scooter nation

Black Warrior Files: Confessions of a Counterfeit Coxswain

2008-09-14T20:19:00.006-06:00

cox·swain (kŏk'sən, -swān') noun

A person who usually steers a ship's boat and has charge of its crew.
A person in a racing shell who usually directs the rest of the crew.

At approximately 7:15 this past Thursday morning down on the Black Warrior River, I parallel parked a boat. Not a motorboat or a sailboat or a yacht. Not even a canoe.

At approximately 7:15 this past Thursday morning, I parallel parked a 4-seat rowing shell.

Parallel parking is, in fact, my one god-given talent. I firmly believe that everyone is born with the innate ability to do one thing really, really well—better than everyone else. My sister Weathergirl, for instance, can find a bargain every time she goes shopping and, since shopping is an engrained trait for the women in my family, she goes shopping quite often. As evidence, I offer the time she found me a brand new J. Crew turtleneck sweater on sale for $2. My uncle, the Italian Godfather (no, I’m serious, he’s Italian and he’s my godfather), does even better than Weathergirl—he finds perfectly whole, amazing things on the side of the road and in the “discard” pile at his office job. A modest catalogue: two papasan chairs (with cushions), a snowblower, two solid oak executive desks, a waterfall veneer sideboard, an off cut slab of marble.

Me, though—my talent isn’t flashy, it’s purely functional. Barring unforeseen events or dreadful distractions (like small children or dogs running into the path of my car), I can sink a parallel parking space in one go no matter what I’m driving. Part of this may simply be a result of my learning to drive in a mini-van and an extended bed pick-up truck—compared to that, every other vehicle seems small and maneuverable. Part of it is, I’m sure, just ridiculous overconfidence. But the end result is the same: I can park anywhere. Even with eighteen people watching me. On Manhattan. In the snow. During rush hour.

But for all that, I have never parallel parked a boat.

Technically, I didn’t really do any of the actual parking. The four people rowing the boat did all the work—propelling us toward the dock, compensating for our direction when I asked one of them to stroke while the rest waited. And really, we needed help getting over to the edge of the dock—I misjudged the distance, brought us up a couple of feet away from the edge so that another rower already on the dock had to grab an oar and drag us sideways a bit. But all in all, considering that I am not actually—nor should I ever be—a coxswain, it went pretty well.

Up until three months ago, I never dreamed I would be parallel parking a boat on a random Thursday morning down on the Black Warrior. I never dreamed I would be down on the Black Warrior, period. And then I got that email from the Enthusiastic Creative Writing Professor.

The Enthusiastic Creative Writing Professor is really involved with interesting, athletic pursuits around town. She works with the no-kill animal shelter, runs the odd 10K, and sends emails inviting the rest of the faculty to get involved. Normally, when Enthused sends an email, I scan it, think “that would be fun, but I don’t have time,” and move on. But the email about the Black Warrior Rowing Club got me interested, mainly because I thought, somehow, that Enthused was the ring leader and that this was, somehow, some informal event—you know “show up and we’ll give you an oar.” The time worked for me—6–8AM on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It was just for the summer. Dues were only $25.

“Only $25?” I said to myself. “Huh. How bad could it be?”

I am not, by nature, a very athletically inclined person. I ran track back in the 8th grade. I played pick-up soccer games (not well) in high school. I once managed a Curves (for Women) gym. That’s about it. But rowing seemed like something accessible for two reasons: (1) I’ve always been into canoeing and kayaking, which also involve propelling oneself across the water with a long stick, and (2) I grew up outside of Boston. Growing up anywhere in a 50 mile radius of Boston automatically predisposes you to be mildly obsessed with rowing crew. It also means that you actually know that rowing exists as a sport and not simply as some quaint pastime that died out in the 1900s.

So that Tuesday, I showed up down at the docks expecting to see Enthused and a handful of other enthusiastic professor-types, which I did. I also saw a whole lot of people I didn’t know being herded by a very tiny, very efficient, very young woman with crossed oars tattooed on her shoulder and a license plate that read USROWING. Enthused called her Coach.

