one.o.eight

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November 24, 2007

Gobble Gobble

Thursday was Turkey Day here in the USA, AKA Thanksgiving. We stayed home and kept our celebration small. We had a friend from India join us who had never experienced the holiday. He discovered stuffing and pumpkin pie. :) Later two more friends from school stopped by to visit and brought over more desserts! Really cool of them to do so. :D

Black Friday was spent at home playing a lot of WoW. I played until 6:30 AM Saturday morning! @_@ That was my birthday present to myself. :P

Hope your holiday is/was a good one. :)

Posted by Tacitus at 04:16 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 10, 2007

Left At The Ugly Penguin

I've flown through Atlanta International Airport a number of times (layovers), but have never flown out of ATL until last month. On this occasion I checked my bag at a ticket counter just off of the parking area, and when I inquired as to how I get to where I next needed to be, the ebullient ticket agent instructed me to walk down the sidewalk and "turn left at the ugly penguin."

Following their hand gestures, I spied in the distance what appeared to be a malformed pile of polished scrap metal. "That thing?" I asked.

They assured me it was indeed a penguin. And lo it was!

Now you may be wondering what penguins have to do with Atlanta, GA, and well... I have no idea! But there it is: stainless steel, majestic, modern, and not all that ugly if you ask me. But then I'm into metal. <.<

Posted by Tacitus at 01:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 09, 2007

PODdy Time!

So the PODs arrived at the storage unit. The guys who manage and maintain the place were great and directed the PODs to convenient, level ground right outside the access door to our unit.

A gaggle of local friends turned out to help us transfer our junk from the PODs to more fixed storage. What took two a total of ~30 hours to pack was unpacked and repacked by eight in 4 hours. Even a few trips to the apartment with the essentials (beds, dressers, sofa, TV, etc.) were managed. Everything was going smoothly until... (You knew this was coming right?) ;)

With only a handful of large items remaining, the clock struck 22:00 and without so much as a whisper, the main security gate to the facility locked for the night. No one could get in, and more importantly no one could get out! This fact kind of ran counter to my whole understanding of 24/7 Access. Go figure.

Now all but two of us, and one car, were outside the gate at the time, but that didn't matter since some of our numbers were trapped behind an "imposing" faux wrought iron security fence. Of course the office was closed, so I call the cops hoping they'd have a means of freeing my spouse, our friend, and his car; before our group opted for Plan B: the disassembly of the gate. <.<

Not knowing the local non-emergency number, I call 911 and immediately ask to be transfered to a non-emergency line. The dispatcher replies, "Dude, what do you want?" At which point... I concluded it must be a slow night, and explained my plight. The police arrived shortly, and deciding we weren't actually trying to rip the place off, freed our captives.

Thus ended our evening; five pieces of furniture shy of completing our move. I took care of those the following day, again with the help of a local friend and his truck. So now I have a living room full of unassembled furniture waiting for me to find the time to put it all together, and thus reassemble our lives into something more resembling "normal". And yes, I use that term very loosely. :P

Posted by Tacitus at 08:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 01, 2007

There and Back Again

The rape of our finances is finally over. We have sold our house in NJ. Almost 15 years of consecutive home ownership has come to an end, and what we are left with is not much more than with what we started. So much for my piece of the "American Dream." I am seriously considering not ever owning a house again, but we'll see.

I returned to NJ during my Fall break from school to shoehorn the last of our things into another POD. As the NJ-based moving company, with which we had planned to contract this task, tried to take shameless advantage of our situation (why should I have not seen this coming?), loading a POD by hand in the rain was the only affordable option.

The road trip up from VA was uneventful; with my father staying true to his promise to not putter along like an "old man." And with the exception of the precipitation which waxed and waned in a most miserable conjunction with every trip from the house to the POD, the "move" went smoothly.

Of course, NJ couldn't let us go without levying a few more fuck-you fees; like one by the county Fire Inspector who came out to confirm that a fire extinguisher and smoke and CO detectors we in the house and working; tasks that were also performed by the house inspector. The difference? The house inspector was paid by the buyer. The Fire Inspector was paid by me, the seller. Same task. Performed twice. For a wad of money each time. New Jersey: Where Redundancy Is a Career Field. (And there's probably a union for it too.)

Despite the rain and the excessive bureaucracy, we actually finished early, and were able to return to VA on Saturday, leaving my Sunday free until I had to be at the airport for the return flight home. I managed to visit with a few friends, but not nearly as many as I would have liked. I managed to blank on a number of friends' contact information, and so missed them. I can be such an idiot at times. For others it was simply bad timing. Sorry for crossed connections.

I arrived at the airport two-and-a-half hours before my flight was to depart, and good thing too. At two hours before take off, someone triggered an emergency alarm effectively shutting down the airport terminal for almost an hour. I was one of the lucky ones who had made it through security screening prior to the alarm, and had a nice sit-down wait at the end of the concourse tunnel at the base of a steel security door. Boarding time was un-delayed, but then we waited for thirty odd passengers to trickle in who had been caught outside security screening during the alert. We departed 30 minutes late. But the adventure wasn't yet over.

En route to Atlanta, we had to defer to Raleigh-Durham for a medical emergency: the passenger next to me experienced a Grand Mal seizure in his sleep. Luckily, there were both an MD and an RN onboard (both passengers), so skilled care was on hand. After the paramedics took the passenger off the plane, we were back in the air.

The remainder of the flight was uneventful until after landing and taxiing to our assigned gate, where the gangway that pivots out from the terminal to the plane would not function properly and so took some 20 minutes to be coaxed into position. Then there was some confusion with the luggage as we had been a flight from VA (and our luggage was tagged as such), but we had come in from Raleigh-Durham. It took another 30 minutes to find the right luggage carousel. In the end, a 2 hour delay, but an interesting series of events.

During this all I couldn't shake a nagging feeling—that all of these events were actually the New Jersey hooks (that for three years held me fast) snapping free of my life. That miserable state was trying to hold onto me despite my efforts to be free; the persistent bastard.

Posted by Tacitus at 11:27 PM | Comments (3)

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