Rusty's Blog

The original Waffle House opened in Avondale Estates, Georgia on College Avenue in 1955. It was later sold and converted into a Chinese restaurant, and has since been purchased back and restored as a museum with furnishings very close to what the original restaurant looked like.

It usually isn’t open to the public, but was open today. We were told it will soon be open to the public two days per week.

We learned some other tidbits, like that this sign they have out front isn’t the same design as the original sign:

It’s actually a late 50s or early 60s design. The letters are supposed to look like dripping syrup. The original sign design isn’t up to current DeKalb County code, and they’re working on getting permission to use the original (or a sign with the same design as the original). The original is currently stored in a warehouse.

Also:

• Filet mignon was served instead of T-bones originally. The urban legend goes that the switch to T-bones was made after a Waffle House location ran out of filet mignon and bought some T-bones from an A&P, which proved to be very popular.
• Other menu ideas — such as the code words for hash brown toppings — permeate up to be corporate standards from flourishes of particular Waffle House locations.
• Originally, everything was made fresh on location except for saltine crackers, Coca Cola and Heinz ketchup.
• The founder Joe Rogers was (and still is) obsessed with not wasting movements, space or materials. At the original location, when they were finished with a paper cash register roll, they’d put it back in the register the opposite way and print on the back. Now, this translates into constant efficiency studies that attempt to cut down on the movements that Waffle House employees make.

You can view the full set of photos here.

Amber also has a photo set here and a blog post here.

A chapter in Things I Should Be Writing About that has yet to make it onto my blog is our house hunt. We’re aiming to buy something early next year, preferably before our apartment lease ends in March. Amber already documented some of the process in a couple of posts on her site. Here’s the most recent one.

I’m calling this a house hunt here because dwelling hunt doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, but we’re still keeping our options open as to what we buy and where we buy it.

The only real dealbreaker is that we live ITP vs. OTP. We’ve been looking at neighborhoods all over town, just trying to get a feel for what’s out there and where we might like to live that we can afford. The serious search starts in December when our Realtor starts sending us listings for things we might end up buying.

I’ve become very partial to bungalows with big front porches like the one Amber put up in her post:

Bungalow in Adair Park

But we’re not ruling anything out yet. We’re leaning toward houses, but would consider a townhome or condo in a really cherry location. We’d like to live somewhere with something we can walk to.

On one level Midtown would be nice because that’s where we work and there’s a lot in walking distance there. In that case though, it would have to be a fucking steal in an amazing location, because the bigoted brand of NIMBYism prevalent in Midtown is a huge negative weighing against living there for me.

Here are some other quick thoughts on areas we’ve toured:

• Decatur is mostly out of our price range, which is a shame because we like it here
• Avondale Estates also is probably too steep
• Oakhurst is likely out of our price range as well, but it’s possible something could come up there by the time we’re ready to buy. It has a nice village area with restaurants, coffee shops, etc. which would be a real plus
• Toco Hills had houses that weren’t that impressive for prices that were out of our range, mostly due to being near good schools, I think
• East Lake has a few things we’d consider
• East Atlanta has more things we’d consider, and it’d be nice to get something close to East Atlanta Village
• We didn’t get a good feeling from Grant Park. The houses close to the park itself were out of our price range, and the stuff that was in our price range was either in a sketchy area or kind of hidden away in a non-descript area. Out of everywhere we’ve visited so far, I have the most trouble imagining myself living there
• The Westview/Adair Park area had a few neat houses there. Lots of neighborhood association flags and stuff, which I take as a good sign
• Edgewood has some neat houses
• There’s property down near Avondale Mall, Candler Road, etc. that could get annexed by City of Decatur eventually and is worth a look since the property values would almost immediately shoot up (along with the taxes, so there’s that). There are some other decent neighborhoods down Candler
• We didn’t see a whole lot down Lawrenceville Highway, but we haven’t looked very hard either

I’m missing a few, but there you go. There are still so many other areas we need to check out in more depth. Kirkwood, North Decatur, East Point, stuff near Howell Mill Road, damn near everything on the west side of the city. That’s only a fraction of them really.

The latest development is we got pre-qualified for a home loan (typo: home load) yesterday. Amber’s credit is a little better than mine, as I’ve got a bullshit collection from Cingular on my credit that I need to try to get stricken (and a couple of other dings).

A couple of years ago, I switched to Verizon and Cingular locked me out of my online account, which was set to “no paper invoices.” Turns out they hadn’t yet tallied the final balance yet, and never sent me a bill for it. By the time I found out about it, it had already been sent to a collection agency.

The lesson to be taken here is that if you cancel cell phone service and they never send you a final bill, it’s still your fault if it’s not paid. They’re dicks like that.

The worst case scenario is it might add somewhere between one-eighth and one-quarter of a point to our interest rate. Could be worse I guess, but that shit adds up.