Kentucky bound

There is this to say for Kentucky: what it loses in having a crappy, torn-up stretch of 65 at the Tennessee line, it makes up for in scenery. The middle section of the state rolls on in trees and wide swaths of grassland, including the famous bluegrass, which struck me more as a teal than a proper blue. Heading north, driving by flowering redbuds and dogwoods, I felt as if the Interstate were showing me a sort of bizarre backward time-lapse movie of April, culminating in yellow-green foliage and those damn oak pollen squigglies. (Surely there exists a scientific term for "oak squiggly", but I've never heard it.) The real payoff comes once you leave 65 for the Bluegrass Parkway: mountains, conifers, and long expanses of farms and forest. It's not nearly as dramatic as, say, West Virginia, but Kentucky offers a tamer version of the wilderness without the ridiculous number of tunnels.

Today...what can I say but one big string of "Well, that wasn't quite what I had planned" moments? I left almost 20 minutes late - not a big deal, but enough to annoy me - but my TomTom knew where I was going, and all seemed to be right with the world. The only real concern was whether we would be able to sign for our apartment today, and so, just to be safe, I pulled my phone from my purse so I wouldn't miss the call.

Quick: when one is desperately waiting for a phone call, which will be the one appliance one will forget to charge the night before?

Seeing the battery meter turn red did nothing to quell my nerves, but I pushed on, hopeful of an electronic miracle. Around Athens, however, the LOW BATTERY notice appeared, and so I pulled into the Shell station and ran inside, hoping they would sell chargers. They didn't, but the clerk pointed me to the Wal-Mart a mile up the road, which did carry chargers, and so, having thought to have my clamshell pre-opened, I plugged my phone into the lighter and sighed with relief as the juice started flowing.

Then I turned the TomTom back on and got nothing. Nada. It stayed stuck on its welcome screen all the way to Nashville, and then I turned it off in disgust. Thankfully, my printed Google Maps got me pointed in the right direction, and I headed off down the Bluegrass Parkway toward Frankfort.

As mentioned, the Parkway is gorgeous, sparsely developed, pleasantly winding, and - unfortunately - littered with the inevitable squashed raccoons and possums. By the time I hit it, lunch had come and gone, especially on Eastern Time. I began looking for a place to pull off, but saw few options amongst the prettiness. Finally, a sign came into view:

New Haven
Boston
2 Miles

Oh man, I thought, I've got to stop there, but alas, it was not to be; New Haven and Boston appeared to have a distinct lack of eateries near the Parkway, so I forced myself to push on to Bardstown, which at least had a cute historical district and a coffee shop-cum-café with a decent ham sandwich.

Now, I'm no stranger to odd roadside attractions - as my writing seminar knows too well, I spent a good deal of time looking them up for my dissertation novel last year. What got me today was the serendipitous juxtaposition of two signs along a stretch of Kentucky highway. On the left side of the road, a large billboard proclaimed:

HELL IS REAL

Just across the road, next to the tourist information center, an even larger billboard offered this to visitors:

ADULT

No need to specify - I had been seeing signs for this particular video and novelty store for a few miles. It's not the messages, but rather this mixture of roadside virtue and vice that gets me - it's so quintessentially American, and so much a part of the Southern Interstate experience.

Finally, after seven hours behind the wheel, I pulled into Frankfort, a capital city of roughly 30,000, and dropped my bags, including my busted TomTom, in my hotel room so I could take a quick walk. An hour later, we determined that the apartment was not to be, and then I determined that the TomTom was in inexplicably bad shape. Still, Frankfort has some cute shops, I had a lovely dinner (though the redneck next to me, who refused to take of his baseball cap during dinner, couldn't quite understand gnocchi), and then I stumbled onto the find of the evening - the local wine bar.

I need more quality wine bars in my life, and not those of the overpriced The Grape variety. These folks offered a variety of wines - including a large selection of Kentucky wines - and bourbons by the pour, plus cheese trays and other goodies. I'll need to pop back by tomorrow night, I think; it's two blocks from my hotel, and it's probably the most exciting thing happening in Frankfort after 6 p.m.

Moving on

I slept in this morning, figuring God would forgive me. Two nights in a row of Porgy and Bess until 11 PM takes it out of you. Still, we received five stars, a first this year, and largely thanks to our incredible soloists, even if the BCC does have an "earthy presence"...whatever the hell that means. One memorable moment of the show happened on Friday night, when a moth flew into poor Bess's mouth and she spat it out, loudly. We laughed, the audience laughed, and Bess, pro that she is, carried on like nothing had happened. That is talent.

This afternoon, I almost got a car and an apartment.

