about the possibility of the fenestration remaining intact. Yesterday I came home and discovered the upper window next door had become a glass-free space.
I took the time a few minutes ago to walk around and see what things actually looked like from poolside. I was relieved to see that (based on the framing) the replacement second floor window will be a decent size. The construction is zipping along fast enough that maybe we really will be moving in May.
A few months ago the apartment manager told the S.O. they were planning to rehab these townhouses (to the left of the pool), which are one-bedroom lofts, into either 2 bedrooms or 1 bedroom with a den, in hopes of attracting more tenants. I think our one-bedroom loft-style apartment is fine (despite the occasional day when I'd kind of like to be able to lock the cat out of the bedroom)(hard to do when two of the walls are more like railings), but apparently I'm an exception. Most prospective renters apparently aren't that thrilled with the current floorplan.
Given the snail's pace taken in rehabbing the building that burnt almost 2 years ago (they're still not done to the point of actually renting out any units in it), I did not expect to see any construction activity until sometime in Obama's second term. I was wrong.
I got home from work today and discovered two roll-off dumpsters in the parking lot, the doors to all the vacant units open, and several radios blasting out norteño tunes. The demo has begun.
The S.O. was wrong, too. He's been totally convinced there wasn't a scrap of insulation in the walls in these buildings. Now that the drywall is gone, insulation is visible on both the exterior walls and the party wall between the townhouses.
I hate to see them destroy the historic integrity of the buildings -- they're circa 1968 -- by changing the fenestration on the side facing the pool when they put in a different second floor window, but it's hard enough to find decent tenants for an older garden apartments complex with minimal amenities (no weight room, no wifi, no covered parking, just the outdoor pool that's usable for maybe 4 months of the year) that I can understand why they're doing it.
Plus, if we stay here long enough (and I have no plans to move any place else as long as we have to be in Atlanta), I will eventually get to enjoy a space that can be a cat-free zone. We've been told that once the unit next door is done, we can move into it without experiencing any increase in rent. If we do, that will be one of the easier moves we've made.
