weekend « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

weekend

books / hobby / photo / weekend — Comments Off
8
Aug 10

Meet the new neighbors

We’re beginning to have regular visitors at the bird feeders. Here are two of them:

Pretty bird

It’s hardly nature photography — sitting in the shade on my porch, trying to be very still, waiting for the birds — but I figure if we’re going to ask the birds to come visit the least they can do is pose for a picture.

We’ll soon be doing this to our human friends, as well. Just be prepared.

For a quality reference on the local birds, including pictures, maps, descriptions and CD calls, check out the Birds of Alabama Field Guide. As soon as I buy mine I’ll know what I’m looking at. Until then, I’m woefully deficient in bird identification.

friends / weekend — Comments Off
7
Aug 10

Older than I look, apparently

We are trying to decide where to hang our pictures and posters and various other decorations. The first question, as far as I see it, is “For which look are you aiming?” You could choose the sparse, open spaces style of an art gallery (work with me here) or you can stuff the walls full of frames of the artifacts of a life well lived.

If I could afford the frames I’d fill the walls with pictures and programs and all manner of souvenirs. You’d never need to paint if you never moved the frames. There would be no poses, but every piece would have a long story. Think of the old restaurant filled with black and white shots. Someone knows all of those details. If you caught them on the right day they’d probably share them all.

We’re not doing that, obviously, but I’m planting the idea. Maybe after a few more years my argument will be a bit more refined. Until then we are assigning wall space for the already collected diplomas, souvenirs signs, posters, portraits and scenery shots.

There are stacks lingering about the house, and we showed a few of the pieces to company this afternoon. Jeremy Henderson brought his family over for a visit. His daughter is getting ready for kindergarten. She’s a little pistol, terrifying the cat, leading tours of our house, getting into everything and mortifying her mother, but entertaining us endlessly.

Until she said we were like grandparents. We are old, don’t have kids, but have a cat.

Also, we learned, there are consequences. Not sure what those might be, or whether she was talking to the non-grandparents or the terrified kitty. I was too busy pretending to be a doddering old man.

So we made jokes about that for the rest of the day. And taking citracal. Larry King told me I should. Now to find Nancy Grace on cable … oh, terrific. They have a graphic that reads, and I quote: “Breaking News: Outrage.” So there it is, cable news has come full circle, able to now generate faux shock at themselves for magnifying faux controversy.

The story was, I believe, about Lindsay Lohan. I’m outraged already.

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1
Aug 10

More boxes

All of the clothes are now out of boxes. I’ve reshuffled the garage configuration. I’ve been in the attic — which is a chore to be avoided in August, I’ve decided.

But it is so new. I’ve never had an attic with storage space, you see. My grandmother has one and I always loved the sound that door makes, all springy and rusty and just full of inviting tetanus, I’m sure. It is odd, my grandmother runs the home where so many of my memories take place. She is an incredibly warm lady, an excellent hostess and champion of baked goods, yet the sounds are what I think about the most. The mysterious creaking descent of the attic door, the wood-on-wood clatter of the decorative welcome sign on her front door, the whump and thud of the oven, these are the things that spring to mind.

Anyway. She has terrific attic space, and as a child it was the rarest treats to climb up there. There’s a lot of Christmas stuff hidden in the heat and rafters of her home, but who knows what else. Now I have my own. (But I don’t remember ever being as impressed by the heat in her attic as what I’m experiencing in mine.) I’m storing our Christmas stuff there and the components of the future projects I’m hoping to conquer. They’re next to the extra luggage and cardboard — oh the humanity of the cardboard.

And you can’t stay up there long. Because it is incredibly warm. But, I’ve laid out a system for the attic, and it is important you set such precedent when beginning in a new home. Things can’t be merely slung haphazardly about. You must gain control of that situation, and early. So we now have in place a line of march in the attic from items of greatest need, and thus easiest access, to things like the wardrobe boxes. They are incredibly useful and wonderful pieces of cardboard engineering, but we hope to store them for some time.

With order in place above us in the sauna-attic, life can continue peacefully for us in the climate controlled portion of the house.

We visited Lowe’s today, picked up new washing machine connectors — the six-foot ones cost a buck more than the five-foot model — and returned a few extra paint items. I re-connected the washing machine. We unpacked. I re-organized the garage again. I realized I’ll have plenty more reasons to back into the attic.