That was my first clue that maybe this was a bit more involved than I’d thought.

Fastforward three months. I now show up on the water three days a week at 5:15. When I’m not pretending to be a cox, I row bow seat (front of the boat) in a woman’s 4+ shell. I row starboard, so my one oar sticks out to the righthand side of the boat, but since I’m facing backwards, to me, it’s the left. Enthused rows port in front of me. We’re looking at maybe going to a Master’s rowing competition some time in November—once we figure out how to get all four of us rowing at once, of course.

I’m not very good.

Coach says I’m getting better.

Here’s the thing: I love it. I love scooting across the water in this boat that moves like a giant waterbug. I love rowing underneath the McFarland Boulevard bridge and listening to the morning commuter traffic clatter far overhead. I love that the river at 6AM is so photogenic it makes runway models look common.

And last Thursday, when I was pretending to be a coxswain because we were short handed, I got to parallel park a boat.

The local paper ran a story on us this morning and had this accompanying video clip on the Tuscaloosa News website. If you’re smart, you can pick me out in one of the boats—I’m in the yellow visor.

Green and Clean . . . ish

2008-06-28T17:56:00.003-06:00

So I've been absent for a while. I could tell you all sorts of stories, but really, I'd rather offer the latest installment on Being Green in a Red State.

At our present juncture in homeownership, Expat and I are working towards Green, but we’re not quite there. In all honesty, we’re really more of a Cool Mint. Possibly an unfortunate Sea Foam. Oh, we’ve got the basics down. We’re switching all the lights over to compact fluorescents. We don’t run the air conditioner unless the house is just too muggy to sleep. As our appliances die (like the dishwasher) or get stolen (like the washer and dryer), we’re replacing them with Energy Star. For the eventual remodel of the kitchen, we’re already considering cabinets and countertops made of sustainably produced, renewable resources, and the fact that the flooring in the living and dining rooms will be either bamboo or engineered, reclaimed hardwood is a foregone conclusion. But these things aren’t really Super Green. These things are trendy. In order to really make a difference, Expat and I really want to go beyond trendy.

Take, for example, green cleaning products. I’m a little obsessed with the idea of nontoxic cleaners at the moment. Every time I go to Barnes and Noble (again, Tuscaloosa has exactly zero independent booksellers that sell things other than textbooks and unwieldy Civil War tomes), I gravitate toward the eco-friendly home improvement and renovation books and drool over projects that would be wonderful if I could afford them and let’s face it, I can’t. But right next to the home improvement books, right in the same section, are the green household cleaning books. The first one I picked up, Green This! Greening Your Cleaning by Deidre Imus, was a little preachy, what with opening with those statistics on childhood cancer and all, but hooked me by telling me that most everything I need to clean my whole house could be found in my pantry. The two I’ve decided that I like the best, though, are the more step-by-step “if you can’t do this, then at least do this” guides: Green Up Your Cleanup by Jill Potvin Schoff and my all time favorite, Squeaky Green : The Method Guide to Detoxing Your Home by Adam Lowry, Eric Ryan, the guys who make the Method brand cleaning products that they sell at Target. The Method guys sit down and discuss (quite clearly and irreverently) why carpet is highly unsanitary and how ironic it is that we worry about eating organic foods and then clean our kitchens with pesticides. But to that I say this: can you honestly tell me that some weird mixture of white vinegar, lemon juice, baking soda, and water is going to zap the mildew colleting behind my kitchen faucet better than Clorox? Really? It might be more healthy, sure, but will it be as effective?

