Week One = Success

I think I'm going to love Charlotte. I knew I loved my apartment from day one, but I've been spending time this week getting to know this whole new city, and I think I'm liking it. To reiterate what I'm sure I've said before...it is so good to have a home again. Sarah stopped over for dinner on Friday, and even though I don't have any dining room furniture yet (arrives from Delaware in a month), we had a fantastic meal. A meal that wasn't cooked in the cafeteria at Delta State. Pasta with broccoli, and toasted garlic and breadcrumbs, with garlic bread and green salad. Plus strawberries were on sale at Harris Teeter, so that was dessert. Very classy, even if we had to use magazines as place mats on my coffee table.

An additional success this week was spending Friday night in Winston-Salem with some excellent people.

I drove up to hang out with Reed and Discepelo, only to discover Kate M. and Caroline T. were there too! Plus a bunch of other cool folks, some still in college (some younger than students I've taught!) some not. It was a fairly ridiculous evening, but a nice reminder that there's no need to start feeling old at 25 if I can still flip a solo cup and chug Bud Light. A good deal of the night looked like this:
After my brief return to college, I drove back to Charlotte the next morning, went to get lunch at a place called the Thomas Street Tavern. While there, I met a number of interesting people at the bar. I was sitting there with my Red Oak when an old man and his wife sit down one stool over. The man sets an empty pickle jar on the bar. I looked closer, and noticed the jar was not in fact empty. There were 15 or 20 spotted beetles crawling around inside it. The bartender (sexy) came over and apparently knew the guy and his wife (as well as everyone else at the bar) and beetle-man started explaining to hot-bartender that he'd collected the beetles from his garden to bring down to the guys over at the hardware store to see if they could tell him what they were and what to do about them. I asked if I could look at the bugs, and he began telling me how they were all over his yellow squash, just eating it to pieces, but that the guys at the hardware store told him they were spotted cucumber beetles and that he could spray them with [something I forget] to get rid of them. He'd brought them to the bar in case anyone else wanted to see what they looked like so they could identify them on their own plants. After showing the bugs around for a few minutes, he gave them to the bartender to throw away. The bartender asked, "Should I put a little whiskey in there? Give them a glorious end?" but beetle-man thought that would be unnecessary. So the bartender chucks the pickle jar, and then he goes and pulls out a plastic grocery bag of cucumbers from behind the bar! Some other bar patron had grown them and left them at the bar to be given out to anyone who wanted one. In retrospect, I probably should have taken one, but the pickle jar of cucumber beetles was bizarre enough already, and the production of home-grown cucumbers completely caught me off guard.

This is not something that would happen in Chicago. But I absolutely loved it.

Further successes this week include: Yesterday I walked to the library and got a library card, plus four books (on economics, the Revolutionary War and the Constitution), and a Belgian movie (Le Fils) that looked appealing. Then I got dinner in NoDa at Cabo Fish Taco with Taylor K. who came down for the evening and brought me muffins. This morning I went to Uptown Church, which I think I might go back to next week. It's not Covenant Chicago, but we sang a lot of the same songs (albeit sans the violin/mandolin/accordion/recorder/cello that made music at Covenant so great), and the sermon was some good, solid exegesis on John 15 (I am the vine and you are the branches). The building they meet in has some unbelievably beautiful stained glass and I'm a sucker for a beautiful church. Three people introduced themselves and were very friendly and sincere. Plus, it's a mile-and-a-half from my apartment, which means once it's not hideously hot, I could conceivably walk. Or ride the bike that will also be arriving from Delaware. And then, after church I caught up with Lauren R. for lunch at 300 East in Dilworth. So...all that to say...success! Charlotte's looking pretty fantastic!

Reason 837 that I moved back south

Three letters. Two of them are B and the other is Q. I don’t know what I was doing being a vegetarian all through college. I had no idea I was living so close to amazing piles of vinegar-soaked pork.

Taylor and her boyfriend Chris took me to a place in Winston that does Lexington style BBQ, which is apparently halfway between ketchup style and vinegar style. You get a little cardboard dish that’s mounded with meat on one side, slaw on the other. Plus hush puppies. And sweet tea. And, as an added bonus, stylish tobacco-themed décor. Good old Winston-Salem. Man, I love the south.


I spent tonight hanging out with Hope (my ex’s awesome mom) who’s putting me up at their lake house for the night. We got dinner and saw ‘Splice.’ Not sure what to say about that movie, except that A) it’s nothing like the previews (which didn’t exactly make me want to go see it) and B) that it involves human-animal cloning, spontaneous sex changes, cross-species reproduction, and a sex scene involving a prehensile tail.

Apartment? Check.

Done and done. I loved the first apartment I saw, and it was one of the cheapest on my list, and so that’s that! I looked at one other place just because I’d already made the appointment, but it was $75 more and not as big. My soon-to-be new place is in Myers Park, right down the street from some ridiculously large mansion sort of houses, so that makes me feel like it’s pretty safe. I can also walk to things! I am still not liking the fact that you have to drive everywhere. I love my little Camry, but the every-day, errand-running, stop-light-waiting, parking-lot-navigating, suburban car-driving lifestyle is not one I’m quite ready to embrace with enthusiasm. But from this apartment I can walk to a movie theatre, a Rite Aid, a Harris Teeter and a library. I have the bottom right half of the building.

Still, what I saw of Charlotte definitely doesn’t feel like a real city to me. It’s too clean and new and landscaped and upscale and shiny. Granted, I spent most of my time yesterday in Dilworth and Myers Park, which are pretty upscale neighborhoods I guess and I’m glad to be living there, given that it’s hard to know where’s always the safest place in a city you’ve never been to before. However. I think I’ll need to get to know this supposedly artsy NoDa area, so I don’t feel like I’m living in a rich-and-preppy wonderland of Starbucks and stores that sell Vera Bradley.

The apartment itself however is old and cool. (I was so distracted by its charm that I failed to take any pictures of the interior.) But…it’s a four-flat built in 1940-something. Original hardwood floors, real wood doors and beautiful trim work. The bathroom has black and white subway tiles like the 1940’s era bathroom I grew up with. The place even has one of those old phone nooks like my parents have in the dining room at home. Two bedrooms, big living room, small-ish galley kitchen with giant pantry and a back porch entrance, separate dining room with a screened-in porch. And it has central air. It’s old, beautifully maintained, way more space than I need, and doesn’t feel like it’s built out of drywall and vinyl. One of the other tenants is 97 and has lived there since the 1970s. I figure if someone chooses to stay there for 30+ years, it can’t be that bad of a place to live.

After I got back to Winston-Salem from Charlotte yesterday, I went to campus to get some extra copies of my transcript to have on hand for next week’s TFA “Induction.” I also took a walk over to Reynolda Village and took a detour into the woods on the way. Last time I was on campus, probably close to two years ago, I remember walking through the woods and looking at the turtles and ducks in the marsh that used to be a lake, and feeling melancholy about living in a big city with no marshes to be found. Ha! No longer. It’s good to be back, North Carolina.