Wow, two recent blog closings in just a few months’ time. I’d like to take a moment to thank Joseph and Rusty for their years of great blogging at Monotonous.net and RadicalGeorgiaModerate.org.
And no, I’m not closing my blog down, even though I’m not posting lately. I’m just a lazy blogger.
My buddy is holed up at an undisclosed Wal-Mart here in Georgia waiting to get a Playstation 3 when they are released tomorrow morning at midnight. Here are his hour-by-hour updates.
Tuesday 9:54pm
1st in line
We’ll see if they get any premiums
this is so ridiculous that I had to come out here 2 days early, but i am glad I prepared for the missed time
We talked on the phone this evening and he indicated that an evil manager had told everyone that if they fell asleep, they’d be kicked out of the store. I told him to stand his ground and reminded him that you’re not trespassing until someone asks you to leave and you refuse. As of yet, they haven’t done this yet. I don’t understand the “you can’t sleep” policy, considering that it doesn’t seem to have been a rule anywhere else.
Wednesday 1:25pm
my officers were cool and echoed your notion that if they asked us to leave that we would have to–i passed that onto the crowd before the officers finished talking with the manager, but when they came out they just said for us not to get unruly and everything would be fine
34.5 hours to go
Wednesday 2:02pm
now the manager went around posting that they may not get the minimum 10 consoles specified in the ad but they will issue up 10 rainchecks for every console they get less than 10
I don’t feel that they’ll get 10 but I do hope they get 1
Thursday 8:09am
preliminary indications from alleged inside sources at the store say 6 consoles will arrive
and they are not divulging this to the last 4 people in line for fear of retaliationi had originally thought I might try for two by going to the as-of-yesterday underpopulated Eatonton store, however, due to the amazing sleep deprivation policy instituted by management here–I no longer feel that would be a safe endeavor to undertake btwn 12am and 6am tomorrow
to me their idea of us not sleeping seems to create much more potential liability–sending us out at midnight than any damage to reputation or appearance which is what I understand concerns them about us dozing off in layaway
Thursday 8:53am
we actually should have tried harder to sleep last night b/c there is no opportunity now, but the night manager came and gave us a speech about how he hoped everything would go smoothly and that the officers that would drop in from time to time would not have to straighten anything out–which was totally justified b/c until that point we had created 0 problems or hassles for the store–I in fact was aiding in the direction and location of deep cover layaway operatives at customers’ requests
that said they now have a full complement of day Nazis including Himmler from the other day who threatened to kick out a dozing camper–so to avoid friction and losing my place after almost 40hrs of waiting I am going to do my best to continue to remain awake
but again, to me, the plan to deprive 10 customers of sleep for a prolonged period and then send them to drive home at midnight [doesn't seem like a good idea]
Thursday 11:37am
The bad manager just came through and said they are not getting 6 but 2. I am #1 in line so that’s where we stand.
At about the 12-hour mark, they announce that they’ll have rainchecks available for those who don’t get one tonight.
Thursday 11:51am
actually the line may expand since they are gonna do 8 raincheck per, before 10 seemed like the maximum line spot, but with 4 consoles and 16 rainchecks total–the list can accomodate 20 people.
I’ll post more as we reach the thrilling conclusion.
Monday, July 10th, was our second wedding anniversary. It seems like the human tendency is to use anniversaries as a kind of yardstick. Has it really been two years? That one feels about right. It’s been an eventful two years–since July 2004, I’m on my third job (and third home).
But in the grand scheme of things, it’s a pretty short time. While many marriages are shorter, my parents hit 31 years in January. I’ve had cell phone contracts that lasted 2 years. We’ve had our cat for longer than that. Yes, in terms of yardsticks, while I’m happy to have hit this milestone, and I’m even more excited about the years ahead of us, it doesn’t seem like very long.
More striking, I think, is that as of July 17th, I’ve been with Heather for 10 years. We began our relationship in July of 1996, when the Olympics were in town. The newspaper last weekend read “Games Changed Everything”, with the expected retrospective pieces on the commercial and cultural growth Atlanta experienced during the years on either side of 1996. Somewhere in my closet, I have the newspaper from the Opening Ceremonies, 10 years ago. Metaphorically, it’s as if these two papers are the coming and going of a comet, a steadfast chronological ticker that returns to earth after a decade and finds that much has changed.