And then there is the problem of the kind of house Expat and I have purchased. There are certain parts of our house—certain key problem areas that have been problem areas since the house was built back in 1972 or 1974 or 1976 (there’s some debate, here)—that simply refuse to be cleaned with anything but, say, full strength ammonia. Like my kitchen floor. My kitchen floor is vintage 1970’s, avocado green linoleum—or at least it was when it was put down over 30 years ago. By the time we moved in, though, it had been waxed and somewhat stripped and waxed and somewhat stripped heaven only knows how many times, and meanwhile it had been scuffed and scraped and stomped on with years of dirty shoes. Add to that the fact that I am pretty sure Verna Smith—original homeowner and product of the 1950s—did her fair share of greasy frying in the kitchen and probably didn’t do such a hot job getting all that greasiness cleaned up (our kitchen cabinets stand testament to this) and it’s no wonder that our floor was now more like scum-colored linoleum with an avocado green undertone.

When my older neighbors all eventually came over to say "Hi," every single one looked at the floor and said “Oh, those old floors. You’ll never get that clean. You’ll just have to replace them.”

And just like that, it became more than a desire for clean floors. It became a challenge.

Undaunted, I tried lots of things to restore my vintage 1970’s kitchen floor to its full avocado-green glory: regular old mopping, spot cleaning with white vinegar, scrubbing with more traditional cleaners like Soft Scrub (with bleach), straight up Clorox, old fashioned elbow grease. So on the surface, the floor was clean, but the surface was really just old scummy, greasy wax. It wasn’t really clean. It was clean-ish.

Now, I’m not necessarily the world’s most tidy person. I am by nature a Piler. I bring things home and stack them into neat piles all over every flat surface available: the counter, the dining room table, my desk, my dresser, and when I run out of raised surfaces, the floor works just fine. This is not a conscience decision on my part, more of an ingrained trait passed to me from my Piler mother on some strand of DNA, but while my mother’s Piling stops at papers and bills and magazines, mine extends to other mediums. Clothes, for one—by the week’s end I have the dirty pile at the bottom of my closet floor and several clean piles scattered around the bedroom of things I thought I might wear one day but decided not to and then never got around to hanging back up. Then there’s the laundry, which I wash religiously every week and then fold right away, but which then tends to linger in the laundry basket in its neat, square piles while my husband and I pull necessary items from it as the next week progressed.

But what separates me from people who have to sniff their shirts to decide whether they can wear them one more day is that, while my piles are messy, they are most certainly not dirty (with the exception of the dirty clothes, which are supposed to be dirty and which are always put in the same spot, so as not to be confused with the other piles). Besides the differences in denotation and connotation, there is a larger, more cosmic, innate difference between being messy and being dirty. I’ll own messy, sure. But I have never been dirty. Never ever. Dirty is gross.

And the sad truth was that my kitchen floor was deep down, 30-years-old dirty. It wouldn’t matter if I gave up Piling altogether and became the poster child for the organization section in RealSimple magazine, unless I did something about it, that floor would always be dirty. I knew that something more colorful and sanitary lay beneath the scum, I just had to find something to cut through it.

Then my mother mentioned ammonia.

As the Method guys put it, “The problem with ammonia is that the toxic ingredient in it is, well, ammonia.” Ammonia burns your lungs and your eyes and your throat and your skin and can be really awful for people with asthma and is deadly if you’re exposed to enough of it. It’s dangerous to have around the house because it doesn’t come with a child safety cap and it looks just like water. It’s not naturally a liquid—ammonia is a gas, specifically NH₃. But you know smart people. Some smart person somewhere figured out how to make it not a gas, bottled it, and there you go, household ammonia. So-called household ammonia is really just a solution of some NH₃ dissolved in water; once its opened and exposed to the air, it immediately starts evaporating and turning itself right back into a noxious, stinky gas. But it’s also a really good cleaner precisely because it evaporates—it leaves behind absolutely no residue. Plus, it’s cheap, so lots of frugal homeowners use it because it can clean everything from floors to countertops to windows.

Mom mopped her floors with diluted ammonia for years—she likes the no-sticky-residue trait. And sure, we’re probably all going to die some horrible death as a result of inhaling the fumes, but at least we had floors we could be proud of. The more I looked at my scummy kitchen floor, the more I began thinking that maybe one little bottle of ammonia wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Maybe. Just to get things started.

