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Have I mentioned that I’m never moving again once we get settled in the new house? One of the only universally positive things I can say about my thirteen years in San Francisco is that I never had to move during that time.

Anyhow, Sunday is the big day. I can’t really say that I’m looking forward to it. We have to get the U-Haul truck, load it in Charlotte (which will be no small task given the layout of this apartment building), drive to Winston and unload it, and then (assuming we live through it and have time) go to Greensboro and pick up some more stuff from my parents.

Still, it can’t suck any more than last year’s cross-country move did, except for the fact that we’ll have to load and unload on the same day this time around. It’s a pretty safe bet, at least, that we won’t get stuck in a small town in Texas this move.

Updates may not be forthcoming for the next couple of days.

Five years ago today, I got an email message from some guy in Fresno on the subject of road trips I’d taken and how they related to one he was thinking of taking at the time. Even way back then, I was getting really bad about not answering email in a timely fashion, if at all. For some reason, though, I eventually answered his.

My life has never been the same. And I’m glad.

Things are moving along nicely here at Murdering Stream Estates. We should be able to get most of the remaining odds and ends out of the Charlotte apartment in one more trip; most of what’s left there is the other half of my rather large collection of vinyl and a few small kitchen appliances.

Mark‘s office is set up quite nicely, while mine is awaiting a new desk, which may be chosen tomorrow. Yes, we each have our own offices, each of which is about half again as big as any single room in our old apartment in San Francisco. Mine should be very comfy as it also contains most of my old childhood bedroom suite, including the bed.

The washer and dryer, which had for some reason been disconnected and moved to the garage, are now in their proper places and again are functional, if a bit loud. The guest bedroom now has its bed, and the kitchen is fully stocked, with Libby Hill leftovers in the refrigerator.

I like our house.

Dottie’s Diner on Stratford Road will be closing this weekend.

Open since 1990, the place still bears a strong resemblance to its predecessor of 30-plus years: Your House, a central North Carolina chain that operated from the 1950s through the 1990s. At least one location is still open, on Greensboro’s Battleground Avenue in a replica of its original building. Your House was a 24-hour diner, something of a knockoff of the Toddle House and Hull-Dobbs chains that were found all over the country in those days, and a precursor to the Waffle House of today.

I grew up eating at the Your House on High Point Road with my dad. We’d very often go there on Saturday mornings for waffles. My dad would meet his friends there in the evenings to sit at the counter, chat, drink coffee, and harmlessly flirt with the waitresses. In my early twenties, I’d go there with my own friends for the double cheeseburger that seemed so necessary at 2:30 in the morning after a night of drinking cheap draft beer somewhere.

I’m not entirely sure where I’m going with this except to say that these little diners are the real 1950s diners, and not some gay-ass imitation with fake neon and old records nailed to the wall. A sizable portion of our male population once got a significant portion of its sustenance from them, and from places like these, and it’s sad to see these little dives go.

I’ll also miss it because it was one of the first places Mark and I ate breakfast in Winston on one of our first exploratory trips here last winter. And they have really good grits.

My current task is to create some level of order in my new office. I’ve had mixed success.

I’d been holding off until I got a new desk, which I finally ordered last week for delivery on Thursday. So this weekend, I set about finding a place for it to land when it arrives. I thought it would be nice and easy once I got all the records organized and filed away in their new home in the closet, but there just keeps being more stuff.

The fact that I’m simultaneously trying to reclaim all the stuff my parents have been storing for me for fifteen years hasn’t really helped. But just look at this enticingly sexy sample of the stuff I’m finding in some of those boxes:

You should’ve heard the noises I made as I unpacked the above, along with a complete, unopened and unread Sunday Winston-Salem Journal from 1978 (with ads), and my collection of miniature Jungle Book figurines.

Pardon me while I re-live a childhood that may or may not have been mine…