When she begins grad school in August, Jen is taking her beloved Beetle with her, leaving me without wheels. My parents have graciously agreed to buy me a replacement car, and we think we may have found it - a cream and black MINI Cooper with many of the bells and whistles, including leather and a dual moon roof. It's a 2005 just shy of 25,000 miles, and it's in perfect order. If they can make the price work, it's mine. Sweet.

Now to the second part. Seeing as I've been back in Birmingham eight months, I'm beginning to think that it's time I got my own place - my folks are great, and I couldn't ask for more from them, but I'll be 24 this Saturday, and I'm thinking it's high time I found my first apartment and boomeranged back out of the nest. Brandon and I looked at a few yesterday (with Kat tagging along as Counsel/Chauffeur), and found a great complex within our budget. The manager showed us a unit they were advertising as a discounted special, and we both seemed to like it. My only concern was that the unit was, for all purposes, in the basement.

My mother dislikes basements, and asked to come along today. When we got back to the complex, she got the manager to show us two other units, including a much better one with a full pantry, second coat closet, living room mirror, and deck. The manager revealed that the new one was also discounted, and we set off to sign the papers. There's a lesson here: parents come in handy, and can keep sub-par apartments from being foisted on their kids.

Unfortunately, we hit a snag in the form of the credit check. Both of us had to fork over $60 to have our credit history checked, and when he ran mine, the machine came back with an "Insufficient Funds" note. (Of course I have insufficient funds if you assume I'm paying for the apartment by myself, idiot machine...) My mother offered to co-sign, and so we'll hear tomorrow whether we can have our apartment. Fingers crossed...

I can't...I have rehearsal

Midway through hell week for Porgy & Bess, I'm beginning to feel better about the weekend's show.

My choir is doing P&B with the ASO and a group of professional soloists on Friday and Saturday night. It's a sung performance, not acted, which makes the fact that all but two members of the choir are Caucasian slightly more acceptable. As I told my neighbor, I never feel whiter than when I'm asked to sing a spiritual, and P&B was written in dialect, to the point that we've actually had textual issues.

On one song, we have a one-line echo of the soloist, which many of us interpreted as "Since she lost her man." Nice and grammatically correct, right? Wrong. "Read the words!" our pianist finally told us in exasperation. "It's 'Since she lose her man!'"

Like I said, we sound so white. The soloists, fortunately, make up for this by being fabulous. Porgy and Crown are great, but if I make it through "It Ain't Necessarily So" without cracking up - he's that over-the-top - it's going to be a minor miracle.

Anyway, as this is the week before, we've been spending some quality time with Justin Brown and each other, to the point that my nights are shot. Almost makes me feel like I'm back in Glee Club...anyone want to bring Sir David Wilcocks down?

Be Kind

When I woke a moment ago and checked out the MSN headlines, I was reminded that I arrived at Yale for Bulldog Days six years ago today.

No, I didn't tattoo the date somewhere, nor did I stick a big gold star on my calendar in memory of the event. You see, today is April 20, and I had a rather...unusual...welcome.

My host, a Calhoun frosh, lived in the Bingham tower on Old Campus. I followed her across the uneven stone walkway I would come to love and despise, and stared up at the neo-Gothic architecture with joy. This was college, this was what higher learning was all about, tall trees and towering edifices of stone that looked vaguely European...

Several floors above us, a guy leaned out a window and spotted us coming up the walk. "Hey, Lindsay!" he yelled down, catching my host's attention. "Be kind!"

She rolled her eyes and swiped me in. "It's 4/20," she explained, noting my confusion. "He's nuts. Ignore him."

Nothing like a pot celebration to welcome the pre-frosh. Still, the first time I visited Yale was in the middle of a March nor'easter, and I woke in my host's LW room the next morning to find her and her boyfriend in the bunk beneath me. Her roommate, who had been chaperoning me, had taken the couch, and started yelling in French when I shook her awake.

Man, I miss college.

Volkswagen saga

Several of my coworkers have been subjected to bits and pieces (or more) of this over the past two weeks, so if any of them happen to be reading this, ever, I apologize. Sincerely.

Sunday a week ago - April 6, this would have been - I was driving home from church, trying to avoid the semi in the other lane, when I noticed a new orange indicator on my dashboard. "CHECK ENGINE," it announced, and added a not-so-happy picture of what I assume is some portion of my engine, just in case I happened to be an illiterate Beetle owner with more than remedial knowledge of car repair.

Given that my knowledge of "car repair" extends roughly to filling the tank and washing bird poop off the windows, CHECK ENGINE gave me a nice cold shot of stomach-clenching dread. As I had been to my local dealership four months before to have a valve replaced, I knew that CHECK ENGINE didn't necessarily mean imminent flames, but I also knew it wasn't good. I called my parents and told them I was heading to the dealership, at which point they reminded me that it was Sunday afternoon, and that the dealership wasn't open.

