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adventures / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
27
Jul 10

The joys of home ownership

Painting was intended for people of sturdy emotional stock. How else can you explain away the unholy tendency of a material designed solely to please the eye which is represented in one color, is applied in another color and dries in a third? This says nothing of the swirls and the splotches and the missed spots.

The Yankee, my lovely bride, is convinced she loves painting. I know exactly where I come down on this particular skill and it is somewhere around the level of “Glad I’m not a carpenter.” She says she loves to paint, but her frustration would suggest otherwise. Last night she tried to paint part of the master bedroom, but the color of blue-hued blueness that Lowe’s offered was too blue. So this morning we visited again. The paint clerk immediately realized the error, acknowledged that there was no amount of water and milk dilution that was going to lighten this shade of pigment enough to our wishes and granted our money back on non-refundable paint.

So we visited Sherwin-Williams, where the cost is a bit higher, but they are ready to cover the earth, a bit of propaganda which no doubt irritates the green customers and the Earth Day types. (There was a splinter between them in 2003, they split into two factions, look it up.)

So we bought more paint for the bedroom and the proper paint for the library and the dining room. Lowe’s did not have the equivalent, so we picked it up from the place that gave us the handy online tool. The Yankee has been playing with it for days. You upload a picture, you highlight the wall portions (thereby protecting the furniture) and click a color on the wheel. You see a preview, the page gives you the name of a color and so on.

So it is like Photoshop? I asked.

“But with paint!”

Clearly she was in her element.

So we started painting again. The bedroom, which was an experience determined to wound the psyche. A now lighter color was painted over the darker color. The lighter color exhibited peculiar tendencies while drying. We considered hiring a painter. Fortunately for the wallet everyone was booked.

She moved on to the kitchen and the library. Having by this time finished with the ceiling fans project. I picked up our termite bond. I’d risked life and limb and probably several safety codes by standing on the very top of my borrowed ladder in my brand new home to tape off molding. I’d had the idea to invent tape smart enough to not stick to itself and generally done everything else I could to avoid painting. So, I began painting around the baseboards, windows and fireplace.

The kitchen went from a Barney purple and the future library went from a pale gold to a slate green. It matches the curtains. Incredibly, it also matches the color of the font on our family fireplace crock that we received as a Christmas present last year. I wonder if she’s noticed that yet. The bedroom, meanwhile, had dried to just the shade for which we’d hoped. Painting with your fingers crossed sometimes works in your favor, though you tend to drip paint in odd places.

We had dinner, and the romance of new home life continued. What we made for dinner tonight called for a can of tomatoes. Of all of the things my thoughtful, prepared and intelligent bride brought with us this trip the one thing she did not consider was a can opener. (I don’t say this to blame her, merely to point out that she’d packed everything else we could possibly need.)

So I opened the tomatoes the old fashioned way: with a hammer and screwdriver.

Dining room paint

After dinner we painted some more. The dining room. Note the excellent tape work done way up high. I climbed up there for that. She climbed back up to paint it. We are painting in “fired brick” which makes my hands look like a bloodied violent offender who has yet to clean up the evidence. We’ll have to do another coat there tomorrow.

Even still, we painted four rooms today, I painted parts of three of them. I managed to get only one bit of it on my clothes, one tiny little speck of green slate on a bright blue, old KARN 920 shirt; no biggie.

Which, wow, provides a moment of clarity. That job was eight years ago. And this realization right after saying aloud “You know, we should be celebrating (or not) our 15th high school reunion this year.”

Time flies when you’re mixing paint.

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.

Friday / photo — Comments Off
23
Jul 10

Friday photo

Allie works out

Just another day of packing, shuffling, organizing, discarding, agonizing over discarding and scraping skin on cardboard.

I think the cat has figured out something is up.

friends / memories / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
22
Jul 10

Remembering radio

Of the many things that have recently floated to the surface in the cleaning and packing are stacks and stacks of cassette tapes from my years in radio. I broadcast for eight years, what seems like a lifetime ago. When I consolidated the tapes in the cleaning of the garage it turned into one impressive box full of old material.

I’ve been hanging onto them because I’ve promised myself (for years, now) that I’d one day listen to them and digitize the good stuff. Somewhere in all those many tapes there has to be two or three good air checks. The world needs, I figure, dated jokes, aging soundbites and hard news leads delivered in a young man’s voice.

Mostly I keep the tapes to keep me humble. Putting one in and pressing play would crack me up, or make me grimace, for hours.

