Rusty's Blog

My mom is on furlough from her job this week, which isn’t great on one level, but it did mean we got to eat lunch together today at Carolyn’s in Midtown. Last night I explained on the phone to her that it’s close to the corner of 14th and West Peachtree.

“You take 75 South to the 14th Street exit and hang a left,” I said.

“I know. I did grow up there, you know,” she said with a hint of exasperation.

She lives in Marietta now, but grew up in the same house on Calhoun Street near the Georgia Tech campus that her father grew up in.

As we ate today, she discussed a vacation she took recently with my dad to Oregon where they were given a private tour of the Spruce Goose. Then I told her about the trip to St. Augustine Amber and I are planning for next month, mentioning that we were going to go on a ghost tour.

“Mostly, I think ghost tours are a good excuse for people who are into history to talk about history without other people realizing they’re hearing about history,” I said.

We discussed other explanations of supernatural occurrences: materials absorbing sounds, hallucinations caused by poisonous chemicals, the Theory of Relativity.

Then my mom asked, “did I ever tell you about the Ghost of Calhoun Street?”

When my grandfather was a teenager, both his parents were killed in a car accident. They were severely burned and died about 24 hours after the fact. My Great Aunt Jane, who is my grandfather’s little sister, gave an account of this story when the Medical College of Georgia interviewed her a few months ago. I also have a video of her telling the story I will publish eventually.

Some years later after they died, a screen door on the house at Calhoun Street would slam open and shut over and over again at night. My mom and her brothers and sister heard it too. They would get up to look at the door sometimes, but there was no indication it had been jarred loose from its frame.

My mom said they figured it was just blown by the wind. My grandfather took it down one day, but the sound of a screen door slamming open and shut never stopped as long as they lived in that house.

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.

These folks from Atlanta WAND have been out every week for years in front of Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta protesting the Iraq War. I really admire their tenacity.

Usually they just stand there quietly with posters and try to get people to honk, but they stepped up their game this morning. They had a microphone, a drum and a huge scroll containing names of deceased Iraq War veterans. They read off a name, then beat the drum once for each name. It gave me a little chill.

In addition to the picture above, I captured about 30 seconds of audio using Recorder on my iPhone, which you can listen to below:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.