One point to the parents.

On Monday morning, bright and early, I drove my car to the dealership and explained that the ominous orange light had flicked on. The service representative ran his diagnostics, then told me I had a bad turbo valve. My car wasn't about to explode, but I would have poor fuel economy until I had the thing fixed. The valve would be $40. Oh, and they were going to tack on another $30 for the time spent that morning, and it would cost me roughly $170 to have the valve installed, say in three or four days, after they ordered the part.

I told the man I had replaced a valve four months ago, and asked whether this would be a common thing. He assured me it would not be so.

Great, I thought, and tried to drive as little as possible until Friday, when I dropped the car off at 7, crossed my fingers, and hitched a ride to work on the courtesy shuttle. My driver, an old man from Michigan who sounded like a deep-bayou Louisianan, encouraged us to go see a redneck comedian that night - the bad rain, he had heard, was going to come through that morning.

Later Friday morning, the tech called and told me my car was ready for pickup (a call that, incidentally, pulled me out of the last five minutes of Java. Oy). The shuttle couldn't come to get me until 2, however, so I worked and stewed until the crusty Michigander returned to ferry me back to the dealership. We discussed why all the auto manufacturers are moving south, he ascertained that I'm not, in fact, British, and we slipped back to the ever-popular topic of weather. He had missed his prediction, and I planned to hang out with the weather radio back at the office for the rest of the day.

$170 and a conversation with a not-entirely-there tech later, I headed back to work, making sure to park under the deck. What followed wasn't pretty; long story short, I tried to leave, saw the rain coming behind me, started getting hailed upon, and turned back to the parking deck until it all blew over, because let's face it, no one likes frozen projectiles, especially not those of baseball size. On the way home, heading down Columbiana into Hoover, I was almost involved in a wreck when the car in front of me lost control, and then, in the midst of praying and attempting to make my adrenaline level subside, I noticed something new on my dashboard.

CHECK ENGINE.

The rant that followed wasn't pretty.

I coasted back to the dealership, rolled down my windows, and gave a couple of techs my best sarcastic smile as I pointed out that the problem I had waited five days to be fixed was botched again ten miles later. They told me to come back the next morning. "We don't take appointments," Not-Entirely-There Tech told me. "If you're late, you're at the bottom of the list."

Fearing that I was being fleeced, my mother accompanied me to the dealership the next morning when they opened - I was still fourth in line, as Not-Entirely-There Tech helpfully pointed out - and she expressed her displeasure with the service to that point. Nothing to worry about, we were informed. They'd take a look at the engine and give us a call.

Well, my mother had to make the calls, and we got my car back just as the dealership was closing for the day. It turned out that the new turbo valve had caused a hose to crack, and that was messing up the engine. Oh, and I had eight valves, so any of the remaining six could set off the indicator at any time. All I needed to remember was that unless the indicator started flashing, I was in no immediate danger of engine failure. Fair enough, I thought, and put it behind me.

Monday evening, I climbed back into the car to go to choir practice. When I was halfway to Briarwood, guess what dashboard indicator lit?

The rant that followed is best left to the imagination.

Two hours of Porgy and Bess practice with a tension headache will put anyone in a foul mood, and I was less than charming when I drove into the dealership on Tuesday morning. "I'd like to go more than three days without visiting you," I told the tech who signed me in. "Look, I travel for my job. I need a functional car, alright?" He assured me they'd fix it, and once again, I caught the shuttle to work. The driver, another older man, asked whether I'd need a ride back, then told me to call and schedule a pickup when I heard from the dealership.

Once 1:30 rolled around, I began calling them. Voicemail. Messages. Mumbled assurances that my car was being examined. At 4, the tech asked if they could keep the car overnight. Sure, I told him, and my dad drove me home from work.

Wednesday morning, I waited for word from Volkswagen, but nothing came. I began calling at 11, when the flustered receptionist gave me one of the techs' answering machine. When I had yet to receive a call at 1:30, my mother phoned the dealership and, in true parental fashion, let the tech have it.

The car was ready on my way home. As it turned out, a small hose that's virtually inaccessible unless you disassemble the engine had cracked. To figure that out, the techs had replaced nearly all of my $40 valves.

My grand total was $33, for the new hose. Volkswagen, apparently, is heartily sorry.

It would have been nice if they'd called me as well as my mother, but hey, at least I get to drive to work tomorrow.

Spamalot

Back in late October or so, I heard that the traveling cast of Spamalot was coming to Birmingham in April. I got all excited, asked a few friends if they wanted to go, and promptly neglected to do anything about it, like...oh, I don't know...get tickets.

