Rusty's Blog

Here’s our full set of wedding photos. There are captions when you click through.

All photos taken by Thomas Strickland.

Marriage and Pistol licenses through this door (photo by Thomas Strickland)

After bandying about several ideas for a wedding ceremony — including standards like Vegas and one which involved us wearing custom ponchos and smashing a vodka-soaked watermelon with a sledge hammer Gallagher-style — Amber and I had settled on just going down to the damn court one day without telling anybody. It was the path of least resistance in terms of both money and effort.

May 9, 2010 will mark the five-year anniversary of us hooking up.^* We consider May 9 our most important anniversary, and as such thought it would be a good day to get married. The problem with May 9, 2010 is it’s a Sunday. So that wouldn’t work since there’s no one in court on Sundays.

After that, we asked our accountant whether there would be a tax advantage to marry this year or next. He ran some numbers and found it wouldn’t make much difference.

Next we decided we should just pick a day we were both off work and go ahead and do it.

We both had the week between Christmas and New Years off, but we were in Augusta the 24th through the 26th. Then I was at my parents’ house the 27th. Then the tree guy was coming on the 30th. Then I was going to the Peach Bowl the 31st.

So that left the 28th and 29th. My parents were married Dec. 28, so that was appealing to us, but Amber’s sister^** Crystal wanted to come to town and couldn’t come that day, so that whittled the day down to the 29th.

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This isn’t any big secret or anything since Kyle mentioned it on Facebook a while ago, but in the interest of full disclosure I should tell you I was paid $300 to shoot and edit this campaign video for Kyle Williams’ Decatur City Commission District 2 campaign:

Kyle and his partner Larry are friends of mine, and we put this together quickly to coincide with the launch of his campaign website. Municipal election disclosures aren’t processed electronically or I would link to the form. All the talk of ethics.georgia.gov being down today and Jason Pye running a disclosure of work he did reminded me I should disclose this work.

I don’t have an ongoing commitment to work for the campaign, though we have discussed shooting other videos in the future. I’ll be happy to help out if asked, and will disclose any other income that comes from any other campaign work.

Kyle is good people, you should vote for him. I don’t live in Decatur anymore or I would. And I’d tell you that even if I hadn’t been paid to shoot a video.

This is one of a series of posts about jobs I’ve had during my time on this planet. You can read more posts by clicking the “jobs i’ve had” tag, and read a lengthier intro to the series in the first post.

“Hi, this is Russell Tanton. I’m a staff writer for the DeKalb Neighbor.”

“Oh, the one they throw on my lawn?”

“Yes, that’s the one.”

Neighbor Newspapers is a chain of a couple of dozen suburban weekly papers published by Times-Journal, Inc., a company run by a kind-hearted, wise, personable, racially tolerant man named Otis Brumby.

I first interviewed with the Marietta Daily Journal, the flagship daily for Times-Journal. The editor didn’t think I was ready for that job based on my college newspaper experience, and he was right. He was about to send me out the door when he noticed I’d laid out my clips portfolio in Quark. He asked me about it and we kept talking, and he decided I should interview with the guys who managed the weekly papers.

I nailed that, then interviewed with an old money guy who was editor of the Northside Neighbor. He was a perfect fit there since the Northside Neighbor spent a lot of time covering old money. That might not sound flattering, but he was cool. He gave the okay to hire me to write for Northside.

While I wasn’t looking forward to writing stories about debutante balls, I was comfortable with the idea of working for him and was excited to have a foot in the door to the journalism industry.

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I’m just going to reprint my comment from Decatur Metro about the City of Decatur’s Virtual Decatur proposal here, as I have yet to weigh in on it on this here blog:

On the whole I think Decatur’s government is one of the more competent city governments in the state. I have enjoyed my stay here, and will miss it when I move to East Atlanta in a couple of months.

I am clearly pro-technology, given my profession and other extracurricular activities. I do generally admire Decatur’s willingness to experiment with ideas, technology-related and otherwise, before other governments are willing to.

But I can’t get behind this one. I don’t understand who the audience is. I don’t understand how the benefit could possibly outweigh the cost of development. I don’t understand why people can’t just walk to the damn meetings if they’re interested, given the relatively small area the city occupies. And I don’t understand why this is a priority when it’s been demonstrated that Decatur isn’t immune to the uptick in crime which has affected the rest of metro Atlanta.

It’s another solution looking for a problem. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, there’s literature here (PDF).

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.

The past couple of nights, Amber and I have run into a couple of coffee shop poets as we passed through various establishments in Decatur. Judging by those encounters, my natural reaction appears to be to laugh at them.

It occurred to me that bloggers and coffee shop poets have a lot in common:

• We ply our respective vocations to small audiences composed of mostly people we know and of a few who just happened to wander by
• What we do seems earnest and lame to people who don’t understand it already
• We often believe our grasp of the English language is a wee bit better than it really is
• A few of us get paid, but most of us don’t.

I laugh because someone being really earnest about something that doesn’t register at all with me is funny. That’s a pretty shitty reaction. Some of the people I like least are people who have been similarly dismissive of blogging and all the surrounding society-transforming whizbangs.

And yet, there it is. I laugh at coffee shop poets.

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…

The Brickstore Pub in Decatur is one of my and Amber’s favorite places to eat. Amber usually gets a chicken salad sandwich and a side salad, and I usually get the penne pomodoro with andoville sausage, though I’ve had nearly everything on the menu. Most of the food is good, some of it is great, and the only thing I’ve had which I would say is bad is the turkey burger. Avoid that and you should be fine.

More importantly, it’s the best place in metro Atlanta to sample craft beers. Watch the video below about the pub’s new cellaring program and it should be easy for you to see why:

If you’re not a beer nerd (and I don’t qualify as a beer nerd, though I do try to look for an IPA I’ve never tried before whenever I go somewhere with an extensive beer menu), you might not have been aware that some beers are designed to be aged as wines are. The Brickstore Pub is taking over space in the basement of an adjacent bank to age those types of beers.

In the video, they discuss plans to have invite-only beer tastings to determine when the beers being aged are ready for public consumption. The space looks like it will be really cool for that purpose. I especially loved the mechanism to let air in the bank vault. Maybe Tony can get invited to test some beers out. Me, I am mostly useful for describing shitty beer.

h/t NEXT STOP…DECATUR for the video