Well, I haven’t been around for a while, have I? Sorry about that. Not sick or bored, just busy and STILL HAVING COMPUTER PROBLEMS.
NOT THAT I AM ANGRY OR ANYTHING.
Also, it’s hard to concentrate lately. Life is one big series of to-do lists and phone calls, complicated by our whack-ass weather of late, which can best be described as: Whack-ass. Snowstorm before Christmas, temperature drops to zero, temperature soars to 60, everything melts. (This is all in about five days.) Then it starts raining, temperature drops, ice, snow, more rain, and now it’s back at 60. Forecast for tomorrow: in the teens. The back yard is a swamp, the river’s risin’, and if we had a hill for mud to slide down, I’m sure it’d be happening.
By the way, sorry to hear about your problems, Californians.
Although, I have to say, I’m sure Armstrong Williams would be happy to have a real mudslide fall on his head at the moment, given the mess caused by the rhetorical one. I admit, when I heard this p.o.s. had collected a cool $240K from the damn government for writing columns, my first thought was, “And to think, in nearly 20 years, the best I got was an occasional lunch.” And you know what? Many reporters, and many columnists, are happy to lick the boots of the powerful for far less than even that. I’d say the Bush administration overpaid, at the same time I’m imagining at least a dozen shoes dangling on toes, waiting to drop. I have my own ideas about who’s got a seee-cret, but for now, The Poor Man has a very entertaining betting pool going. I’m going under on Dinesh D’Souza.
Why I’m glad this idiot will no longer be my congressman, in 16 days.
A mover came today, the second, to look at all our stuff and figure out what it’ll cost to move it. I think we’ve kept our life fairly lean and mean, but we’re a family and dammit, we have stuff. “Is someone in the house a D.J.?” she said, looking at our modest row (OK, six feet) of LPs. Talk about guilt — you find yourself begrudging every book, every CD, every object, and it’s not like I have a collection of Hummels, for God’s sake.
Tell me some moving horror stories. Make me feel better.
P.S. I’m watching J.C. Burns’ sister, Leslie, on “Jeopardy!” and apparently she isn’t blogging about it. With Final Jeopardy still ahead, I suspect I know why.
Connie said on January 12, 2005 at 9:25 pm
Darn it. For a second there my heart was filled with joy. In 16 days Souder will no longer be a congressman! No, wait, in 16 days Nance moves out of his district. Darn.
Moving stories? I’ve done the pack and ship thing twice and both times it was wierd. Watch out or they will pack your trash. And stuff is packed within stuff and then within stuff again. For over a year in Minnesota I could not find the dark blue cloth napkins I tend to use with Grandma’s dishes. Then at Thanksgiving I pulled out my rarely used box of good silver and there they were, rolled into skinny tubes and tucked between and around the silver.
Good luck, have fun.
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brian stouder said on January 12, 2005 at 9:50 pm
well first – as for the whack-ass weather, we live in the shadow of channel 15’s TV tower. I believe it soars 450 into the air, and numerous sets of guy wires radiate in several directions from lower, midway, and high atop the thing.
Every year we get at least one good ice storm (and some years, more than one) – and when the inevitable meltdown comes, the coating of ice peels off the tower and the guy wires. If it’s a rapid warmup, an oddly impressive (and slightly intimidating!) barrage of ice comes spearing down, smashing into the roofs of houses, cars, driveways, and all up and down the street. That spectacle has the virtue of being overwith quickly!
Other times, the ice comes down a little at a time, which can last through the course of a night (and can produce a genuinely unnerving ‘THUMP” on your roof!) Some of the ice flies, javelin-like, out and away from the tower, maybe making it 5 yards outward for every 15 yards downward; others tumble end-over-end to crash who-knows-where. Truly, I wonder how they deal with this in a cityscape like Chicago, where millions of people are amongst dozens of towering structures, with plenty of whack-ass weather every year…
Aside from that, I agree the Bush admin over-paid for whatever they think they got from Williams. All W’s best shills (Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, et at) make piles of money all their own. The funny part is that W did the deed so poorly. All the leftists know that the way to pay off a journalist is to give them a good Clinton-style stroking
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joe kobiela said on January 12, 2005 at 10:00 pm
N,
Gee sorry about the weather. Have been in Orlando since Friday, Temps high 70’s-80 lows 60-65, blue sky’s, Weather was a bit hot for the marathon, hit the wall at 21 miles but still finished in 4:02. Bad part is back to Ind on Thursday. Good luck on your move.
Cheers from Disney.
