Screwed By The Town Of Cary

Posted on August 5, 2009 by Meg

We drove by this house on Maynard today. I’m just guessing here but I think someone’s unhappy.

Edit 8/6: Hi to everyone who’s finding my blog by googling for “screwed by the town of Cary!” I snapped this just because I loved the sloppy neon orange protest, you can practically hear the local Homeowners’ Association gasping in shock and preparing to draft a strongly worded complaint letter. The full News&Observer story is here.

Other local area attractions include Awesome Street, the last guy with an angry sign, and my plants that aren’t dead yet.

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Tarheel Road

Posted on August 3, 2009 by Meg

Just another blue-sky day in North Carolina.

(I mean, it’s no Awesome Street…)

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Play! A Videogame Symphony

Posted on July 31, 2009 by Meg

Stick and I went to Play! A Videogame Symphony at the Koka Booth Amphitheatre a few weekends ago. We joined the crazy quilt of blankets, over a carpet of drying pine needles, and unpacked our cheese, olives,  Nintendo DS, and those mini wine bottles I keep calling chardonnay shots. We must have been flying the nerd flag, because a fellow passing out flyers for a gaming and music fest in DC in a few months, came right to us. And after telling him no thanks, we realized we might actually be in DC in a few months!

Once it got dark, the performance began. The conductor opened by asking everyone to feel free to clap and cheer if they felt moved to do so, and everyone did. I was so impressed with the range of games chosen, with the wild shift from metallic beeps to symphony, and with the music in general.

Sometimes when I’ve lived abroad, I’ve had moments of glowing amazement that I was really in that place.  This is me, walking across the St. Catherine’s quad to go to a lecture in Cambridge, I remember thinking, or this is me, on the Great Wall of China. I’m always amazed to find myself actually at place I recognize from books, walking in the steps of history.  (Yes, it’s true, my self-centeredness knows no bounds.) it’s best when I’m traveling, of course, but even in Amherst, I would sometimes be amazed by real New England fall leaves! Just like in books!

In this past almost-year in North Carolina, I haven’t felt like that at all. Probably because it’s hard to feel any connection with the past in the brand-new sameness of Cary. It’s hard to feel amazement and wonder that I’m driving on a highway.

But finally, lying on the blanket looking up at the tall, skinny Carolina pines, and listening to the swell of the symphony and the applause, I felt amazed that I live here. This is it. The Carolina pines, the endless Southern twilight.  Just like in books! With the cheering nerd-crowd as an added bonus.  I sighed with total contentment.

“I think I felt a raindrop,” Stick said.

The other part of Southern summers in books are the surprise, torrential thundershowers.  Within moments, we were drenched. We tried to tough it out long enough to hear World Of WarCraft: Stormwind, but soaked jeans are not fun and we joined the mob running for the parking lot.

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From The Knees

Posted on July 27, 2009 by Meg

The number 33 bus takes you right to Port Authority. Trust me, Montclair is the knees.  We have Globe Trotter Antiques. We have the Wellmont Theater.  Silent movies with organ.  The Montclair Art Gallery. George Inness. Have you heard of him?

Paul Kinsey, describing the attractions of 1962 Montclair in Mad Men, season 2.


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The Awesome Party

Posted on July 21, 2009 by Meg

Last night we went to Awesome Street for a party. I was a little nervous since I didn’t know anyone, but that dissipated when we arrived and saw a couple of backdoor smokers, wearing white fuzzy bunny ears.

“If I’d known,” Stick said. “I could have worn my Hugh Hefner smoking jacket,”

Although Stick and I found Awesome Street endlessly hilarious (“There’s no room for the car here! We’ll have to park over on Mediocre Street!”), some of the other guests told us that the town of Cary was less than thrilled with creativity cutting into their cutesy themed-named subdivisions, and the Awesome Street residents had to apply several times to get the name approved. We also learned that Awesome Street beat out runner-up names Floppy Drive and Hard Drive.

“Yeah, sometimes I’m working and I see people pull up and take photos of the street sign!” one guy told me.

“That was me.” I said.

I’m of the school of thought that social gatherings require me to put on lip gloss and bring a six pack (see also: ways in which I will never fully leave college), and I was totally impressed with this one’s Sno-Cone maker, margarita machine, and all kinds of toys. What really set it apart from our last our last Playboy-themed office party, though, was Mama Hoffmann’s twin circling and insisting that we all eat! More! Have another one! Do you want something else? Eat! You should eat more! Have another one!

It was a nice crowd, and we talked about the joys of Bosphorus, Unaabi Grill, and how Cary, for all its soulless sameness, really does have great food. I met a lot of —  can’t resist it any longer– awesome people. (If you were at the Awesome party, and I was not swift enough to trade contact info with you, I would love to get in touch!)

Later on, I met a girl who — and I could not make this up — was an element bridesmaid for her best friend’s pagan wedding. (She was Earth, but when I was in Allison’s wedding, I was Air) The former-element-bridesmaid and her now-husband decided to get married at the courthouse. I am not saying those two facts are connected, of course, just mentioning two things I learned last night.

“So, how do you know the Intelliscanner crew?” another girl asked me.

“I drove past one day and I got out to take a picture.” I said.