Last week, I happened to notice that Spamalot was here. Whoops...

Fortunately, I have a co-worker who is not averse to a) Monty Python, b) $36 tickets, or c) impromptu Thursday night shows, and so we got our nosebleed seats and two hours of Pythony goodness.

I love Holy Grail. I can't remember if we watched it in seventh-grade social studies (we did see other historical films in that class, like Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and Aladdin), but it's a wonderfully wacky take on the Arthurian canon. (It's even better after Malory.) The musical, by necessity, deviates in several places from the film, but if you go into it with the understanding that it's a completely different creature "lovingly ripped off" the original, it's quite entertaining. While Spamalot does stand alone, familiarity with the film helps, if only because you catch a few of the gags. (The first "show" listed in the Playbill, for instance, is about Finland and features a moose ballet troupe. And while Castle Anthrax never makes an appearance, those girls' white outfits look awfully familiar.) What's brilliant is that the writers took a film that poked fun at the vehicle and gave it a Broadway treatment - numbers like "Whatever Happened to My Part?" (and the post-Spears lyric changes) are priceless.

My favorite moment has to be the duet between Galahad and the Lady of the Lake, when they appear onstage in a tiny boat, under a chandelier that had to have been used in Phantom in another life, and sing the romantic ballad of the show, "The Song That Goes Like This":

I'll sing it in your face
While we both embrace
And then
We change
The key...

Brilliant.

I'm not dead

I just haven't had the time, energy, or inclination to write in a while. And yes, that can partly be construed as laziness.


I had planned on a glorious prop sale last Friday, but that was not to be. No, I was laid low by a visit from the Allergy Fairy, who gave my mom and me such a bad go of it that we had to finally visit the allergist. As it turns out, this allergist is the doctor of choice in my department, and she sent us home with goody bags of antihistamines. I got a special gift: a second inhaler. "You probably have at least seasonal asthma," she told me.


"How the heck does that work?" I asked.


She explained that my years of singing have probably taught me to compensate, then gave me a ten-minute breathing treatment before she would let me go to work. My lungs still aren't at full performance, but I got through Porgy and Bess rehearsal Monday night, and that was a blessing.

At least my friends scored some fabulous prop sale buys.

We were supposed to host my sister and her friends on Saturday night, but one of them, thinking like - well, like a young-twenty-something male - gave up their seats on the plane. Poor Jen had to overnight in Tampa, then sit through endless hassles at JFK on Sunday. She had intended to pick up her spring clothes and other important things, like her keys, on their return trip, but Mom had to mail it all to her instead. The box arrived a day late, too - this has been a great weekend for Jen.

The most exciting thing to happen in days was that I sat outside for an hour without wheezing this afternoon. It's always fun to catch pollen showering down on you out of the corner of your eye...

Impulse buy

Joy, oh joy, we have two prop sales this week!

As I told my editor last night, I'm convinced it's possible to outfit a large house solely with prop sale finds. Some of the stuff is great, and the rummaging is just this side of insanity - if you don't move, or if you're not holding something large and spiky under your arm, you will get crushed.

Hyperbole aside, the only times I've seen crowds swarm the way the prop sale group does is back at college, when Master Schottenfeld gave us free food nights during finals. I remember a couple of times when there was no food left at the appointed starting hour, due to lack of crowd control. Thai take-out, fluffernutter sandwiches, art glass...it's all relative, really.

Yesterday was the first of the week's duo, and I made a few nice finds: a wall piece similar to one I'd seen at Bombay and couldn't afford, a candelabra, a great candelabra with a vase in the middle, and a set of eight ice cream glasses, which were free.

Then I, um, bought a tapestry. When they saw it, I got these "Dear God, what now?" looks from those who know how much I bought at the first sale. It's a nice piece, though, and it was only $25, so now all I need is mounting equipment.
And a wall to put it on.
And an apartment with a wall.
And a job to finance said apartment...

At least I know now what I need, and knowing is half the battle. Or something like that.

Busy week

The office is a ghost town.

Many of the editors (but none of the interns!) have taken spring break. Things are so depleted at the moment that for the last two days, our department has been down to four people, two of whom are interns. It's very quiet, but we've had a good chance to get work done, including, for me, all that goes into archiving an issue.

Last night, a group of us did Chinese food and watched Once, which is quite good for an indie. I downloaded a few of the songs today, though I doubt they'll do me much good on the track tomorrow morning. For that, there's the iPod club mix...

I do need to go to the gym tomorrow. Wednesday morning, I skipped due to the threat of severe weather, and this morning, I was too beat to drag myself out of bed at 5 AM. I did manage to get up at 6:30, when my dog tried to jump onto the bed, then headed down the street to check on my neighbors' cat.

