Garrett M. Vonk

fire 014
Originally uploaded by Jordan Gray.

Yes, there was a big fire in Atlantic Station. The Element construction site across the street caught fire early Sunday morning and it turned into one of the biggest multifamily residential fires in decades.

One building of our condo complex caught fire and several units had severe damage. My car has some minor damage from falling (burning) debris. From what I understand, 90+ people had to leave their homes, though only 20 condos in our building were “severely damaged”. Our condo is fine. Heather and I were in New York for our good friend Scott’s wedding.

I shot a few photos of the destruction, including the damage to my vehicle. I’ll try to post a few other links when I get a chance. This building looks like a war zone, especially the cars along the street that burned.

I think using your 19-month old baby as a shield in a shootout with the cops is one of the most despicable acts I’ve heard of in a long time. The surprising thing to hear was that this was apparently only the second hostage to ever die during an LAPD SWAT Team standoff. That’s a pretty amazing record, and I hope this doesn’t hurt their image too much. Certainly, the killing should be investigated, and it’s horrible that the baby was killed by a police bullet, but the actions of the police did not put that baby in danger. Her ridiculously evil father did.

My parents had to deal with a $700+ water bill earlier this year at our beach house in Destin. The culprit seemed to be a faulty meter (or a faulty meter reader), and my dad worked out the hypothetical number of flushes per minute that would be required to use the thousands of gallons of water they were charged for. Well, they can at least consider themselves lucky they aren’t this woman, who received a $74,000 water bill from the city.

I’d really like to know why Brad Pitt’s illness is making headlines. Between the news teasers on TV and the articles linked from the front page of Google News, you’d think that people actually care about this crap. This is a celebrity with a runny nose. Is there any way we can focus on something a little more important?

Finally, Heather and I close on our new condo tomorrow morning, and we’re moving in the afternoon. Six weeks of packing and planning will (with any luck) culminate in a smooth, successful experience tomorrow and this weekend getting all our stuff together. Hopefully, there won’t be any huge surprises when we see the totals for the closing costs today. That’s our biggest worry at this point. That, and getting all of our stuff to the new place. Wish us luck!

I figure the longer I go without posting here, the more stuff I’ll forget to post. This is an incredibly busy
summer for Heather and me, and it’s mostly exciting.

Moving
The biggest news is that Heather and I are buying a condo in Atlanta. We’re buying one of the smaller units available in the Art Foundry complex, located at the west end of Atlantic Station, near the big new Ikea.

I have more information compiled on a Backpack page I created to compile photos and links of the place. We spent a few months really looking at what’s available in Atlanta, and narrowed down the type of place and location we want. I have more information regarding Atlantic Station on that page; it’s a pretty exciting development. In the end, we knew we really wanted to live a) in a nice, brand new place, b) in Midtown near Heather’s office, and c) near shopping and entertainment. This condo meets all three requirements stunningly…

1. It was built earlier this year and has never been occupied, and has beautiful Corian countertops, upgraded lighting, tile flooring in the kitchen, awesome crown molding and baseboards in every room (easy to see here).
2. It’s literally a few blocks from Heather’s office; her commute will be cut by over 80%.
3. This is the most obvious, once you see all of the great retail tenants they have lined up to open this fall… Living a few steps away from Publix, Regal Cinemas, and restaurants, bars, and coffee shops will make life a lot easier. And I can’t mention IKEA enough times. I can’t imagine we won’t become huge devotees, especially with this view out of our living room 24/7.

So, it is a very exciting but busy time for us; stay tuned for updates.

Quick note-
I’m really, REALLY busy right now, but here’s the gist…
Heather and I are working really hard to buy a house this summer. More details later.
We just got back from Memorial Day Vacation in Destin, which was relaxing and fun.
I leave Wednesday (tomorrow) for California. More details later.

So, this has been a pretty boring week at home. The reason? On Tuesday, our cable blinked out some time during the day. From my own in-depth analysis of the Tivo, we can tell that it was sometime between the morning rerun of The Daily Show and what would have been Ken Jennings’s forty-somethingth win. I’ve gotta believe the suits at Sony Pictures and King World are at least carriers of the capitalism gene, and thus will produce a DVD set of the incredible (rumored to end at 75 times) championship of Ken Jennings.
Where was I? Oh, the cable.

So, I called up Comcast and explained. Customer service at most big utility companies (perhaps justifiably) treats everyone like an absolute retard. They put you through the rigamarole of attempting to find every single way that you could have screwed up before they’re willing to even consider that they may have done something wrong. I understand this policy. It probably makes them money in the end. But our cable just stopped working. It’s not like I plugged 75 splitters into each outlet and bought 6 black-market cable boxes while trying to electrocute the cat with the batteries from the three dollar universal remote that somehow costs $95 to replace. The cable worked in the morning. It didn’t when I got home. It’s really not any harder to understand than that. But they act as if I made a conscious effort to disable the cable. Yes, Joann from Comcast, just like you want nothing more than to sit at a 20-inch wide mini-cubicle and read a script to housewives who “dusted” their cable boxes with 12 ounces of Armor-All, I have nothing to do all day but sit around and try to get my cable to stop working, so that I can call and beg for the privilege of devoting a third of my weekend to waiting on your technicians.
Ohh, the technicians…
Right after we moved in, we got our cable turned on and scheduled our service call for a Tuesday. (The brilliant and efficient company charges you $50 to drive their van over to your house, and screw one wire into another one, so that you can continue to pay them $50 a month.) The call was for 5-8pm. I got in at 4:50 and there was a note on the door saying “sorry we missed you.” There was an answering machine message left just after noon saying they’d be there a little early. I’m sorry, Comcast. I didn’t know that when you said “be there 5-8″, you forgot to also add “and also be there the whole day in case we call. You know, because we’re really busy plugging these wires in and might have to call you.”

The next time they came, when they were bringing us our digital cable box, we had an appointment from 11-2 on a Saturday. I was out at 10:30 but got in at 10:50 or so to another answering machine message. “Comcast here. I guess you’re not home. Please reschedule the appointment…” was the message left… AT 10:45 AM. If you want me to be at home at a given time, just tell me. I was THERE for my appointment, YOU weren’t. YOU probably called all your calls for the day at a time OUTSIDE the appointment time, so that you could sit in your van all day.

The next appointment we had, I made sure to be home for a period of approximately seventy-five hours preceding the appointment time and just managed to catch the technician, when he showed up, without calling, 2 hours into the appointment. And installed an extra cable box. Which they claimed we ordered. And billed us for. And when the technician was in my house, on his way out the door, I told him that we didn’t order the second cable box and we wouldn’t be paying for it. To which he shrugged: “Call and have someone come pick it up.”
“Yes, I’m looking forward to it”, I replied.

So ANYWAY, the point of all of this is that finally, today, just in time for the Georgia/Tennessee game (more on that in a second), twenty minutes before the scheduled appointment, our fourth cable repairman came. His diagnosis? Comcast just *turned off* our cable. Someone tagged our apartment as not paying for cable, and “auditors” unplugged our cable, just for fun.

I don’t even have the energy to address that insanity. It’s back on now, and I talked Comcast into giving us at least a credit for the downtime.

So now I just finished watching the Presidential Debate from yesterday, and I am reminded of something wise I read, which I will now paraphrase without attribution.

You know things are bad when the (Republican) President is boasting about his prescription drug entitlement plan, and (Democratic) Senator Kerry is complaining about deficit spending.

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.