Rusty's Blog

Amber and me on the Beltline

If the weather stayed like this forever I’d sleep in a tent in my yard. It makes even the most mundane errands a pleasure. I drove over to our storage unit to drop off an extra interior door we had sitting around with the windows down, iPod on shuffle… Rolling Stones, Amy Winehouse, Mountain Goats, Hank Williams, Radiohead, various Motown, whatever …everything that came on sounded like I hadn’t heard it in years.

Sometimes in high school and college, when gas was cheap, I’d drive around aimlessly with the windows down for hours on end playing music too loud, getting lost, finding my way back. The first hint of springtime weather always reminds me of this.

Yesterday we walked a stretch of the Beltline between Glenwood Park and Boulevard. We saw a cold storage building with what looked like effigies hung outside, walked across the cool arched bridge over Ormewood, and took lots of photos. By the end of it my shoes were full of sand and we were planning our next walk. I hope we can see most of it before the kudzu grows too thick. Walking it makes me see what a fucking tragedy it will be if it never gets built. Many parts of this city are as beautiful as anywhere I’ve been in their own backwards way, and are fascinating to watch change (or not change) through the seasons.

Grilled mushroom burgers

There was also a lot of good eating, with trips to Highland Bakery (order the Country Fried Steak Benedict), The Pecan in College Park (delicious but overpriced Southern cooking), and to my back yard to fire up the grill for the first time this year (grilled mushrooms are going to go in almost everything I make for myself for the foreseeable future).

It may sound like some hippy shit, but I’m trying to just appreciate life and tune out all the bullshit that doesn’t matter. I find myself stopping in all sorts of places to take in the air or the sounds or the sights or the company and commit them to memory. Like Amber dancing to cheesy 80s songs from her old box of 45s we were playing an hour or so ago.

That’s what I want to spend my energy on, and fuck the rest of it.

I was inspired to take down some of my Internet history when Amber and Garrett had discussed writing similar posts a few days ago. Amber has since published a post.

I’m going for an executive summary here and will probably miss a few important items, but if I try to be a perfectionist about this I’ll never end up writing anything. I am also including some pre-Internet backstory that I think is also important to take down. Read more after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

We started celebrating by eating at Radial, our favorite breakfast spot, this morning. Then I gave her the present I bought her, a robotic baby chick from Thinkgeek (pictured above). Tonight we’re going to have dinner at The Cheesecake Factory. And, you know, anything else she can think of that she wants between now and later.

Amber is an avid bird lover who has owned several Zebra Finches over the years. When I first met her, she owned seven of them. This has rubbed off on me. We currently own two Zebra Finches named Puff and Stuff:

They are an endless source of entertainment and intrigue. Every time I think I’ve seen all their behavioral quirks, they do something else that’s strange or funny that I’ve never seen before. Like falling asleep in awkward positions on top of a swing. Or pulling paper towels up from below their cage lining to make a nest with it. Or doing cannon balls into their bath and soaking the table cloth.

One of those nauseating couple things we do is almost anytime we see an inexpensive bird trinket in a store there’s at least a 50 percent chance that we’ll buy it. So far, we have:

• a kitchen chicken
• a kitchen owl
• three living room chicks
• a bedroom hummingbird (Jen gave us this one)

We also have several paintings on the wall with birds on them. I’m probably forgetting a few things, but you get the point.

It was only a matter of time before we installed a bird feeder on our balcony. So we did a week or two ago. I mounted it on a light fixture built into the wall outside, dangling it from one of those things that hippies use when they go rock climbing. It sat there full of seed for a while seemingly without consequence. We figured that it would take the birds some time to find it, since we’re in the part of the building that faces away from most of the greenery.

One day I looked outside and all the sudden maybe one-eighth of the seed was gone. Those birds sure were hungry, right? Right?

Not long after, I looked outside again and saw a squirrel sitting on our window sill like he owned the joint. And the seed was all over our balcony while his friend nosed around eating it. I banged on the window, which convinced the little buggers to piss off for the moment, but I knew they’d be back.

The feeder we bought was advertised as squirrel proof. It has a mechanism where if something heavy enough pulls on it, the holes used for feeding are covered up. Birds are too light to trigger this mechanism, but supposedly squirrels aren’t.

After some trial and error, we figured out that it didn’t matter what weight sensitivity setting we had the feeder on. The squirrels managed to get around the mechanism by propping themselves up on the wall and shaking the seed out onto the ground. Clever squirrels, very clever indeed.

While we tried to figure out our next step, we left the seed out on the balcony and brought the feeder inside. Several birds started coming by as well as the squirrels, and sometimes the asshole squirrels would chase them away.