I'm a dog person, mostly due to family allergies, but I have nothing against cats. They're cute, in a strange sort of way, and this one seemed not to hate me the last time I was over. She didn't bother to greet me when I came in - unlike my dog, whose favorite method of greeting is to jump all over the newcomer, then shove her nose toward her new friend's unmentionables and look up adoringly - so after checking food and water levels, I decided to make sure the cat was alright. "Mimi?" I called.

"Mrow."

I paused, trying to triangulate. "Mimi?"

"Mrow."

Thus began a groggy, albeit brief, game of feline Marco Polo. I found the poor thing eventually, having traced her meowing under a chair, and, ascertaining that she was just hiding and not nursing some massive trauma, left for the day. When I returned this evening, she seemed much more pleased to see me, probably because she heard me rummaging in her food bin. Good kitty.

Tomorrow, barring snow, my sister and her posse will descend upon us for a long weekend. If they arrive before midnight, they'll be lucky. If Sam Ruth knows what's good for him, he won't give me any shit while he's here. Just kidding, Sam.

But really.

Road trip, part the last

Atlanta. Traffic. Sucks.

That's really all there is to say for it. That, and I'm grateful for two things on Friday. First, I had my wonderful GPS, which guided me through the maze of streets in the city. Secondly, I got out of there long before the tornado hit downtown.

I've been rather tired since I got home, but the trip was successful. The party last night was pretty sweet, too.

Road trip, day the second

I woke this morning, seemingly healed from my close encounter with the Waffle House, and hit the treadmill for a brief workout (briefer than I would have liked, as the room had no air conditioning) before heading back to Georgia. The drive was pleasant, the GPS fairly reliable, and I had no problems until I got off I-75 and started heading to Colbert.

I've noticed that there is an inverse correlation between the urbanization level of a place and the number of auto shops and Baptist churches it holds. When you start seeing an overwhelming number of nondenominational churches, or churches housed in manufactured homes, you know you're getting out into the sticks. This relationship does break down, however; past a certain critical limit of salvage parts and sad-looking places of worship, everything disappears and you're left with only God's country, which in northwest Georgia means rolling hills of green that go on forever, crossed by oddly-named roads of dubious condition and pedigree. These are single-track roads masquerading as two-lane, their surfaces patched and pitted, and the trees grow overhead in a sort of half canopy as you pass through. It's almost claustrophobic in there, especially when you're not entirely certain where you're going, and once I stopped thinking of banjos, I recalled Stephen King's Lovecraftian story, "Crouch End," and hoped I wouldn't see signs for R'lyeh or some such around the next bend ("Beware the goat with a thousand young!" etc.)

Towns exist around Colbert, but most are wide patches that have grown up along the railroad tracks. To get there, I drove through Royston, the birthplace of Ty Cobb, and that was a booming metropolis compared to my destination. Again, thank God for the GPS, as there is no doubt in my mind that I would never have found the place if I hadn't been guided. Once I did stumble upon it, I realized two things: I had two hours to kill, and I wasn't going to find food in Colbert. Deciding a field trip was in order, I set my course for Athens and headed off in search of lunch.

Athens is a college town of the first order - it puts New Haven to shame - and to find the strip of restaurants and shops, I did what anyone would do: I programmed my GPS to find the nearest Starbucks to campus, then drove smack into the downtown area. I had lunch at Picante's, a decent Mexican place, then walked around, looking at shops and sweating in my dress clothes, as Athens was at least 70 degrees this afternoon. What was fun was explaining the nature and production of druzies to the girl behind the desk at the bead shop, who probably should have known, seeing she was trying to sell a gorgeous druzy and citrine necklace. A steal at $450, right?

Having eaten and strolled, and killed as much time as I could, I got back in the car and headed off to my interview, then set a course for Atlanta and my Holiday Inn, which is located in what appears to be a combination of Little Korea and Little Mexico. Fortunately, there's a restaurant on site, and the salmon was decent, even if the waitress hadn't the faintest idea how to operate the register. No matter; I've had a decent meal and I'm not sick to my stomach, which is all one can ask for, really.

Finally, a few interesting sights of the day:
1) Rhett Butler apparently sells real estate around Athens. Either someone's getting tacky with the agency's name, or someone's mom really loved Gone With the Wind.
2) A billboard for Bond, James Bond bail bonds. Yes, that's actually the name of the company.
3) This one was from yesterday, but I finally remembered to look it up tonight: there's a stretch of I-85 in Jackson County, Georgia named in honor of Lauren "Bubba" McDonald. Speaking as a Lauren...man, what did you do to your parents to make them hate you?