Joe
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Gene said on January 13, 2005 at 12:23 am
Brian,
A good way to tell Chicagoans from suburbanites and tourists in the winter is to watch the sidewalks. Chicagoans know enough to walk closer to the street and away from the icicles dangling from the various high-rises. I’ll bet almost every person who has been nailed by falling ice in Chicago has been from outside the city limits.
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kim said on January 13, 2005 at 8:22 am
Almost 11 years ago we moved to Virginia from Chicago. During our “you’ve got three days – choose a new life and shelter in a place you’ve never visited!” tour I asked the realtor if a public library was near the house we were about to buy. I was toting our year-old son and feeling a bit peckish about the coming change. Her response still kills me: “Are you a librarian?” “Is that a rhetorical answer?” I responded. “Excuse me?” she drawled.
“Exactly,” I said.
Hey, at least the lady knew what an LP was. My 7-yr-old found our stack and wanted to use them in his treehouse. Hang in there. Moving is huge.
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Dorothy said on January 13, 2005 at 9:13 am
I still can’t belive I have moved twice in less than 3 years. Best advice I can give is to mark the boxes as best you can which room they go to, and what’s inside them. I don’t mean each thing, of course, but this will help tremendously when you go to unpack.
We were fortunate this last move was paid for by Mike’s new employer, but it was still aggravating. The movers in Ohio were first rate, efficient and diligent workers. Only two guys to pack the whole house and the truck, and we tipped them generously. We got to South Carolina and found out quickly the things we heard about Southern attitudes toward work were not an exageration. Larry, Moe and Shemp rested every half hour for the first two hours and only stopped that when I walked on the truck and grabbed a box myself. (I’m not a confrontational type of person when it comes to that stuff – I didn’t want to risk their wrath and have them drop breakables if I bellowed at them.)
They were careless at a few places inside the brand new house, too, gouging drywall going up the steps and splitting some baseboards in the kitchen. Mark down EVERYTHING if they do damage because they are insured – eventually they came back and repaired everything but it took forever.
I wish you luck and much happiness, Nance. The hardest thing for me about moving is making new friends. It will help that you have Kate and you’ll meet her friends’ moms and dads. My kids are in college so I don’t get as much exposure to adults the same age as me, except at work. I really miss my old pals and all my family in Pittsburgh.
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4dbirds said on January 13, 2005 at 10:04 am
As a former army girl, I’ve moved so many times I have no single place to call home. I’ve experienced stolen jewelry, broken and scratched furniture (German movers are notorious for drinking beer as they wrap and pack), but the worst experience was opening up a box at our new home to find the movers had shipped a used diaper. Phew!! Brian, speaking of moves, nice move bringing Clinton into the discussion to deflect any criticism of conservatives.
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alex said on January 13, 2005 at 10:17 am
Mark Souder made me hold my nose, but other than that my relocation to Hoosierland from that great blue state of Illinois went swimmingly. I packed and moved everything myself, and not a thing got broken save for some cheezoid freebie glassware that came with a liquor purchase.
As for Chicago winters, yes–the worst calamities seem to befall the out-of-towners. I remember some years ago, on my lunch break, noticing Michigan Avenue cordoned off around Nieman Marcus. Turns out a man from Wisconsin got flattened by an enormous chunk of ice. He was waiting for his daughter, who was taking a college entrance exam.
As the skyscrapers age, ice isn’t the only thing falling off them, and in the last several years we had quite a few other catastrophes involving terra cotta tile and panes of glass. At CNA Insurance–an ugly and relatively new building–a window took out a woman walking with her toddler daughter. A friend who worked in IT at CNA described the scene from above: The mother was turned to a pulp. It looked like someone dumped a couple of giant cans of stewed tomatoes on the sidewalk. And the unscathed child was swimming in it.
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Randy said on January 13, 2005 at 10:51 am
When we moved into our current house, we unloaded the truck and left a few things in the old place, along with all the cleaning and scrubbing we agreed to do as part of the sale. We had plenty of time to square away the old place, we figured.
The next morning my wife had to be admitted to hospital for emergency gall bladder surgery, taking her completely out of the equation for five days. I scrambled to get the old place finished, started unpacking the new place, and visited the hospital three times a day so my wife could feed our five month old daughter. Because of the move we had no milk stored away, and she wouldn’t try formula.
So the move would have been stressful on its own, but it became an endless cycle of going from place to place, frantically getting things done and figuring out how much time was left in the day to get more things done. I recall cleaning the fridge at our old place at 1:30 in the morning, with our daughter sleeping peacefully in her car seat, which by then was the only thing left in the living room.
Anyway, my point is to always get the old place squared away well ahead of time, just in case a gall bladder eruption or some other unexpected development unfolds.