I realized we have a lot of boxes.

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31
Jul 10

Starting the settling

Slept in a bit after the world’s longest day, which was preceded by two hours of sleep. As yesterday wound down I started the count. I think I’d had about nine hours of sleep in the previous three days. So it was a great relief to sleep this morning. I spent the first part of the day much like the TiVo, “Preparing to connect …”

Brian, who spent the night with us after the move, continued his routine awesomeness today by generally helping out with the handyman stuff and also building a bookshelf.

The Glomshelf

I stocked it with all of my Gloms.

We discovered that one of my wrenches is antique. It is a Craftman. Singular. They were only doing the one thing back then … It fell apart in my hands (Isn’t this the company that promises that won’t happen?) while I replaced a shower head. We had to save the wrench to install the washer connectors.

And then we decided to get new washer connectors. (I have a feeling the next few days on the blog will be about unpacking and trips to Lowe’s. If you want to avoid that, I don’t blame you. I want to, too.)

For instance: We discovered a few pieces of large Tupperware the previous owner so graciously left behind. I’m storing cables in it — so they stay fresh, you understand. I’ve discovered today we have a lot of cables. If you need any RCA, coax, cat-5 or USB cables, stop by and pick some up.

The Yankee set up the kitchen today. I pulled all of my books out of boxes and started juggling things in the office.

All the furniture is in place. Now we’ll just have the boxes, a ton of which are in the garage.

We met a neighbor. She’s a woman who moved here from California. She takes care of the grandchild while her son is doing his doctoral work. Nice job if you can get it, eh? Turns out her son served in Iraq and Afghanistan, will soon finish his PhD in engineering and then head north to teach for the rest of his career at West Point. Sounds like one together guy.

The neighbor already knew all about us. We’re no longer talking out in the yard, just in case the community has strategically placed microphones in the hedges.

We bought Brian, who is awesome, dinner at Niffer’s Place. He wanted corn nuggets and the man deserved corn nuggets. He’s sleeping them off tonight and then, having craftily avoided a baby shower, will head home tomorrow. (We’re trying to talk him into staying longer and diving into a few more of these boxes.)

Tried out the pool tonight. Triple-digit temperatures mean an exotically warm swimming experience. Sitting on the pool deck it was nice to just relax and not sweat. And then the moisture dried off, the warm summer air kicked in and, lo, at 11 p.m. at night we did begin to sweat again, while stationary.

It only reached 99 today … though I saw a bank sign that disagreed. If you stare at the heat wafting off the asphalt long enough it will rise into the shape of a number. And that number was 104. Who am I to disagree with the heat itself?

Auburn / friends / photo / weekend — Comments Off
25
Jul 10

On the road again

So we drove down to Auburn this afternoon. We’re spending a few days there, which meant packing in the midst of packing. Meta-packing, by the way, is a task best left to the professionals. Where are those extra pair of socks, anyway?

We’re spending the night in an extended stay hotel, where a very nice young woman checked us in. She asked us about our visit. We’re moving here.

“I would live in Birmingham over Auburn,” she says.

Why?

“There are no jobs here,” she replies.

It is a college town, small place, lots of young people willing to work jobs with flexible schedules and low pay. She had lime green hair. Fortunately The Yankee and I long ago outgrew that stage of life where you move somewhere first and found the job second.

Mellow Mushroom

We hit Mellow Mushroom for dinner. We split a sausage, house special pizza and pretzels. I love Mellow Mushroom and that is the best wood carving in any of their restaurants. Each one of the franchises has one, most relating to the local mascot or, failing any particular ties to sport and culture a giant psychotic mushroom. The eagle-on-tiger motif is the best of the bunch.

During the eventual post-apocalyptic period some enterprising young college student will burn precious fuel to make his way there, break into this place, sample the beer taps and load that sculpture onto the back of his pickup truck. Sure, he might lose a friend or two to the zombies in the process, but it will look so sweet in the fraternity house.

Fin joined us for dinner. We’ve drafted him to help us unload things when the truck makes it to town. It is good to have free labor at the other end of your long day.

We had leftovers for our refrigerator in our little room and DVDs to watch. Tomorrow we’ll wake up and hit the realtor’s and then the lawyer’s office where, I’m told, I’ll sign approximately 97,000 pieces of paper.

I forgot my signature stamp.