It’s official: I’m now a person of no fixed address. The Fort Wayne house changed hands this morning, and it’s as empty as Paris Hilton’s head, except for a homely couch we left behind for the new owners (with their permission, I hasten to add) and a few Spriggy-grams in the back yard (which I meant to get to last week but then, whoops, it snowed a truckload and they became someone else’s problem).

This is Kate’s last day at school, which means I’m at loose ends until late afternoon, and I have the classic homeless person’s problem: Where to go to while away the hours? I opted for Panera, which has free wireless, a classic third-place customer attractor, something Barnes & Noble should learn — the “free” part, that is. Panerablogging will keep me from thinking too hard about the unique circumstances of this day: A full tank of gas, a recently serviced car, a packed suitcase, a little dog to accompany me and, best of all, a substantial sum in two casher’s checks at my elbow. Today’s mortgage payoff could become tomorrow’s down payment…or it could be my ticket to a new life with an address like “c/o General Delivery, Pier 66, Barbados.” Which is also unfixed, but in a much more interesting way than my current situation.

The high today is supposed to be 18. I’m tempted.

The load-out was yesterday, and oh, it was sad, after we’d run the vacuum the final time and mopped the floor and swept the garage and looked at what we’re leaving behind. It was such a pleasant house to live in, but time keeps marching along. When we moved in, it was a riot of floral wallpaper and dollhouse curtains. We minimized with pleated blinds and saturated colors. Now I turn on “Sell This House” and see gay decorators sneering over faux-finish paint jobs. Two of our bedrooms had faux-finish paint jobs. Bastids!

I left a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator for the new owners, which is what we found when we moved in. I hope it’s a karmic blessing of sorts. Old houses need all the help they can get.

It’s 15 degrees outside, and the dog’s been in the car for 90 minutes or so — wrapped in my fleece scarf, but still. Time to push my shopping cart down the road. In three hours, we’ll be Michigan-bound.

The house is officially trashed. Half of everything’s in boxes, the garage is filling with garbage bags and the dog is starting to look around with a worried expression — he just knows the new place doesn’t have a fenced yard.

(Which is doesn’t, yet. When I mentioned the possibilities of invisible fencing, Alan reminded me of our neighbor’s experience with it. Their redbone hound would hurl himself at the fence, yelping in pain from the shock he was getting, scramble over and run off down the street. Evidently he either never connected the pain with the fence, or else he thought freedom was worth a few seconds of pain. I can see our tough little terrier adopting the same attitude when mocked by a squirrel just outside the perimeter. If you have experience with these gadgets, give a report.)

Anyway, the house is trashed. Tomorrow I have half a dozen errands to run and 65 phone calls to make, and one of those errands will be to the cable company to return their box and unreliable modem, which means we’ll be dark here at NN.C central offices and otherwise insane. So let’s figure on shutting this outfit down until the weekend at the very least, although I’ll still be available via e-mail, thanks to my neighbor’s leaky wireless signal and unsecured network.

In the meantime, feel free to carry on a lively discourse in the comments on topics of your choice. Maybe you could start with this amusing trifle: “Lincoln, gay? Of course!”

UPDATE: Or, you could try out this bit of locally obscure Johnny Carson trivia — the rise of Myrtle Young, potato-chip inspector. Never mind that the linked story appears in my old paper’s competitor; it encapsulates the basic outlines of Myrtle’s story well enough, while leaving out some important details.

One day Myrtle read a syndicated feature we used to run on the comics page of The News-Sentinel, “Ripley’s Believe It or Not.” It was about a man who had some bizarre bit of agricultural trivia — a potato that looked like Ziggy or a zucchini that resembled Richard Nixon or something like that. She sat down and dashed off a note to her local p.m. daily. That’s nothing, she wrote. I have a potato chip that looks like Bob Hope, and there’s a lot more where that came from.

A smart assistant features editor, John Bordsen, saw this and assigned it to one of his best reporters. That reporter sought out and interviewed Myrtle, who was an inspector on the line at Seyfert’s, our local snack-food purveyor. Her job was to stand by the conveyer belt and pick out and discard discolored, burned or otherwise unacceptable chips. Over the years, she’d started picking out chips that she thought looked like something other than chips — a pair of cowboy boots, famous people, etc. She was an absolute treasure, a seemingly dotty old lady who had turned the ordinary into the extraordinary, and the story captured all of this. There were lots of pictures.

Someone sent the story to David Letterman, and he invited her on. The reporter went along with Myrtle. It was her first time on an airplane. When the stewardess said there was a life vest under your seat cushion, she got up and pulled the cushion up, just to check.

