- Monday morning, before I left St. Louis, the trash truck or something took out the phone line behind the house. The phone line which carries the internet. Sigh. So while I’ve been driving and have been somewhat out of touch, by the nature of this whole process, the fact that the internet died didn’t help things. Sorry for the lack of posts.
- The midwest (particular the northern and parts that I’m most familiar) is, on the whole, incredibly boring to drive through. Not stunningly boring, but not that bad. By the time you get to eastern Ohio, however, things start to get interesting. The miles and miles of corn fields interspersed with the lone standing tree and occasional soybean crop--you know you’re in trouble when soybeans come as a refreshing change of pace--were replaced with rolling hills, mountains, and the like.
To make up for this, however, it did seem that they were doing a lot of construction/road repair for very little improvement. Parts of the eastern edge of the turnpike were actually pretty good: modern, pretty wide, in good repair; other parts, not so much.
Although, to be sure, heading east was much better than heading west. Better to get the bland out of the way first, and have something interesting at the end.
- I met Chris for the first time, in the flesh. Dude. This requires it’s own sublist:
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I think the common perception is that things that happen in meatspace are somehow more authentic, and meaningful, and “real” than conversations that happen on line, and often I’d agree. While I’m certainly not complaining about the real-life experience, I do think that there are some distinct disadvantages:
It’s hard to share links in meatspace, and so “hey I was reading this thing, here’s a link, and I thought that it was nifty and has implications for ____” becomes, not a stepping stone for another thought, but an exercise in “hell, I read something not that long ago and thought it seemed relevant.
Chris and I tend to have these interleaved conversations where we’ll sort of drift through a few topics at once, and because at least in an ephemeral sort of way chats are logged, it’s hard to interrupt the other person, even if there are a couple of threads of quasi-related material on the table at once. Without the benefit of a running transcript you have to remember more and that’s weird, or at least it feels weird in this context. I’ll adjust I’m sure.
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On the whole, he is (and the occasion was) pretty much what I expected. I’ve had this theory about “how people turn out to really be in reality versus how they seem online,” which is that after enough time (months/years) it’s pretty hard to maintain any sort of ruse or false facade. Sure, people lie, and people lie in real life, but those amount to little surprises. Big surprises? Unlikely. That held true.
The cats have been reasonably cooperative. They’re sort of scared of the outside, and were made nervous by the whole experience. Thankfully their response was to cower/sleep in the carrier and not make a lot of noise. I’m leaving them with M.N. in Philadelphia for a night or two while I secure digs for us in New Jersey.
M.N. and I will have a couple of opportunities this weekend to do shape note singing. Woot!
It’s nice to know that summer, even early summer, isn’t quite as brutal everywhere as it is in St. Louis (or the other places where I’ve (semi)recently spent my summers: Kansas City, Nashville, and St. Louis of course.) Between that and the Wisconsin winter tolerance, which hasn’t yet worn off, I think I have a freakishly broad temperature tolerance.
Eastern time is weird. Though, at least for a little while, I like it because it sort of means that my body doesn’t quite get that it’s daylight savings time. And there are very few things that I hate more than daylight savings time.
And I think, that’s all the news that’s fit to print.
Edited to add: I’m going to continue such musing regarding my current state over on my live journal which seems the more appropriate venue for this kind of blathering. Real post tomorrow. I swear.