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March 2006

Stuff

It’s off to Greensboro tomorrow to take care of some business for a friend and to install a new printer and scanner for my mom. I wanted to do this earlier in the week, but my life is sort of on hold thanks to the leisurely pace at which so many medical professionals seem to operate these days, particularly when it involves getting in touch with patients.

Of course, my aversion to technology which facilitates people getting in touch with me may be making this all a bit more difficult, but I’m comfortable with that.

This, by the way, is hysterical, and comes to you via here.

Mmmm. Cake.

I’m baking a cake. A carrot cake, specifically. It may be a very interesting carrot cake, because I accidentally sprinkled garlic powder into the mix rather than the ground cinnamon I thought I had in my hand. I think I managed to scoop most of it out, but you never know how much of a great new taste treat I may have developed here.

Randomly Saturday

Random thoughts for a Saturday night:

  • For those of you who may have been concerned about this, the secret ingredient in Wednesday’s cake, while no particular improvement to it, also proved not to be particularly detrimental either. In other words, no one (myself included) really noticed.
  • I spent today in Columbia with my parents, visiting an elderly cousin I hadn’t seen in a good twenty years or so. This being the south, we’re ALL cousins here, so I’m not 100% sure of the relationship. She was my grandmother’s first cousin, which makes her (I believe) my first cousin twice removed. Yes, this being the south, people also pay attention to distinctions like that. Makes it easier to keep up with who’s off limits for breeding.
  • Is it just me, or do truck lane restrictions actually make driving on the freeway MORE dangerous rather than less? Around here, trucks are restricted to the right two or three lanes of urban freeways. In theory, I assume it’s supposed to make drivers in the left lane feel safer. In practice, however, it just makes truckers behave like assholes in lanes where other drivers expect to be moving at a slower pace. So you end up with big rigs riding your ass at 70MPH when you’re not even IN the fast lane because (a) they CAN’T pass and (b) they WON’T slow down.
  • Why is every freaking freeway interchange in South Carolina NAMED for someone? And why is it always someone with a stupid nickname in quotation marks, like Jefferson C. “Buzz” Dingleberry, or something similarly idiotic? As honors go, having your own memorial onramp must rank just slightly above having a toilet in New Jersey named for you.

Atlanta

I decided on Monday that there were several reasons why it was necessary for me to leave town for a few days. The water was going to be off all over my apartment complex, I have a promising interview later this week which might make future trips more difficult, and I just sort of felt like it.

So I went to Atlanta.

I just got home. I’m beat so I’m not going to tell any exiting stories about the trip tonight. OK, there weren’t really any REALLY exciting stories anyway, but still…

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir

So now I’m all excited at the prospect that “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” (the TV series) may be coming to DVD soon. I loved that show; I used to watch it in re-runs every night on channel 18, right before “Nanny and the Professor”. And just like “Bewitched”, it had its own token homo, in the person of Charles Nelson Reilly…

Long Week Ahead

It’s shaping up to be a long and mildly unpleasant week, so I guess I should make the most of the weekend, huh?

The ‘Burbs

Funny, funny op-ed piece from my hometown paper:

he zoning laws are very strict concerning the naming of new residential communities. If you are well-funded and have the right lawyer, you can pretty much drop houses out of the sky wherever you please, but the name must be generated from the grid below by choosing one word from each of the columns, (e.g., “Hootenanny Hills Holler” or “Deer Droppings Down”).

…

I live in northwest Greensboro, which is zoned “HT-3,” meaning it is mandatory that a Harris-Teeter be located every three miles or else. Under municipal ordinances, if it is ever found that there is a greater than three mile distance between any two northwest Harris-Teeters, the city is empowered to build a deli and/or bakery in your residence until a new store can be constructed. Until they opened up the new Harris-Teeter on New Garden Road last month, my mom was forced to hang rotisserie chickens from her porch, and it caused a serious animal problem.

While driving around looking at houses with the hubby, I also like to come up with new subdivision and street names. Some of my favorites include numerous variants on “The ___ at ___ ____” and cute, little multi-word street names. Forget “The Shops at Peppercorn Point” or whatever. How about some of these?

  • The Projects at Piedmont Courts
  • The Prostitutes at Larkin Street Commons
  • Crystal Meth Marketplace at Ashley Point
  • The Check Cashers at Wal-Mart View Terrace
  • The White Trash of Dover

And in the vein of street names like “Timid Deer Lane” and “Spotted Oak Trail”, may I suggest the following:

  • Uncircumcised Penis Lane
  • Hempsmoke Heath
  • Lost Cherry Circle
  • Detached Retina Drive

More ideas welcome…

Not a Surprise

It’s absolutely insane that a decade of bickering over aesthetics now means that the eastern span of the Bay Bridge will not be completely rebuilt until a quarter of a century after the earthquake that originally damaged it. I’m glad I don’t have to drive across the damned thing anymore.

Notice that I said “insane” rather than “surprising”. There is, alas, nothing at all surprising about it.