And yet, you could throw both newspapers in the same pile in the closet because they both represent that which is finished. Heather and I have laughed and cried for these 10 years together, and have shared our lives in ways that are always intensifying in an exciting manner. It’s invigorating to pass the 10-year mark, and it makes me a little nostalgic.
Anyway, as I’ve said many times, I love you, Heather. Thanks for the best 10 years of my life.
It was a very good weekend. Friday was a big work event up at Château Élan. I found, as usual, that no matter how nice the course is, I’m still pretty bad at golf. Saturday, we got some of the gang together and went out to celebrate my birthday at The Vortex and go have some drinks. Our fun was interrupted by the rain, however, and we had to hole up at Skippy’s place shooting pool and playing foosball. Not a bad way to celebrate one’s birthday.
Yesterday, we stayed inside (more rain) and I opened presents. The highlights were a DVD burner (yes, I’ve now entered the 21st century) and some very snazzy work clothes. Oh, and if you see me on MARTA reading any of the books in the Halo series, please try not to make fun of me. They’re interesting books.
The DVD burner makes my life much better, computer-wise. While I do have 440GB of space on my local hard disks (excluding iPods and other various external storage), I still seem to have a surfeit of large files that I don’t need daily access to, but can’t bring myself to delete. Now, I can burn them off 4.7GB at a time and make room for more important things, like archived shows from the Tivo and my 40GB of uncompressed video from our wedding that I’ve got sitting on there.
Just a quick post to recap our trip to Destin for Memorial Day Weekend.
This has been the third year in a row we’ve been, and it’s gotten crazier and crazier down there. The beach was completely packed with people drinking and partying (far more than we were on both accounts). It truly is “white-collar spring break”.
I ran into several people I know, including my old boss from my last job, and some guy I swam by about 20ft into the Gulf of Mexico who said “Hey, don’t you work for [my company]?” Yeah, in the ocean. It’s a small world.
Heather and I were in Jacksonville for the weekend, as you may have noticed from the fun photos to your left. My sister graduated from college (congrats, Christine!) and we all met to celebrate.
Tomorrow, we leave for Italy. My buddy Matt made the decision to have his wedding in Florence, and we decided to make a weeklong vacation out of it. We fly into Milan, take the train to Rome and Florence, and fly out of Milan a week later. I’ll have a recap and photos as soon as I can. Have a good week, everyone!
A few weeks ago (6/23-6/26) was my friend Scott’s bachelor party, and he really pulled out all the stops. We flew to Boston Thursday evening and stayed with his brother for the night. Scott’s brother Dave lives with his wife Mira and their new son Ralph in a very nice house in Brookline, Mass.
Let me back up. Thursday night, I flew up to Logan Airport in a seat next to a drunk woman who twice asked me if “the bartender” had come by yet, in between her short naps. My plane got in ~10:30pm, and of course the bags took another 30 minutes to arrive. I’ve been hesitant to carry my luggage on the plane with me for a while now, because of how annoying all of the people are who bring gigantic bags on the plane and then whine when there isn’t any more room to stuff them in the overhead bin. I always roll my eyes and think “Yeah, too bad there’s not a gigantic compartment somewhere on this plane where we could all put our luggage. That’d be swell.”
Scott and I had some great sushi in Brookline and had a few beers before we went to sleep. Er, after we attempted to get into the wrong house for 5 minutes. No, we didn’t drink that much.
In the morning, we took two cabs over to the harbor and boarded the boat.
Present were Scott, Andrew (his new brother-in-law), Rich (his new father-in-law), Ralph (his dad), Dave (his brother), and Ray (the captain) and his crew.
We sat on the boat a while and had some late-morning beers (Dont look at me like that; it was a bachelor party!) before getting on our way. The plan was to sail from Boston to Newport, apparently a 6-hour voyage. We encountered some rough seas on the way, however, and after about an hour of trying to get through some 10-foot waves, the decision was made to instead dock at Martha’s Vineyard and spend the weekend in Edgartown.
We docked in Edgartown at the Harborside Inn, a beautiful spot that Ralph and Rich seemed to enjoy. (They stayed at the inn and the rest of us slept on the boat.) As it turns out, Edgartown was one of the principal filming locations for the thrillingly accurate documentary Jaws. I was somewhat surprised to find that the film greatly exaggerated the dangers of the surrounding waters, as only 3 of the 8 people on our boat were eaten by sharks, a much smaller body count than I’d expected. I helped moor the boat and felt like a genuine sailor for about 18 seconds, and then we quickly made for the nearest gift shop, as several of the men were cold. Yes, in the middle of the late-June heat, the evenings are still pleasantly cool on Martha’s Vineyard. So it was $30 long-sleeve t-shirts for all! (Except yours truly, who somehow managed to pack smart for once in his life). The town is also notable for its central role in the Ted Kennedy scandal, though they don’t have a museum or anything, as far as I could tell.