The Letterman show didn’t go so well. He wasn’t very nice to her, treating her as a boring whack job, a reminder of why so many Hoosiers flee the state for places like Manhattan. Maybe she embarrassed him; the show just didn’t work. Myrtle flew home. But the next time the phone rang from a late-night talk show, it was Carson’s people. She got back on the plane, flying west this time, the reporter again accompanying her, and did the Tonight Show.

The rest isn’t exactly history, but it was memorable TV. Myrtle delighted Johnny, and he pulled the trick that TV Guide called television’s funniest moment — when she turned away to get another part of her collection, and a loud CRUNCH came from off-camera. She turned around, horrified, to find Johnny munching on a potato chip. Her face was like something out of a cartoon, and then he showed her the bowl of fresh chips he had stashed under the desk.

She was supposed to be one guest of three. She ended up being the only guest. Jennifer Tilly got bumped, along with an Irish flutist.

More TV and public appearances followed, in places like Japan, Europe, all over the world. Myrtle was the best thing that ever happened to Seyfert’s chips, although the plant closed a few years later, after she’d retired, when it was sold to a Missouri company that saw no reason to make chips in Fort Wayne. The News-Sentinel no longer has an assistant features editor, and the departmental staff has dwindled to just one writer, not several. I like to think those who remain would be smart enough to pick up on another Myrtle-like story if it came along, but you never know. If the wrong editor had opened that letter, it could very well have been round-filed.

And the reporter who turned Myrtle into a worldwide phenom? Well, that would be my husband, Alan Derringer. And now you know…never mind.

The next time you read this, I’ll be a Mitten Stater. Fingers crossed.

Congratulations, today, to two members of the NN.C extended family — and that is what we are, isn’t it? — who are getting their due, or at least a portion of it.

Lance Mannion, who apparently never gets tired, got a link from James Wolcott. “It was to the ‘Law & Order’ post, right?” I asked; no one has a more encyclopedic knowledge of L&O trivia AND subtext than Lance. No, it wasn’t, it was to this post, but do yourself some good and just add Lance’s page to your bookmarks and check him every day or so. He rarely disappoints.

Even more impressive was young Zachary, who made it into The New Yorker, yes I said The New Freakin’ Yorker this week, and not just in some lame-o Talk of the Town piece, either. We remember Zach when he was just the only other Fort Wayne blogger to come to a blog meetup at Chili’s several summers ago, and here he is, living in a $10,000 a month NYC apartment (yes, with several roommates, but still). We here at NN.C couldn’t be more proud to be on his blogroll. And we hope we can get on the guest list of one of his future parties.

The mover called today, and we have a date, and suddenly time seems to be galloping forward as opposed to easing in that direction, so I may not be here much over the next few days. Tonight I plan to clean out the liquor cabinet, hic. We have bottles in there left over from our wedding (in 1993), and it’s time to face facts: The only place people still drink Cutty Sark is in Martin Scorsese movies, especially when there’s Macallan in the house. Into the recycling bin with you, Mr. Cutty.

In the meantime, the nation’s newspaper weighs in on the infamous America’s Dumbest City designation. I’ve refrained from saying anything about it, being loudly and repeatedly on the record as believing such designations are the junkiest of junk news, intended to please lazy editors and TV news directors, as well as get the name of the designator into print as often as possible. I’ll stand by it, even while I enjoyed this remark, by a former resident widely believed to have been run out of town by dumb people:

But Gerry Prokopowicz, who served as Lincoln Scholar for nine years at Fort Wayne’s Lincoln Museum, says more needs to be done to get the city out of the dunce corner. “Some people in Fort Wayne are aware that the steady diminishment of its intellectual capital is directly connected to the town’s stagnant economy and are trying to do something about it,” says Prokopowicz, who teaches history at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C. “Unfortunately, they face a strong current of anti-intellectualism mixed with complacency and ignorance that characterizes much of the local business leadership.”

“Maybe it’s time to start paying attention to these quality-of-life issues,” he says. “Maybe it’s not always the messenger’s fault.”

No duh, prof.

But this is no longer my concern, is it? I’m en route to America’s Fattest City. (Last year, anyway; Houston reclaimed the crown for ’05.) I hope it’s a move in the right direction.

I had some car repairs scheduled for this morning, but stupidly forgot to reserve a loaner, which left me marooned in the dealership’s waiting room for much of the morning. I tried make the best of it. My cell phone’s batteries were almost dead, so I plugged the auto charger into a showroom Touareg and made a few calls from the driver’s seat, my very own $48,000 telephone booth. Read the Journal Gazette (six minutes), read the Financial Times (15 minutes), read Town & Country (45 seconds). The waiting room’s other reading material: Brochures on the 2005 VWs and a King James Bible (red state, or maybe the Gideons are doing car dealerships now).