“Oh. Oh! I thought you were kidding about that.”

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Growing

Posted on July 18, 2009 by Meg

“I got this cucumber seedling and this watermelon seedling because they were on sale,” I told Stick, “60% off! It’s like a little prize for ignoring proper growing seasons! Not like we’d know when to plant them anyway!”

“Good thing, too, because we wouldn’t have room for a full-sized watermelon on the balcony,” Stick pointed out. We surveyed our not-yet-dead potted plants with pride. His favorite is the dill, he likes to go out and say dillweed and laugh while he’s watering the plants. My favorites are the new watermelon, xi gua, and the cucumber, huang gua, because I like to practice my Chinese and my plants don’t make fun of my tones.

“We’re doing so well with these, we haven’t killed anything at all!” Stick said. “We can start with taking care of plants and work slowly up to taking care of children. After a few months, we can try getting a gerbil.”

“Whoa! You don’t just jump right from plants to mammals! That’s a lot of pressure!”

“A goldfish?”

“I don’t know if a person who buys a watermelon plant in a dixie cup should be responsible for a vertebrate.”

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Miss Venezuala

Posted on July 17, 2009 by Meg

So I’m working on a blog promotion for Thimbler. I’m having such a great time with it… usually I’m on the receiving end of poorly-targeted Dear Blogger sales emails. I really resent those emails, both because marketing teams seem to think that if I’m a blogger with ovaries, I must be a mommyblogger, and therefore, I’d love to tell my readers about baby slings and sippy cups! And I also resent the idea that bloggers will spam our readers with product information just because someone massmailed a form letter.

I might have given a long and impassioned rant about this, but for whatever the reason, my boss gave me a lot of space and autonomy to make that not happen. It’s been surprisingly fun to track down relevant bloggers, girls who’d enjoy the promo, whose readers would be interested and not feel spammed, and it’s also been fun to get an awesome product into indie fashion bloggers’ hands.

Anyway, a designer at Thimbler suggested a possible blog to me, and that’s when things got a little crazy. The blog is super popular, but I had a little trouble with it, as half of it is in espanol and my Spanish is SpanishPod Easy (Did I tell you I’m learning some Spanish? I’m learning some Spanish.)

It turns out that the blogger’s actually a former Miss Venezuela!

That’s not the crazy part.

I googled her name and found a lot of hits. At first I thought it was one of those cute mistaken identity stories, like that time we were studying Latin in the library, and Jared wanted to find our syllabus online, so he googled our Latin teacher’s name and found out she shares her first and last name with a porn star. Maybe that wasn’t so cute.

Nope, Miss Venezuela is also a high-powered lawyer.

No, that’s not the crazy part. WAIT FOR IT.

Some of those name-related hits had to do with her performances on Sabado Gigante a bunch of times, and, after we got in touch, and talked about Thimbler and Don Fransisco and so forth, it turned out that she remembered our episode of Sabado Gigante.

That was the crazy part.

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Xyzzy

Posted on July 14, 2009 by Meg

Credit: <a href=I have a new piece up on In-game dating: Not just for basement-dwelling nerds up at TechCoquette.

Like online dating on Match.com, eHarmony or other matchmaking sites, couples who meet through World of Warcraft first connect entirely through their words. Game romance still holds some of the spontaneity of offline romance because gamers aren’t logging on to look for a special someone.

I sent it to my dad, who wrote back that he really liked the connections between gaming skills and relationships, but added that my mom is not too fond of the Colossal Caves style of courtship, which involves dropping one unique item in each room you pass through.

Via In-game dating: Not just for basement-dwelling nerds | TechCoquette.

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Purple State

Posted on July 13, 2009 by Meg

We passed this house yesterday and I made Stick turn around so I could get a photo of all the American flags at this house and the Stop Obama sign. Do you know why the US is great? We can have huge political disagreements with each other, and no one blocks Twitter!

Unfortunately, you won’t get the whole whiplash-inducing, I-don’t-think-we’re-in-Amherst-anymore effect because when I got out of the car to take this picture, a man came out of the house.

“Taking a picture of your sign!” I said, unnecessarily, as if he might think I was just extremely interested in the hen, and hadn’t even noticed the lawn billboard.

“Wish the newspapers would.” he said. And that means he doesn’t think print is dead! So I wanted to run across the road and hug him, Obama-hating sign or no.

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Shooting Fish

Posted on July 7, 2009 by Meg

I’ve been hearing disjointed quotes from the now-infamous Palin resignation speech for a couple of days and I decided to read the whole thing myself. I’m not going to go over the whole thing, because I was much more confused after reading it than before. But the speech ends with:

In the words of General MacArthur said, “We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”

With my admittedly-limited knowledge of WWII battles, I sort of thought it referred to Bataan, and that seemed like a really odd choice for a speech about – I think – moving on.  So I used my awesome powers of quote-tracking (thanks, Living Pulpit gig!) and found out that the actual quote was from a Major General Oliver Prince Smith, as quoted in “Retreat of the 20,000” Time, Dec. 18, 1950

I wonder if pointing that out makes me a big meanie Gotcha Journalist, or am I still a pajama-clad blogger in my parents’ basement?

Info via Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, Time Magazine

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