Our next stop was the Seafood Shanty, a decent joint with a tremendous panoramic view of the harbor, including the quaint lighthouse on one end and $10 million houses in the hills on the other.
After a few rounds at the Shanty, we made it back to the yacht for one of many fantastic meals prepared by Jason, the chef on board the Double Down. Jason is an absolutely tremendous chef, and made some of the best meals I’ve had in a long time. Even more incredible is the fact that he prepared huge meals for 8 in such a small kitchen. I guess he’s got months of practice, but I could have the entire kitchen and staff of a hotel and not create the feasts that he created with two people in a tiny kitchen on a moving vessel! Breakfast, lunch, and dinner were all ready when we were, and made the weekend that much better.
After steaks and red wine, we set out on the town to find out what kind of trouble we could get into in this small town.
Edgartown is one of only two towns on Martha’s Vineyard that even allows alcohol sales, and even so, last call is a far-too-early 12:30am. The bars in town are predictable, touristy places with the usual mix of local kids, vacationing partiers, and draft beer in plastic cups. Like everything else on the island, drinks are rather expensive, and I was glad the Family of the Groom was sponsoring the weekend.
At precisely 12:30, we strolled out of whatever bar we were at and marvelled at the number of cabs and people waiting for cabs. I guess the people in the dry towns have to go somewhere…
More drinks back at the boat kept us in bed far past the 7:00 wakeup call for the brave souls who decided to get up and go fishing in the smaller fishing boat that accompanied us on the trip. The guys who went fishing returned in time to have breakfast with us at 10:30, and regaled the nonplussed sleepyheads with tales of seasickness and catching absolutely nothing, the latter of which is apparently “the fun part” of fishing. Or so I’m told.
Most of the day was spent relaxing on the boat, venturing into town, and eating Milano cookies straight from the bag. We took a long walk in the afternoon out to the aforelinked lighthouse and back, spotting a wedding in progress on the way. I don’t want to even imagine what a wedding on the Vineyard would cost, but it was certainly beautiful.
Saturday night brought the best meal of the trip, a spread of lamb, couscous with raisins, and squash. We enjoyed the feast, celebrated my birthday (which was Saturday), and had champagne and cigars on the stern of the yacht. We again ventured into town for more imbibing, and found that every night at the bars of Edgartown is exactly the same. We saw the same people, the same situations, and everything was much the same. This is perhaps attributable to the fact that there are only 3-4 bars with any crowd in town. Still, we had a good time, and managed to continue to celebrate Scott’s upcoming marriage and my 24th birthday, all at once.
We sailed back to Boston on Sunday and had a delicious dinner at Kingfish Hall, an impressive seafood restaurant. The wedding is this weekend, and Heather and I are flying up to New York tomorrow for the celebration.
It’s good to be back here on the LJ. We had some incredible storm action last night (incredible for Atlanta, anyway… I’m sure it doesn’t compare to what my parents went through with Frances). My drive home was, oh, two hours long, through 18-inch deep water from creeks washing over Buford Highway. We’re apparently pretty lucky to have power at all; over 200,000 are without power this morning in Atlanta alone. Actually, a huge tree came down on Briarcliff about 2.5 miles from our apartment, knocking out power for our entire area, right up to a few blocks from us. Cable’s out, so we missed all the shows we wanted to see last night. Can’t we just get full video on demand already, so that we can see what we want, when we want? I mean, that’s why I got a Tivo, but if there’s nothing for the Tivo to record, it doesn’t really matter when we decide to watch it. It’s not like they’re going to re-air the shows we missed (The Apprentice, Survivor, CSI) just because some folks down south missed them.
Anyway, I’m thankful that at the very least, we still have DSL. It could be much worse. Skippy had a fire occur in the apartment two floors above him, and now has an apartment full of wet stuff and mold. The result? Heather and I now have a roommate. Skippy’s sleeping on our futon until his apartment gets cleaned up. I’ve gotta say, it’s interesting having someone else in the house and being married. It’s like college, only Heather and I have to clean up after each other a little more and the chores actually get done.