Another customer was tapping away on a laptop identical to mine, which made me irritated I didn’t think to bring it. “They have a wireless network?” I asked. “No, but they have a computer for customers to use,” he said, indicating a beige box on a desk out in the showroom. Cool! Only it was like traveling back in time, a 486-era PC running Windows and IE. Dim monitor. No pop-up blocker. If the cars hadn’t been 2005 models, it would have been 1995. Every page took 20 seconds to load (I timed it). But along the way, I managed to find my way to this fine Marjorie Williams column, which I missed when it ran a year ago; it’s about the Janet Jackson Boobgate episode. As usual, Williams managed to cut to the rotten heart of the matter in a sentence or two:

It seems that only the desecration of a sacred, adult-male-oriented rite can awaken Authority’s outrage at the slime in which our children are daily bathed. (The Super Bowl isn’t supposed to be about nudity, dammit! It’s supposed to be about enormous men trying to maim each other’s kidneys!) Janet Jackson’s breast is probably the most wholesome thing your average 12-year-old has seen in a year of Sundays.

She goes on, without sounding like either a prude or a scold, to make a short list of the sort of cultural landmines most parents find themselves navigating daily — MTV, radio, video games, the sleaziness of PG-13 movies, etc. — and make some good points without sounding as though she spent the previous night sucking on a lemon. With more writers like her, we might actually be able to have a conversation about the cultural divide, but of course she’s dead, while Mona Charen, Michelle Malkin, Kathleen Parker et al will probably live to be 100, and be syndicated the whole time.

Not that I am bitter.

Speaking of video games, Kate spent a large chunk of Monday at her friend’s house next door, and reported a disagreement they had when Drake wanted to play a video game rated M (for moronic).

“If you do, I’ll have to come home,” she said, which made my heart leap like a deer, because apparently I made this rule (I have no memory of it, although I recall the gun conversation vividly), and she listened and followed it. (Those of us who don’t offer an all-seeing God to police children’s misbehavior have to believe there’s a seed of non-religious conscience inside our kids.)

“What’s the big deal?” Drake asked. “All it has is some shootings and killings and stuff.”

American children at play! So precious.

I had a job interview early in the summer, during which I was asked why I stayed in a media backwater like Fort Wayne so long. I have two answers to this question, one long and one short. I decided to offer the short:

“Because I hate moving.”

I don’t know how it weighed in the decision — I didn’t get the job, but neither did anyone else, I’m told — but it felt far truer than the long version. I’m by no means a pack rat; the throwing-out part of moving feels very good. But you can’t throw out everything, and the older I get, the more I have to keep.

For instance: I found a cache of letters Saturday morning, mildewy and dusty, but irreplaceable, letters from friends to addresses I haven’t occupied since 1977. There was an apology letter from an old boyfriend, dead more than 25 years. There were old copies of my college newspaper, including the last one of the year, with the staff photo that took up half the page. (It features airbrushing that looked as though it was applied with a fire hose; if some stringer or other hanger-on tried to sneak into the staff picture, they were outta there.) There was a puzzling business card — I couldn’t place the name — and then I remembered the nice-but-no-chemistry accountant who took me out on two movie dates once upon a time long, long ago. We saw “Agnes of God” and ate dinner at Casa D’Angelo. I looked at the card again; his office was, I realize, about three blocks from my new house in Grosse Pointe Woods.

Small world. I wonder if he’s still there.

I threw out some of it, kept most. Some things you just can’t leave behind. So we tote one more box. So it goes.

Now I have to get back to it, and a thousand other things. To keep you occupied:

A fine obit of Marjorie Williams, whose column I discovered just before she went on extended medical leave. A great loss, a great person.

G. Beato on our jes’ folks inaugural.

Ashley Morris slaps his HBO bitch up, over “The Wire,” of course. I’ve been meaning to plug Ash’s blog for a while; thanks for reminding me.

Back to the mangle for me.

Years ago, I attended a rather raucous Columbus Dispatch party at a German Village apartment — oh, stab me in the heart now! — which was hosted, in part, by a sportswriter. About 3/4 through the festivities, it occurred to me that the host had a big day tomorrow — the Memorial Tournament was in full swing.

“Don’t worry about him,” someone said. “Golf is a sport made for hungover reporters. All you have to do is make it to the press room, and everything takes care of itself. Every hole is on closed-circuit TV, the staff brings you individual score sheets, they even bring the golfers in so you can interview them. There’s even food. You never have to leave.”

