Home, where my thoughts escape - Part one of ?

It figures that after the lengthy explanation of companion blogging and how the two blogs would interact that our first writing assignments to one another would be given offline. I was given a choice to write about one of three things:

1. blog about a trip you took before your tenth birthday
2. blog about what you're reading these days
3. blog about your neighborhood

As Wanda has noticed, I tend to compress all trips I ever took to any given location into one uber-trip encompassing all of the major events that I remember about that location. I don't think I do this any more, but given this propensity for mental melding I feel it best to leave that topic be for now.

As to what I'm reading... well, it's mostly mind candy. The only book I'm not slightly embarassed by is called, ironically enough, "Dungeon, Fire and Sword", and it's all about the Knights Templar and the politics behind the crusades, which I hope, at some point in my life, to meld into the kernel of the militaristic religious society at the center of this epic story I've been building in my head (and on various notes on a collection of small scraps of paper and journals) for the better part of 7 or 8 years now.

Now my neighborhood - here is some rich fodder! Alas, as I began to write I quickly found that I have far too many stories to tell. Just the first part of the story, about my own house, was going to cause a reader to have to scroll down about a thousand times before you hit the end. To avoid this I am going to start a mini-series about my neighborhood and the people in it, the length of which is at this time unknown. I promise not to make too much stuff up.

Part the First : Our House

I love our neighborhood. It couldn't be a better location, nestled smack in the middle of the rectangle formed by North Druid Hills Road, Clairmont Road, LaVista Road and Briarcliff Road, (the word "rectangle" is being used very loosely here and should under no circumstances be construed to imply that the shape those four roads make (or any 4 roads in Atlanta, when you get right down to it) even vaguely resembles one), and is less than a mile from Sam's Warehouse, Publix, Kroger, Starbuck's, CVS, Target, and Office Depot. It is also within a mile of a good bookstore (both a new bookstore and a used bookstore), a decent shoe store, and a cheap dry cleaners. It is less than that same mile from fabulous Indian, Greek, Thai and French restaurants, as well as an excellent liquor store where we can finally get our beloved Lagavulin single malt scotch. We're 3 minutes from the freeway, 10 minutes from Symphony Hall, a very different 10 minutes from WABE where Wanda works, and, on a good day, 25 minutes from where I work (on a bad day, 3 hours).

Here's an overhead, thanks to Google Maps:




It's a very green neighborhood, with lots of trees to insulate us from the noise from the freeway (even in the winter you cannot hear a single multi-car pileup on I85), if not the occasional airplane on its way to Dekalb Airport (the trees are not this tall). The ironic twist in the story is that when we lived in Bloomington, we thought we had things so great. We were only about 5 minutes from a Target, a Kroger, a shitty mall, and a super-shitty (but very, very loud) movie theater, the same 5 minutes from a Mexican Restaurant with the single best Mexican entree' I've ever had in my life (when Wanda and I used to go there for lunch, and they'd see our car pull up in the parking lot, they'd go ahead and put our order in and have drinks ready for us - we NEVER ordered anything else), and roughly 20 minutes from Sam's Warehouse. We talked about that great convenience as something we'd miss when we got back to Atlanta, and how we'd never be able to take less than an entire afternoon to go to Kroger, Sam's, and Target all in one fell shwoop (a SHopping sWOOP, if you will). It takes us signifigantly less time to do those things now than it did then.

If you had my address you could get this map from google maps yourself, and if you do I'll warn you that it's an older map. How do I know? First of all, the tightest zoom you can get actually shows both my front and back yards in moderate detail, and two very important details are missing:

1. My above-ground garden in the front yard,
2. Our screened-in back porch.

My garden looks like this:



This picture was taken in the spring, mind you, when those 6 tomato plants were young. The garden is constructed of 3 separate plots; the two closest plots being 4'x4', made with landscaping timbers and a crapload of imported topsoil (like most yards in Georgia, my yard consists primarily of red clay and variously sized rocks), and the plot behind them being 8'x4'. The tomato crop this year was insane -the vines produced fruits numbering in the several hundreds and have only just produced their last. The long plot held 5 pepper vines of various types, and while I did manage to quadruple my pepper output from a year ago, that means I got four instead of just one. The things flowered like crazy but didn't fruit until I started ignoring them entirely. All I did was weed to make sure they weren't getting strangled, and one day I noticed that 3 of the 5 bushes had a tiny pepper on them. They didn't get very big, but even a tiny fresh pepper from the garden beats anything you'll get in any store. We scrambled one of them up in an omlette with leftover sausages from the grill.... heaven!

It's harder to show a picture of the back deck - the thing is just too frikking big. There's a collection of pictures here:

http://www.yangtemko.com/benjamin/test/deckdone/

And before you start grousing at me, be assured that I am well aware of the absurdity of a computer geek like me having that shitty of a personal space on the web. Eventually I'll get around to sprucing up the joint, but for the time being other matters take precedence.

Our house isn't very large - nothing like the McMansions which are sprouting up like weeds all around us - and with Wanda and I both wanting 4 kids it's probably going to undergo some significant personality changes over the course of the next decade or so, but it feels more like home than maybe anywhere I've lived since I stopped living, well, at home. The most interesting thing is how we came across it. Wanda and I had looked at many, many houses in Atlanta before we ever moved to Bloomington, including one right down the street from this one. When we were getting ready to move back to Atlanta we knew more or less where we wanted to live, and so were able to tell a realtor what we wanted in a general sense and our relative price range. So one weekend we plotted to come down and spend a day looking at houses, just to re-wet our feet in the waters of real estate, to mangle a metaphor. Our agent gave us the most brilliant house-hunting plan ever, one I hope you will steal and use for yourself:

1. See a house.
   
2. See the next house. Compare it with the first. Choose between the two.
3. See the next house. Compare it with your current favorite. Choose between the two.
4. Goto 3.

At the end of your house hunting you have two houses to choose from, maybe 3 tops if you really had a hard choice to make, which is almost never the case. Most houses differentiate themselves pretty quickly, and somehow you just know where home is supposed to be.

For us, it was the first house we walked into that day. This house. It smelled like babies (the good baby smell, not the bad baby smell), it had hardwood floors, a deck, a galley kitchen with enormous cabinet capacity, 4 bedrooms, 2 full baths - in short, everything we wanted. We saw several other houses that day but the first one pulled us so strongly that we called the real estate agent that very afternoon and asked her why we wouldn't just go ahead and grab the first house. It's hard to explain what a big thing this is - of the maybe 50 or so houses that Wanda and I saw the first time around before we left for Indiana, not ONCE did we agree on any house as being the one. We spent a lot of time arguing about which concessions to make to imperfection, in fact, until it became a moot point. But this house, it just felt like home. Immediately. Interestingly, our real estate agent had exactly the same reaction to the house - in repeated conversations with her she couldn't get that house out of her head. She didn't even bother trying to sell us any other house - she knew that house was ours.

I have other stories to tell about our neighborhood, including:

1. The Stupidest Fucking Dog On The Planet
2. The Second Stupidest Fucking Dog On The Planet
3. Wascally Wabbits, And How To Cope With Them
4. The Greek Festival, or, The Revenge of Disco Jesus
   
5. Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

And more, as they happen.