Road trip, day the first

If anyone from my writing workshop read that title and groaned inwardly, I swear, this has nothing to do with my dissertation novel, Rock City, or Layla and Wally. Really. Promise.

Currently, I'm sitting in my surprisingly well-appointed room at the Holiday Inn outside Anderson, SC. The bed is huge, the couch seems passable, and the Wi-Fi is free, so I can't complain. My only problem is the lack of local dining options - we're limited to McDonald's or Waffle House, and I'm having Scholars' Bowl flashbacks as I type. I could, of course, drive on down the road until I reached civilization and/or a real restaurant, but I've been driving all day and I'm really not feeling the whole I-85 thing right now. Besides, I have gourmet cake waiting, but more on that in a minute.

I left home at 7 AM in my spiffy, albeit cruise control-less, rental car, headed for parts unknown with only my Google directions and Hertz GPS to guide me. Once past Atlanta (and boy, that's a hurdle - I don't know how anyone learns to drive in that city, because if I had tried to learn in Atlanta, I would have ended up a whimpering mass on the side of the road), I had smooth sailing until I reached Anderson. Having allotted entirely too much time to driving, as usual, I found myself with nearly two hours to kill, so I parked and took a much-welcome stroll.

In many ways, downtown Anderson reminds me of Vicksburg, minus the casino boat. The storefronts are renovated 19th-century designs, and the downtown strip has plenty of pedestrian traffic and ample parking. I ate at a nice deli, then found a great little shop that sells beads and semi-precious necklaces, and bought myself a string of rough-hewn turquoise nuggets (it was either that or the lapis disks, and I went cheap at $50). Then I found a Thunderbird Motel and laughed - let's talk retro.

My interview went well, and concluded with a takeaway box of cake, which I am eagerly anticipating post-Waffle House and possibly pre-gym (we shall see whether the gym comes tonight or first thing tomorrow). I had called Brandon earlier to ask where her mother's store was located, and, thinking I had enough information, plugged what I had into my GPS and set off for Greenville.

Don't get me wrong, the GPS is fabulous. I would never have found Greenville without it, and I'm not sure what we did before these car systems came along. Nevertheless, half an hour later, I realized I was definitely on the wrong Main Street, and so I called Brandon back and got the address. I'm glad I did - her mother was as sweet as could be and gave me guides - and after I left the shop, I strolled through Greenville's shopping district until I found Falls Park. Must be nice to have a waterfall downtown; being from Birmingham, the great landlocked metropolis of the southeast, I wouldn't know. Birmingham needs to learn from Greenville - I'd definitely go back.

And now, slightly road weary but none the worse for my adventures, I'm off to find dinner. This may just turn into an early night after all.
-------

Post-dinner post script: Waffle House is as godawful as I remember. That has to be the greasiest omelet and hashbrowns I've ever had. Cake it is.

On the road again

After nearly a four-month stint in one place, I'm off on a road trip bright and early tomorrow morning. It'll be me, a selection of mix CDs, and my rental car - which, I should add, has a built-in GPS system but lacks cruise control - against the open road, all the way to South Carolina, but I'm hoping to come home with some good information. One of the other interns is also traveling this week, but in North Carolina. Sounds like someone's getting a phone call tomorrow...

The rental's built-in GPS means I won't have to rely on my new TomTom, which is sad, as I had programmed my unit to give me directions in the voice of Yoda. "In 50 yards, right you must turn" might get a little old after a while, but it would make me laugh. We'll see if I can't pull my faithful Jedi TomTom out at some point this week.

In other vehicular news, my Beetle is being repainted in the morning so it will no longer look like this:

Lovely, isn't it? I'm so good, I scare myself. The car was going to feature in a photo shoot today, even with its scrapes, but alas, the weather refused to cooperate and the shoot was moved, meaning they'll need another car. Too bad for me.

Finally, a moment of "Dear God, why does everyone think I have an accent?!?" randomness: while standing in line at Panera, waiting for my lunch, the lady next to me commented on my necklace and asked where I'd bought it. I told her it was from a Fair Trade store in Edinburgh.

"Is that where you're from?" she asked.
No, I explained, I just went to school there.
She seemed confused at this and asked where I lived. Eventually, we established that I'm a native, to which she gave me the old "You have a bit of an accent" line.
Yes ma'am, I know. I know.

Not the best day of my life

I had plenty on my mind Friday afternoon when I got ready to leave work. There was the traffic to consider. My upcoming trip. The movie that night. The possible rain.

The one thing that seemed to have left my mind was any sense of three-dimensional geometry. I got into the car, put it in reverse, and mentally did a slow-motion "NOOOOO!!!" a few seconds later when I cut the turn too sharply and scraped into the cement support pole.