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Connie said on January 13, 2005 at 11:16 am
I have to second what Dorothy says about finding new friends in a new place. For years our friends were the parents of kids we had met when our daughter was in preschool. When you move with an older kid it’s just not the same. Until you find yourself with a kid in one of Indiana’s top competition high school marching bands, which is where we found our current band of adult friends. People have told me over and over again that the way to find friends in a new town is to join a church. Oh well, to each his own.
And Kim, as a public library director, I loved your library comment. I find it hard to believe the realtor had never heard that before, because I hear it frequently.
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juan said on January 13, 2005 at 11:20 am
All I can say is that it’s a slow news cycle when selling your government advertising space on your show (for an issue you’ve long championed) rises to the level of “scandal.”
That’s what he did. He sold advertising space for government spots on school vouchers on his news program. HE DID NOT TAKE MONEY TO CAMPAIGN FOR BUSH. That is unsubstatiated crap. The guy has been a proponent of school vouchers since Hector was a pup.
Whooo. The shame. Not a word about the CBS debacle, but that damn sell-out Anderson Williams… He really gives an honored profession a black eye.
In my minds eye, I flash back to Gov. Bill Clinton, standing up in the debates with Bush 41. He had that fecal-masticating smirk on his face, and he took his shot at John Sununu, who had “scandalized” the Bush 41 Whitehouse by taking a plane to a stamp collecting convention at taxpayer expense.
“Mine will be the scandal-free White House.” Smirk. Lip bite.
Uh-huh. In the parlance of my urban sisters: Bitch, please.
Bad behavior is no excuse for more bad behavior. But it’s funny how we tend to define morality down for “our guys” and call for the heads of “their guys” at the first sign of weakness.
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Danny said on January 13, 2005 at 11:22 am
Nance, good luck on the move. Like everyone says, be very “hands-on” and label everything.
WRT the p00rman, I hold andy, claudia and the rest of those bozos over there in very high disregard. I don’t think I have come across a bigger bunch of straight-up, bonofied jackasses in all my years on the internet. When they are wrong, which is often, they ignore any reasoned arguments presented to the contrary and basically just cuss you out. To engage them is to battle the hydra of stupidty as they clamber over one another to see who can post the most inanely F-bomb laden “Me too” drivel.
Ultimately, when one defeats “The Editors” with the calm calculus of reason, and “The Editors” and everyone else have worn out their collective F, U, C and K keys, one gets banned and the whole lot is left to their incestuous groupthink. Or at least that is what I have heard :-).
Andy is funny from time-to-time. If left unchallenged, he is as happy as the next idiot. Step over the boundary by saying something “inflamatory” like, “I disagree with you on such and such basis,” he shows himself to be not an idiot-savant, but an idiot-idiot.
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joodyb said on January 13, 2005 at 12:02 pm
Connie’s right: They’ll pack your trash (but nn will not be having trash around where they can pack it). Not a happy discovery on a blinding-bright post-blizzard day on the Prairie.
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Dorothy said on January 13, 2005 at 12:18 pm
Connie, sure wish you lived in Greenville, SC! We could be instant friends perhaps. Forgot to mention that when I moved from one area of Pittsburgh to another (about 35 miles between homes) the first thing I asked a new neighbor was “Where’s the library?” Doesn’t feel like home until I go in the door and apply for my new card! Funny, though, how I haevn’t done that here yet. Wonder what THAT means?
And we have been struggling to find a Catholic church here where we feel comfortable. THey all seem terribly old fashioned and backwards to us. Cincinnati was VERY Catholic and we belonged to the greatest church with lots of young families. Here it’s really the priests that are driving us nuts, more so than the church itself. When I hear them using Latin at the start of Mass, I just want to scream: WOULD YOU STOP WITH THAT!? IT’S 2005 FOR PETE’S SAKE!!
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mary said on January 13, 2005 at 2:09 pm
Jeez. Souder is an idiot. That’s the second idiot you’ve pointed out to me recently, and I appreciate it.
Mary
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brian stouder said on January 13, 2005 at 2:48 pm
Souder is indeed an idiot.
I voted for his opponent, even despite that our Democratic nominee actaully made HIM look like the one with brains (no kidding – she walked out of a televised debate with him in the first minute, saying “I just can’t do this”…They even gave her a mulligan and stopped everything, let her calm down, and started all over again – and she bailed out AGAIN!!!)
Mary, I DO believe ANYBODY would be a better representative than Souder is (hence my vote for Para, who was singularly inept!); unfortunately the Democratic party in this area keeps testing that proposition!
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