While I learned early on I was no disc jockey, thank goodness, I did turn into a strong news anchor and sports reporter. I had another dip into that memory today, when I had dinner with my radio mentor Chadd Scott. He taught me a lot, because he learned from a great one, who learned from two greats. We learned a lot together because when we worked together Chadd and I found ourselves in a position where the bosses left us alone to make mistakes. We created more successes than failures, though.

He’s in town from Atlanta for SEC Media Days. Since he made the trip, we’d asked him to pick us up a bookshelf from Ikea. He drug it across the state line, crammed into his car with his colleague and intern. I think he made his intern go fetch the bookshelf from the store, which would be the silliest thing I’ve ever had an intern do.

My own internship at ACES, once upon a long time ago, was an excellent experience. There were three communication specialists and me doing the job of six or eight people. I built web pages, produced television, practiced photography and dark room skills, wrote for newspapers, cut audio for radio and more. The least consequential thing I ever did was to collate photo copies, and that was a necessary thing for my projects. My internship was so useful I’ve always been conscientious to help interns have the opportunity to receive a similar experience.

And now some young man has been sent to Ikea to pick up a bookshelf in my name.

We had dinner with Chadd and Chuck Oliver and others tonight. We talked Internet, where just maybe I returned the favor and gave Chadd a little practiced advice.They are working on a big project, one I’m looking forward to seeing this fall.

The Yankee and I each enjoyed a frosty for dessert. I recorded two voiceovers. (Anybody need voice work? I used to be in radio, you know … ) We watched a bit of television and packed more. We’ve only a week more of this to go!

memories / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
21
Jul 10

My cardboard kingdom

Boxes, we have them.

“The irony is that for years the collection was just left in cardboard boxes. It’s only when they rather conscientiously dusted it off and launched this rather impressive exhibition that the whole issue has resurfaced again.”

I spent another afternoon in the garage today, cleaning and straightening and trying to tell myself that it wasn’t in vain, that I wasn’t wasting my time. I’ve lately become very interested in time. In another day or two, I figure, I’ll do something about it.

That’s the afternoon scene in the living room, above. We live in and around cardboard just now, and will for another week or so. On the one hand I’m glad we’ve started the packing process so early. Things have a tendency to creep up on you. Something happens that slows you down. It is good to be prepared. On the other hand, I’ll be sick of seeing cardboard by the time the big day rolls around.

Anyway. In the garage I’ve found a few interesting things. I have one more box of old paperwork to go through, hopefully it can all be shredded, burned by a blast furnace and then reduced to its chemical components by an exciting new enzymatic process I discovered on late night television. Before that happens, though, I must go through every scrap of paper to determine the likelihood of needing a power bill from 2001. (Not likely.)

But still, you never know what exciting information might be in that bill. Some future generation might gawk in awe and wonder at power consumption rates from the turn of the century. “And grok that wacky font, space cowboy!” Because this is how future generations will talk about the things that have been resting in my storage system for all those years.

But then you think about the things they won’t understand, or, worse, even care about. I found a paper from one of the classes from my master’s degree. It was titled “Campaign Homophily: Earning a Voter’s Perception of Similarity.” I just Googled an old paper I wrote, the height of vanity. Happily no one else has yet to use that eye-catching, page-turning title.

I don’t remember much about writing that particular paper — it has been about five years, or a lifetime, whichever comes first. I also discovered a little slip of paper from elementary school, this one I vaguely recall. It was a day when football players from Alabama visited our school to talk about studying hard, saying no to drugs and making good grades. I got all of their autographs.

As football players go it was a good group, Derrick Thomas and Keith McCants were the biggest stars, a murder’s row of defenders no one wanted to face. Thomas became a terror in the NFL, of course, died far too young and was posthumously inducted into the football Hall of Fame last year. McCants’ presence is now painfully ironic. He’s been arrested on five drug-related charges in the last two years. Another guy, Trent Patterson, is working as an athletic trainer near his home in Syracuse and was featured on The Biggest Loser two years ago. Two of the other signatures are from common names, so Google only lets us guess where they are today.

I’ve never given away a Hall of Famer’s autograph before, but an acquaintance claimed it for scrapbooking purposes, so I’ll stick it in an envelope and send a 20-year-old scrap of paper to someone who will glue it into a book. And then, someone in her family will stumble across it in 40 years and wonder why it has been in a cardboard box all this long.

The circle of life continues. I should continue more of it to donations or the garbage, but you just never know.

That quote? It is from British explorer Hugh Thomson, discussing early-20th-century Yale expeditions to Machu Picchu. Do you know how few worthwhile quotes on cardboard there are?