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 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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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.

If you live in DeKalb County as I do, there’s at least one important race to vote in today: the Democratic run-off for CEO. Your choices are Stan Watson and Burrell Ellis, and it’s a no-brainer who you should vote for.

Watson has been a no-show for several debates, choosing to attend fundraisers instead. He has campaigned illegally in front of polling stations. And he has not denounced the distribution of a race-baiting anti-Ellis flier.

I am concerned that Ellis is a little too cozy with Sembler, a company which builds suburban-style developments in places that would be better-served by true mixed-use developments. His election would make the construction of a controversial shopping development on Briarcliff and North Druid Hills roads a near-certainty. But by all other measures it appears he would do a good job. There’s nothing illegal or unethical about taking campaign contributions from Sembler, which is more than I can say about Watson’s activities.

There’s also a snoozer of a U.S. Senate run-off between Democrats Jim Martin and Vernon Jones. It doesn’t really matter who you vote for. To lose, incumbent Republican Saxby Chambliss would need to be caught killing a baby, pulling out its entrails and wearing them as a headband—while a young male intern was blowing him. Sadly, I think the second part would be more shocking to people around here.