Last night, I mounted the feeder so it hangs off the rail. My theory was that the risk of certain death from a fall of a couple of stories combined with an inability to spill seed onto the balcony where it’d be easy to collect would serve as a deterrent. Like so:

And I was kind of right for a little while. This morning Amber said she saw them trying to figure out how to crack into it for several minutes, but they eventually went away empty-handed. I went to work hoping we’d seen the last of them, but not quite believing it. I was right to be apprehensive:

As you can see, the squirrels managed to chew through the plastic on the bottom of the feed holes, making the openings just large enough to poke their stupid little muzzles through as they hung upside down on the feeder, risking a two story fall in the process. Amber actually saw one of them do it.

So what now?

I would be perfectly happy to sit on the balcony with a BB gun and pick them off, but Amber (for now at least) doesn’t approve of that idea.

And at least they didn’t get as much seed as they were getting by tipping the feeder over. This has slowed them down quite a bit. And the birds haven’t been scared away yet:

We are looking for other ways to deter the squirrels. To be continued…

Amber had a doctor’s appointment this morning, so I took MARTA to work. I got off the train and made my way toward the office, white earbuds contrasting with my gray shirt and olive green cargo shorts, listening to This American Life on my iPhone. The picture of white hipster douchery could only have been more complete if a friend drove up in a Prius with an Obama sticker on it, stopped and suggested we should totally bail on work to go rock climbing. Or snow boarding.

As I’m about to cross the street, I see a former co-worker of mine from a past job. He’s spastic, but nice enough I guess. He has long hair, speaks with what sounds like a sort of British or maybe Irish accent and spells his name with a Z where an S should be. I ran into him at the same intersection a little over a year ago.

He stops me in the center of the crosswalk as I notice the signal turning from Walk to Don’t Walk.

“What are you doing around six o’ clock tonight?” he asks.

I remove my earbuds and lie.

“We’ll be out.”

“You will?” he asked.

He didn’t sound convinced.

“Yeah, we’re leaving right after work,” I said, not really convincing myself either.

“I’m going to call you this afternoon.”

And so the conversation ended as we both noticed our allotted time to cross the street had long since expired, and with a few more seconds we might start a riot. I was already self-conscience enough about my douchery, and didn’t need to be the guy standing in the center of the crosswalk blocking traffic. People who do that are assholes.

He called just now, but I didn’t answer the phone. He didn’t leave a voicemail. I’m vaguely curious what could be so important that he would stop traffic to tell me about it and ask me to show up after I hadn’t seen him in a year or so. But not that curious.

Several of our friends are getting married in Vegas soon. Congratulations all around. Amber and I are thinking of getting married sometime in the first half of next year and have been throwing around a few ideas for where and how to go about it.

Neither of us have any interest in doing a big traditional wedding. She had one for her first marriage, and my brother’s wasn’t a whole lot of fun for me or my parents. So it won’t hurt my parents’ feelings if we don’t go that route. Plus, the expense seems stupid to us. My brother’s wedding was small and still cost in the neighborhood of $10-15K before it was over. That kind of money would be much better applied toward a down payment on a house or at least toward a kick-ass vacation.

One idea we have pretty well solidified is we’re not going to invite many, and possibly not even any, people to the wedding itself. We’re very seriously considering streaming it on Ustream or an equivalent free live video service. Instead, we’ll just elope somewhere, and the throw a big reception party a month or two later somewhere in town. I had the most fun of any wedding I’d been to at my friend Jamie’s wedding. His vows lasted 15 minutes, tops, and then we moved on immediately to a reception with several kegs and boxed wine which lasted well into the night. Our reception may be BYOB, but the underlying principle is the same: cut the bullshit, get to the fun part.

As far as locations, we’ve had three ideas so far, and would love to hear more from you. Here they are with some pros and cons:

• Las Vegas

  Pros: Inexpensive, few hassles, fun. Chapel operators possess the gift of self-awareness, leading to farcical drive-through chapels and other hilarity. I’ve never been to Vegas and would like to cross that off my list.

  Cons: Not a very original idea.

• Gatlinburg

  Pros: As cheesy as Vegas in its own way, only closer and probably even less expensive.

  Cons: Chapel operators appear to not be aware of how cheesy their operations are, which is kind of sad.

• Hedonism II or Hedonism III

  Pros: There are worse ways to spend a few days than watching kinky people doing kinky things in Jamaica. And they do weddings.

  Cons: The distinct possibility that those kinky people are as lame as some of the kinky people around here.

So those are our ideas so far. We’d love to hear your thoughts, as we haven’t settled on any of these ideas yet.