I got out of the car and checked the damage. Not pretty. "It's okay," I thought, trying to calm myself down. "I'll just go to Royal and get them to buff it out."

Half an hour later, the idiot girl behind the desk at Royal's body shop gave me the bad news: $627 to repaint the car. "It's not that bad," she drawled.

"What do you mean, it's not that bad?" I exclaimed, resisting the urge to throttle her or say words of which my mother would not approve. "It's bad when you're on a minimum-wage budget!"

"Uh...yeah, I guess."

The man helping her suggested I take Pledge to the car and get the worst of the white marks out. Consequently, when my father pulled into the driveway, I was bending over the car with paper towels and the can of furniture polish, rubbing as well as I could and trying to avoid getting anything on my work clothes. Before then, however, I'd run by Estes, the place where we get our tires, and asked for a recommendation of anyone who could fix my car for under Royal's price. The owner gave me the name and number of his son-in-law, and I left him a message.

Saturday morning, I had resigned myself to forking over the exorbitant fee when the son-in-law called back. I drove out to his place in Pelham, which is so new that the main phone line doesn't work yet. I wasn't sure exactly what I would find, but he launched into his credentials almost immediately.

"When you said 'green Beetle,' I knew exactly what you were talking about," he began, examining the scratches. "Green and red are the two worst colors. Green gets milky, and red fades to pink. You don't notice it, but if you try to repaint it, it's obvious."

"It took Royal three times to get the paint right when they fixed the car after my sister's wreck," I told him.

He nodded, then reassured me he had done Volkswagons, even annoyingly painted ones, before. "I have a formula."

The turnaround was 24 hours. "And the price?" I asked, biting my lip.

He studied the car a moment longer. "$300?"

I could have hugged him. Instead, I took his card and said I'd call him. If all goes according to plan, the car will go in Tuesday night and be back when I return from my trip. Happy day!

Being spontaneous

I love moments of random spontaneity.

The following conversation (roughly) transpired at lunch yesterday, after someone got a few of us jonesing for Fun Dip by pulling a candy stick from her purse:

"Are there any candy stores in town?"
"Yeah, SoHo Sweets. It's sort of new."
"Where's that?"
"Homewood. SoHo. You know, by Zoe's."
"No."
"Do they have various kinds of gummy things?"
"I...think so? Maybe?"
"What about old candy? Necco Wafers?"
"I don't know." (Pauses, considers the half-hour left in the lunch break.) "You guys want to go now?"

What followed was a mass exodus in search of candy. Most of the party settled for gelato. Even considering that I only had the small size of the Peanut Butter Cup flavor, I was grateful for step class this morning.

Random fun

I've found a new way to waste time...

Futoshiki.

It's a logic puzzle in the same vein as Sudoku. Unfortunately, if you forget what it's called and try to find it by entering random parts of the word, you come up with some fairly obscene hits.

The main difference between Futoshiki and Sudoku is the addition of greater than/less than rules. Take this one, for example:
Fit the numbers 1-5 into the grid in such a way that no number is repeated in any row or column and the rules are followed. The box between the 5 and 4 could logically be either 2 or 3, but not 1. Simple enough, right?

Keeps me off the streets, at least...

Yessss...

It's slightly after 7 AM. I just woke up. The temperature is low, but the sun is shining and the electricity is still on.

I'm sore in a few places, so I stayed home from the gym today. This means that I got 10.5 glorious hours of sleep last night.

Good morning, world!

Blackout

I woke this morning at 3:30 to lashing rain, a lightning storm, and a lack of electricity. Fearing a puddle in the foyer, I grabbed a towel and ran to put a stopper at the door, then relaxed as the power came back on.

Then it went off again, this time for the rest of the night.

I don't sleep well once disturbed, and for the next hour and a half, I lay in bed, wondering whether 1) we would have any tornadoes, 2) we would get power by morning, and 3) it would be worth it to go to my intended 5:30 step class. At one point, I turned on my laptop and decided to play on Facebook to numb myself back to sleep, only to realize that, ha, the wireless router was also out with the electricity.

I must have slipped into a doze around 4:30 or so, because I woke again, this time with significantly less pep, when my Jeeves clock roused me at 5. Seeing no change in the power situation, I packed a change of clothes, shampoo, and a hair dryer in my gym bag and headed for the Rec. Class was good, even before caffeine, but the best part was being able to dry my hair afterwards.

My dad met me in the foyer upon my return, fully dressed and with our dinner table votive in his hand. I figured then that it would be one of those days, and began nursing a Coke.

