Where Have I Been?

March was wondering this the other day; I can only assume it's because he's secretly hankering for more Idol Thoughts. May is usually my busiest month because that's when I come out of hibernation and there are always a lot of birthday dinners for myself and a couple of my friends who share May birthdays. This May has been no exception. As you all know, I've been having nervous breakdowns over cataloging since January. I handed in my final paper in the end of April, then headed off to Mooresville to see Rusty. Two weeks after that, Chris and I went for a long weekend in Washington, D.C. and then right after that, my first summer class started. My second summer class starts June 3; yes, they overlap. And the birthday dinners haven't even started yet! The first one is today, I'm still waiting to hear back from L. (If you're reading this, thanks for ignoring me!! :)) and another friend, there is a breakfast pending with some old co-workers, and an outing to see Sex in the City with a current co-worker coming up. That's a lot for someone who is as adept at sitting on her ass as I am.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. D.C. pics are forthcoming; I don't have too many because the weather was horrible. Steady rains and temperatures 25 degrees below normal sort of marred my big plans, but I had a good time nonetheless. I ended up getting an 88% in Cataloging. I'm usually not happy with a B in a class for which I did so much work, but that was hell and I had D at one point, so I can't complain about a B. Especially since he ripped my paper apart... It's also a little annoying that he considers an 89% an A, so I just missed it. But, as one of my co-workers told me (remember what I said about working with therapists?), I need to let go of the negativity and move on.

I had my first session of my first summer class this past weekend and it was the best class I've had so far. I adore the professor (and I think she really likes me) and only looked at my watch about 3 times, compared to 3,000 times in my other weekend classes. I'm actually considering switching the class I chose in the fall to have her again. On a side note, I just found out that someone else will be teaching cataloging next time it's offered. Arghh!!!!!!! If I had waited, perhaps I could have had a professor who doesn't have such an arbitrary grading system. Sorry; letting go of the negativity... I'm dreading having these two summer classes overlapping (the first one is three weekends and the second is online) because we have to do as much in 5 weeks as we would normally do in 4 months, but by July 3 I'll be 6 credits closer to graduating. By Christmas I'll have 7 out of 12 classes and all I'll have left to take is electives, so I can take things that actually interest me.

There aren't any Idol Thoughts for last week because I worked Tuesday night and my Ti-faux is still out of commission, so I taped it and only watched David Cook's performances. No surprises Wednesday night; Syesha should have gone weeks ago. The Office season finale was Thursday and it was great. Pathetically, I'm glad that I'll have my life back after Wednesday. I rarely watch TV in the summer, and I won't have time to until July anyway. I even bumped my Netflix subscription down to 2 at a time.

Work is still insanely busy, compounded by the fact that I've been off so many days in the past month. I'm off again on Monday, so next week will be crazy again, but I'm hoping that things will calm down after that. Obviously we're closed on Memorial Day, but there's a huge difference in the amount of work required when I'm off on a vacation day compared to a day we're closed. It hasn't helped that they were switching the servers, so our MIS has been down a lot and 95% of what I do requires the ability to use it. The only other thing on the work front is that we got new computers (our old ones were castoffs from the state, so they were probably about 10 years old).
Now it takes less than 2 minutes to open a new window and I have a flat-screen monitor so I have free space on my desk! Woot!

So, with everything that's going on, I'll be posting D. C. pics and Idol Thoughts next week and then probably won't be around too much till July unless something awesome or stupid happens. I expect it'll be the latter. I hope everyone has a good beginning of the summer!

Centralia 12/26/07: Part IV

This is the sign that greets you as you near Centralia. This is the old route 61 (the one with all the cracks) that has been replaced.

The amount of graffiti in the town is unbelievable. The batteries in my camera died when we got to the crack (of course), so I wasn't able to get any good pictures of it.

There's obviously a pyromaniac who likes to come to Centralia. Among the detritus were shotgun shells, a bottle of brandy, McDonalds bags, old spray paint cans, and many, many cans of cheap beer. I'm not sure that I want to know what the mattress and garden hose are used for.


They still decorate for Christmas. There was a nativity scene in the town square. The saddest part of the trip was that the mayor's house was torn down. Here's the story. Within 5 years there will probably be nothing left.

Centralia 12/26/07: Part III

These are various vent pipes around the town (notice one has become a kind of garbage receptacle and has some nice graffiti) as well as some pictures of the gorgeous Orthodox church.

Centralia 12/26/07: Part II

Here are some pictures from a cemetery that we missed the first time around.

Centralia 12/26/07: Part I

I'm sorry about the bluish tint; I'm not very familiar with the settings on Chris's camera. This first series is pictures of smoke coming out of the ground (it shows up much better on a 40 degree day than a 90 degree day!), views from various parts of town, and, to begin the group, a sign that greeted us.

My Trip to Rusty's

I haven't been good at blogging lately, but I have to talk about my trip to Rusty's. I left at the asscrack of dawn on Saturday morning. The airport was 10 times as busy as it was the last time I went. I accidentally forgot to take my lighter out of my bag which caused the security guy to hold it up and yell, "Whose is this?!" Oops. Incidentally, they started allowing lighters on planes THE DAY AFTER I CAME BACK!!


