Skink!

Updates.

The Cheerios I left out for the mice disappeared. I have some (as yet unobserved) new friends.

Time Warner Cable came, at long last, which means I can watch episodes of Mad Men without incessant buffering.

Consequently, when not planning for my classes, or going to training things, I have been watching episode after episode. After episode. It's not as bad as with Six Feet Under, or Battlestar Galactica, or Lost, because the website that hosts the Mad Men episodes only lets you watch 72 minutes of video at a time, and then forces you to wait 54 minutes before watching another 72 minutes. I have no idea how they arrived at those numbers, but as aggravating as it is to have the episode stop ten minutes from the end, it at least has forced me to get up and do things. For example, yesterday it got to be about 4:00 and after getting a hair cut and greeting the cable guy, I'd pretty much just made food and watched more Mad Men. So when my 72 minute limit kicked in, I decided to find a mountain to hike.

The actual mountains were farther away than I felt like driving at 4:00 in the afternoon, but Google Maps told me that Crowders Mountain was much closer, so I told Sack (my GPS) where to take me and she got me there in about 45 minutes. (It's about 25 miles west of Charlotte.) At 1,600-ish feet, the "mountain" itself not especially tall, but it's got its own state park and a bunch of hiking trails. I picked a trail at random and hiked maybe two miles and change. At the end of it (well, the middle really - I went one way then doubled back) was a steep, gravelly hill that led up to some high rocky bits, half of which were roped off with caution tape for some reason. I couldn't see beyond that. I had not planned terribly well for my little excusion, and so was lugging my purse over one shoulder (ridiculous, I know - I need one of those little, tiny backpacks that hikers always have) and was sweating to death and the water bottle that I SHOULD have lugged with me, I did not. But, in my experience, you rarely regret climbing to the top of something very tall, so I kept going up. I had to climb sideways in one direction, then sideways in another, and then suddenly, I looked up. And the rocks and the trees stopped and it all just dropped away. I didn't bring my camera, but I drew a picture:
As I was trying to get the best view I could without pitching off the cliff, I heard a scratchy, scuttling sound off to one side, and in my peripheral vision I saw something moving across the trunk of a pine tree. I backed gingerly off the rocks I'd clambered up on, and moved towards the tree. It was a skink! Ha! The only wild lizards I've seen are those little anoles in Florida; and that skink totally made my afternoon. He disappeared before I could draw his picture, but here's about what he looked like (thanks, Google!)
I was glad it was not a rattlesnake. There were warning signs instructing visitors that the local rattlesnake mothers would be giving birth to their live young in the near future, and to be careful of snakes around rocky crevices. Rattlesnakes! So cool! I mean, yeah, glad I didn't run into any, but seeing one from a distance would have been even more awesome than the skink. I miss my snake friends at the Nature Museum (like Connie here) that I got to play with.

Dear Time Warner Cable..

Dear Time Warner Cable,

I waited for your knock on the door. You were supposed to come between 5 and 7. For that two hours, every time I heard a car pull up outside my heart skipped a beat, and I hoped it was you. I cleaned up my living room, and even changed out of my pajamas. I had everything planned out in my head. I'd show you where the cable hookup was, then I'd bring out my old wireless router and watch over your shoulder as you connected it to the new modem you promised me. Then we'd watch together as my computer found all its little wi-fi bars, and we'd test out the streaming video with something perfect from Hulu.

But then it was 7:05. And then it was 7:15. I called, and was told you were going to be late. That you were "out laying down a line." Right. But you'd be here between 9:00 and 9:30. I made myself some dinner, and tried to enjoy my episode of Mad Men as it buffered, and buffered again, and then stopped buffering until I reloaded the entire page. If only you'd get here, I'd never watch buffering again! I went for a run at 8:15 and hurried back to be sure I didn't miss you. I took the fastest shower ever, so I'd be sure to be out when you arrived. At one point I heard the front door open, and I froze in my tracks to see if I heard a knock on my door. But instead I heard someone walking up the stairs, and Amy's door open and shut behind her.

You never came. A very disenchanted-sounding man called me to reschedule for tomorrow. The twenty-dollar credit to my account would have been nice if I thought you gave it to me because you wanted to. Because you wanted to do something nice. That twenty dollars doesn't make up for the hopes I had. What happens to a dream deferred, anyway?

I'll let you in tomorrow. And I'll let you install my cable. I'll haul out my router and hook it up. I'll be courteous, and offer you a drink if it takes too long. But I want you to know that I haven't forgiven you. I wasted a whole evening, waiting and watching, only to be let down. Twice. I have better things to do with my time than wait around for you. I've got a life to live, Time Warner Cable.

Don't try and call tonight. I won't answer.
Molly

Mrs. Tittlemouse?

I might have some friends living under my apartment.
I noticed this suspicious-looking and rather mouse-sized hole today on my back porch entrance. I'm not sure how a mouse chews through brick, but I suppose given the 70 years the building has been here, maybe it's possible through the combined efforts of multiple generations...?
Since it's an exterior wall, not my screen porch, and the hole appears to go underneath the apartment, not into the apartment, I have no plans to disrupt anyone's cozy home. We get little mice in the house in Delaware sometimes - they're kind of adorable and are really just little Beatrix Potter characters as far as I'm concerned. As long as they stay out of my kitchen and out of my food, they're welcome to live in my foundation. I left some Cheerios by the hole to see if something comes and takes them. Yes, that's the kind of thing you do when you're nine, but there's not much for wildlife around my apartment, and mysterious animal visitors haven't yet lost their appeal for me. Unless I'm camping. I don't leave out food for bears because they scare the crap out of me. But I'll take a mouse or two over a house centipede any day of the week.