Alabama moment

My mother graciously re-upped the family's membership at the Hoover Rec this weekend ($240/year is the senior family rate - that covers me until May, and then it's only $100 more for me to continue on the plan), so now I can sweat in relative comfort. Granted, treadmill running is boring as hell - I kept looking at the distance indicator and comparing it to lake laps, and wondering what was taking so long - but it beats having to run around in three layers, sweating through your gloves and wishing for June. The good parts about the gym are the weight room, the likes of which I haven't seen since I left Edinburgh last August, and the classes, which I'll try tomorrow. Come on, doesn't 5:30 AM Cardio Step sound like a great way to wake up?

Anyone?

Anyway, as I was driving home this morning - it's only a five-minute trip - the SUV in front of me came to a halt, and I peered around to see what the hold-up was, thinking it would be a cat.

It was a possum. Honest to God, it was a possum, just taking his sweet time crossing the road.

They do exist in Hoover. Fancy that.

Long weekend

For the first time since I started kindergarten, I had Presidents Day off this year. Staring down a long weekend is always fabulous, especially when you're coming off a week of dress rehearsals, one of which was on Valentine's Day. I'm sorry, but there's something horribly depressing about Requiem practice on Valentine's Day. It just doesn't bode well for my love life, ya know?

Anyway, we did our two Brahms concerts (3 of 5 stars, according to the Birmingham News critic, but he's a jerk and sits too close...and he only ragged on the sopranos and tenors, anyway), and by Sunday, I was ready for a day of rest. We had a farewell soup and sides luncheon for Sarah, who's off to rock Midland, Texas in a Ron Burgundy sort of way (She's kind of a big deal. People know her.), and I went to bed that night eagerly awaiting the next morning, when a group of us would make a pilgrimage to the Unclaimed Baggage Center in Scottsboro.

What, you may ask, is the Unclaimed Baggage Center?

It happens all the time - your luggage doesn't meet you at the carousel. Sometimes, if it's my sister's bag, it ends up on the wrong continent. Other times, it winds up lonely and discarded, and then the airlines sell it to this group in Scottsboro. They then dissect the bags, dry clean and tag as needed, and open the goods up to the waiting public.

I kept hearing "Schadenfreude" in my head all weekend, but swore I was doing my patriotic duty for Presidents Day by improving the American economy. As it turned out, however, the joke was on us.

Let me tell you a little about Scottsboro, Alabama. It'll have to be a little, because honestly, there's not much to say. Scottsboro makes Fort Payne look like a booming metropolis. It's tiny. It's tucked up near the Tennessee border, about 30 miles from I-59. Unlike Fort Payne, it doesn't even have a band or a claim to global fame - all it has is the Unclaimed Baggage Center.

We didn't know this when we set off, so Jason, Brandon, and I were looking forward to the excursion when piled into Jason's car for our day trip. After a pit stop to take pictures of Brandon's smashed car (including one of her hugging the car goodbye), we set off, stopping only for gas and for lunch in Fort Payne. Don't you love little restaurants where everyone stares at you as you walk in the door? Still, they make a good cheese sandwich.

Somewhat satiated, we headed out into what can only be described as God's country, hoping for bargains. What we found was, to put it mildly, disappointing; the place was rather like a flea market with a high price point. Granted, they had some jewelry and a few fur coats, plus a selection of iPods, a couple electric guitars, and two saddles, but the only thing any of us bought was a paperback, and that cost me a whopping $4.36.

There was one bright spot, however. They had this:

It's Hoggle, from that Bowie classic, Labyrinth. (Thanks, Roadside America, for taking a picture!) The puppet arrived in someone's suitcase and has lived there ever since. Go figure.

Frustrated, we tried the knock-off unclaimed baggage store across the street. This proved to be a mistake, as the proprietor was of the surly, probably-has-a-gun-under-the-desk variety, and the best item for sale in the shack was a giant box of Tampax. Doesn't get much better than that, I suppose.

Tiring of this exercise in futility, we got back in the car and headed home, planning to reconvene that evening for pub trivia. As I was driving back to Hoover, I couldn't believe I'd failed in my mission to acquire cheap goods. On a whim, I pulled into the TJ Maxx parking lot - I'd only been in once before - and took a look at the women's racks. Half an hour later, I emerged with a black Dana Buchman sport coat and a khaki linen Tahari jacket, for which I paid only $175. If I'd been at Saks, they would have set me back around $825, so I felt pretty good about myself. I'll be going back to TJ Maxx.

Trivia was fun but for the cigarettes, to which I am annoyingly allergic. We only missed one point all evening, but so did three other teams, one of which had fewer players and thus won. If only we'd known that a Black Velvet is Guinness and champagne, we wouldn't have had this problem.