I arrived in Charlotte at around 10 AM and Rusty and I went to lunch at a Mexican restaurant. It was seriously the best Mexican food I've ever had. After stopping at Rusty's place to drop my stuff off, we went on a brewery tour. The tour guide was really bad, but it was cool to see the brewery. I tried some strawberry beer and some beer with no carbonation. They were decent, but as I said a few days ago, not a big fan of beer. After that we went to a drive-through safari. We bought a bucket of food to feed the animals and it was a total clusterfuck. The animals all acted like they hadn't eaten in years. An ibex shoved his head in my bucket and I couldn't get it away from him, so he proceeded to eat all my food. Rust was pretty pissed because she had just washed and vacuumed her car, which was now covered in dust and animal pellet particles. Later that night we went to see Ratatoille, which was adorable.


On Sunday we went took a boat tour of Lake Norman and saw some more of the expensive houses, including a house Burt Reynolds once owned. It was nice and relaxing. After lunch we went down to discovery place in Charlotte and saw the Body Worlds exhibit and an IMAX about the human body. We looked around the science center a little more, but Body Worlds and the IMAX were definitely the most interesting parts. After that was dinner and then some HGTV.


On Monday we went to Grandfather Mountain. The trip included a trip over the mile-high swinging bridge, which made me feel like I was in an Indiana Jones movie. The view was gorgeous. We went on a little hike and then headed home. We went out to dinner and then watched Hell's Kitchen.

I had to leave in the early afternoon on Tuesday, so we just went to breakfast at Denny's and went to Sterling Marlin's race shop. I decided Sterling was going to be my driver because he does and says dumb things. He was fired about 2 days after I chose him as my driver. Sorry, Sterling!

Sorry for the 2nd grade level writing in this post, I just really need to get it posted and am not in a writing kind of mood. Maybe I'll have some things to write about later!

Road Trip; June 25, 2007: Part I

Rusty and I set out around 9:30 on our road trip. Our first stop was Lemoyne, right across the Susquehanna River from Harrisburg. Rusty and I are both obsessed with interesting houses and there were some up on a hill that I see on my commute that I wanted to show her. Unfortunately the main house I wanted to show her was down a private drive, and if I'm going to be arrested it's going to be for something cool, so we weren't able to see the house up close. I did snap some nice pictures looking across the river into Harrisburg though.


The state capital building is in the center of this picture and obviously you can't see it here, but the roof of the rotunda is made of gorgeous green tiles that reflect the sunlight beautifully. The tall building to the right of the capital (with the sign on top) is the bank where I go when I have to deposit money for work. It's about a block away from my office.








This picture was taken looking northeast. The bridge is the Harvey Taylor Bridge and the land at the bottom right of the picture is the edge of City Island. I love the hills in the background; I could never live somewhere flat. Notice the haze; this day was hot and humid as hell. Not the best day to be wandering around outside.








The third and last Harrisburg picture is looking southeast over the city. That's the Market Street bridge, the one I take as a back way when I-83 pisses me off too much. The parking garage on the right is on an island and was flooded up to the second level last spring (?) when we had a lot of rain. The house on the right is empty; anyone can feel free to buy it for me.

Road Trip; June 25, 2007: Part IIa

The main reason of our trip was to visit Centralia. The mine fire began in 1962 as the result of trash burning. Some conspiracy theorists say the fire was started by the government because they wanted access to the coal in the area, but as much as I love a good conspiracy theory, I highly doubt that is true. There's no way to safely get to the coal underneath Centralia. Governments of all levels bungled Centralia, but I don't think it was malicious. Even though the land was taken by Pennsylvania by eminent domain and the town's zip code was revoked, people are still allowed to live there. The town received national media attention in 1981 when a 150 foot deep sinkhole opened underneath a boy who was luckily rescued. It took people over a decade to realize the extent of the damage to the town and eventually the population dwindled. In the 2000 census there were 21 people living in Centralia. I'm sure there are fewer than that today, as we only saw about 3 or 4 houses. The first stop on our trip was St. Ignatius Cemetery. There are more dead people in Centralia than there are living, and the cemeteries were very well-kept.

We could see this orthodox church in the distance from St. Ignatius. I'm not sure if they still have services there or not.


Here's the church close up.

Apparently Centralia had a large orthodox population.


This is the town square.

Road Trip; June 25, 2007: Part IIb

We weren't able to get a feel of how hot the ground really is since it was 90 degrees with a blazing sun that day, but obviously if a tree trunk becomes charred just by lying on the ground, it's pretty damn hot.


This is the municipal building. I've heard it's still in use, but no one was around.

Here are a few of the inhabited houses. The bottom picture is the mayor's house.



The best view of Centralia is on top of hill at the edge of town. Unfortunately, this area has become a garbage dump.







This building used to serve as a shower area for the mine workers.