In time, I’ve come to think of Fort Wayne’s floods as my own personal Memorial Tournament. I’ve covered enough now that I could do it from the newsroom, using the city street department as legmen. Tell me which streets are closed, which neighborhoods are evacuating, where sandbags are being placed, and I can close my eyes and see it all. I even know lots of the flooded-out residents’ names, having read them or interviewed them myself so many times.

So we’re having a flood this week. It’s my last Fort Wayne flood (I think — you never know), and this time I’m seeing it from the perspective of an editor, wondering how many ways we can think of to explain the reality of a flood, which pretty much relies on several very simple concepts:

1) Water seeks the lowest place.
2) Water has to go somewhere.
3) Flooding occurs when the usual places — rivers, streams — fill up.

That’s pretty basic. And yet, year after year, we write thousands of words covering the what (see No. 1), the where (No. 2) and, worst of all, the why (No. 3). But that’s our job, I guess.

Anyway, even though I can see it all in my head, I felt obligated to gaze upon it with my own eyes one last time. I went down to the park (closed) and took the public road around it (open, at least most of its length), drove as far as I could without becoming a gawk-block menace, parked and got out to gaze upon the mighty rushing St. Marys.

Yep, that’s a flood, all right, I thought.

Now it’s time to move.

Because he likes beet salad. And because this story is such a stitch:

Felipe Rose, the Indian dude from the singing group the Village People, presented the National Museum of the American Indian with a framed, gold 45-rpm single of the disco group’s 1978 megahit “Y.M.C.A.” on Wednesday afternoon.

And the museum happily and ceremoniously accepted it (a Lakota prayer was sung first, then everyone danced to “Y.M.C.A.”), on the precept that sooner or later they might need such an artifact of a bygone era, perhaps to flesh out a future exhibit on the folkloric value of disco, and native cultural responses to it. (No, you shut up. It could happen. Why not? There are only so many ceramic pots, war bonnets and kachina dolls that people can stand to look at, and so when the day comes that someone asks, Hey, what about the Indian dude from the Village People? the Smithsonian, as ever, will be ready.)

And not to change the subject too abruptly, but perhaps to point out that our readership here is truly diverse and …catholic (small c, please), my neighbor Michael Dubruiel (aka Mr. Amy Welborn), asked me to plug his Lenten retreat in Indianapolis. I regret I won’t be there. But I’m happy Michael still thinks my soul is worth saving, and that NN.C might help round up a sheep or two.

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.

Perhaps because it’s January, the month when we start thinking about exercising our fat bodies once again, and perhaps because I recently caught “Bull Durham” on cable, or at least the part where Susan Sarandon tells Tim Robbins he needs to breathe through his eyelids, I’ve been considering why some workouts work for people and some don’t.

I hate almost all organized participatory sports, because, like Yogi Berra, I can’t think and hit at the same time. I was the kid who got beaned in right field because my mind was elsewhere, and I’ve grown into the sort of adult whose favorite exercise is long walks with the dog, long bike rides along the river and long swims in 50-meter pools, all exercise where your mind goes elsewhere and reaches a state of thinking you can’t get any other way. In fact, swimming is the only workout where I finish feeling more relaxed and energized than I did when I started, and I’m talking a full mile here, sometimes more. I think it’s the combination of exertion and stretching, the way you’re rewarded for a relaxed reach more than a choppy surge.

I also love horseback riding, even though it requires thinking. The thinking, however, i s very right-brain, low on logic and rules and high on intuition and feeling. As in swimming, on horseback you’re rewarded for relaxation at the same time you’re using muscles you didn’t even know you had. (No aerobics class or weightlifting session ever leaves me as sore as a 45-minute riding lesson after a long layoff.)

Riding is the most Zen sport I know, but all athletes benefit from its principles of meditation, relaxation and not thinking too much We all know about Phil Jackson’s Bulls and, of course, Susan Sarandon’s great pitching advice to her young lover. Tiger Woods keeps his relaxed focus by exploring the inside of his glove, seam by seam and stitch by stitch. I once passed a guy playing golf on the public course that my bike route passes; he was teeing off, and you could see every muscle in his back tied in a knot (he was wearing a wife-beater — it’s a public course). He hit that ball hard enough to send it to Ohio, but so wrong that it flew straight up in the air and fell to earth just beyond the ladies’ tees.

Dude, I wanted to call out, explore the inside of your glove next time. And breathe through your eyelids!

Or do it the way Drew Brees does, who improved his passing by doing it with his eyes closed.