Reason 37 that I love my apartment

It appears that the big shrub outside my screen porch is actually a gardenia bush.
In both Delaware and Chicago, gardenias are houseplants that you buy in small pots in the grocery store to give as Mothers' Day gifts, so it completely threw me when I noticed familiar-looking flowers on this giant bush. The landscapers recently were out pruning mindlessly with loud electric hedge-trimmers, so it's not exactly flowering profusely, but given as the bush is behind my porch and not near anybody else's apartment, I had no qualms about cutting one of the few flowers I did see.

Gardenias smell so incredible, and nobody's going to enjoy it out in the parking lot. Now my bathroom smells lovely. (See the charming bud vase? Formerly a flask from a hospital lab, courtesy of my mom.) I should probably clean the rust off the overflow drain - that looks kind of dingy.

In teaching-related news, I've been schlepping off to the Marriott every morning for the past week for more TFA training/Kool Aid drinking (I'm swimming in it these days)/planning for my class that I start teaching in THREE WEEKS! I stopped by my school yesterday to scrounge up a text book, and was able to talk to the woman there who does scheduling. She told me that for all three blocks I'm teaching, I'd be working with an '09 Corps Member who teaches Civics & Econ inclusion. (Inclusion is just the way they teach the Special Ed kids who aren't so severely disabled they need their own class. They're "included" in the normal class, and the whole class is then taught by a classroom teacher and a special ed teacher who work together.) I'm really excited about this because my co-teacher, Cliff, taught this class last year, and so has a much better sense than I do of what works and what doesn't. Plus, having a co-teacher means I won't have to struggle on my own to differentiate for kids at different levels while trying to teach the rest of the students. Plus, he's already done a lot of planning for our class, so it's just going to be a matter of getting together and getting on the same page. Plus, he's been at the school for a year so he knows who can help with what, who's in charge of what, and all that other stuff that you get to know after working at a school but can't possibly know when you're brand new.
Tonight I have a dinner scheduled with some TFA donors who live just down the road. TFA has scheduled all of us to go to a couple of these dinners as part of their development campaign. Basically, we get a free meal in return for putting a friendly face on the organization they give money to. Although I'm not the most naturally outgoing person ever, I really kind of enjoy getting to know strangers in smaller settings like this, so it should be fun. Plus there are a couple other corps members going too, so it's not just me and the donors. I was planning on walking, but it has suddenly started thunderstorming (the weather here goes from sunny to monsoon in about 20 seconds) so that might not work out. I did walk to Ben & Jerry's though (3 minutes away) and got a black raspberry frozen yogurt. I don't know what possessed me to get the 'healthy' option - real ice cream is way better. Next time it's back to something with plenty of fat in it.
Free xml sitemap generator

Dear Charlotte's city planners: Seriously?

I got back from the Marriott and TFA stuff by 4:00 today, so I had some time to run to the post office, make dinner, write some emails, and then I thought I'd go for a run. I'm not what you call "in shape" so I figured I'd go for 2 miles, 20+ minutes, easy peasy. This was the route I had in mind when I left the apartment. (I live by the "D".)

Not quite. Charlotte has the most confusing street layout I have ever seen. Roads change names 3 or 4 times within a couple miles, they zig zag, connect in bizarre intersections, and half of them are named 'Queens.' You can stand at what, to all appearances, is the intersection of Queens and Queens. And then Queens turns into Kings, which makes total sense. This is the route I wound up taking:
I have circled for you all the pieces of road that are called Queens. Every time I thought "Oh! This is Queens, I know where I am"...surprise!! It's the wrong piece of Queens and it actually just changed its name to Morehead. 20 minutes of pleasant jogging turned into 20 minutes of pleasant jogging followed by 30 minutes of incredibly confused and sweaty walking. Thank you Charlotte, for making the executive decision that I needed a harder workout.

Our house is a very, very, very fine house

Today's my last day of freedom before it's back to TFA-land and the Marriott. I decided to pull out one of my p90x DVDs (for the first time in over two years) and spent an hour doing Kenpo with Tony Horton. I was pleasantly surprised to not be keeling over by the end - credit I'm going to give to LA Boxing back in Chicago. Made some ham and eggs, and a cup of tea, ate some nutella, and got to work on a painting I've been doing to go over my bed.

It's going to be half of a diptych, because I want the whole piece to be as wide as my mattress. But I figure it'll have the green, blue and brown that I currently have going on in my mismatched bedroom, and it'll give me something to put behind my bed without my having to go buy a headboard. Or a bedframe. The photo I'm working from is from an issue of my favorite magazine Orion and is part of a series of "landscapes" taken underwater in ponds and streams. It's the biggest watercolor I've ever tried, and it's taking me a lot longer than I thought it would, but it's nice, meditative work and I'm happy with how it's looking so far. It's been too long since I made anything pretty.

Otherwise, I've been listening to Crosby, Stills and Nash (thanks to a hefty donation from my Dad's iTunes), chatting with faraway friends of the Biber and Ex types, and enjoying one hell of a thunderstorm from my cozy screen porch. I have no porch furniture at the moment, but since I also have no dining room/kitchen table, I've at least got a spare chair.

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!