So I bought it. The first time I used it, I was very careful. I opened all the kitchen windows and the back door. I closed off the kitchen from the rest of the house so the cats couldn’t get in (and to contain the fumes as much as possible). I wore pants and long sleeves and those long plastic gloves that make me feel like a 50’s housewife doing her dishes. I had a paint fume mask—the kind all those residents of Beijing wear when cycling to work to block out all the smog. I bought a scrub brush just for the ammonia mixture. I even had an ammonia-only bucket. Screw green. I was red hot and ready to up my toxicity if it meant not feeling like I had to apologize for my floors. The whole “It’s not my dirt! I swear! It was here when we got here!” routine isn’t going to work forever.

At first, I tried using a standard 1 part ammonia/2 parts water ratio. It moved the scum a little, but not much. Then I tried 1-to-1. Again, not much luck. It was as if my house was taunting me: “You think a little water is going to do it? Awwww, you think your little eco-conscience hocus-pocus is going to work on me? Screw you, hippie. I was built back when DDT was legal! You ain’t got nothing I haven’t seen. Mmmmmwaaahaahaaaaaa.”[1]

But no DDT-era house was going to get the best of me. Annoyed at the scum and at the previous owners and at myself for introducing miles of noxious fumes into my already less-than-stellar indoor environment, I finally just splashed a little full strength ammonia right out of the bottle onto the floor and let it sit there for a minute while I stepped out onto the carport for a little not-so-noxious air. When I came back inside, I gave the patch a half-hearted swipe with my scrub brush, fully expecting to just pack everything up and call it a day when the scum didn’t move.

Here’s the thing: it came clean. There, shining up at me, was a funny, splash-shaped patch of pure, unfiltered vintage avocado.

I sighed, uncapped the bottle, and set to work dousing patches of floor with full-strength ammonia. The difference was so startling that, indoor air pollution or not, I couldn’t bring myself to stop. I worked on my hands and knees for two hours and got through 2/3 of the kitchen floor. I took lots of air breaks. I set up a fan to pull the bad air out through the windows. I spent a fair amount of time standing under my carport gasping the cool Alabama spring air like a fish. And at 10PM that night, I called it quits. I had found the true linoleum. I knew how to get to it. That was enough. I’d get back to the other part or the floor later, after my lungs and eyes had some time to recuperate. I packed it all up, rinsed everything, tossed all my cleaning cloths and my clothes into our Energy Star washer, and put myself into the shower where I rinsed all remaining fumes and bits of floor scum off with my all natural, biodegradable olive oil soap, and scrubbed my hair with our sustainably-produced Aveda shampoo (with natural flower essences).

I felt like a phony. Like a trendy eco-consumer. That night, as I crawled into our 100% cotton sheets, I was definitely an unfortunate shade of Sea Foam.

So far in my personal battle for Greeness against my house, House=1, Sparky=0.

[1] DDT was outlawed for general use in farming in the United States in the year 1972, but it wasn’t banned for use in agriculture worldwide until the 1995 Stockholm Convention. So technically, lots of houses were being built until fairly recently while DDT was still legal somewhere, but really, we’re going for the spirit of the thing.

Black Warrior Files: Blast from the Past, or, Ann! Scoot Over and Make Room for that Meteorite!

2008-04-15T16:46:00.006-06:00

In addition to cliché, a portion of this post title reeks of double entendre: (1) I’m writing about the Alabama Museum of Natural History; (2) I have had this post sitting on my computer, half-written, since, um, February. But as with all things past, it’s best not to dwell. Onward!

So my locavores and I have been embarking on a series of walking field trips this semester. Under the clever guise of “learning,” we’ve been fleeing the Island of Misfit Desks (a.k.a., Morgan Hall, Room 305) and taking advantage of the nice weather and the vast amounts of neat stuff practically oozing out of Flagship State U’s pores. Just across the quad from our antiquated classroom facilities are real antiques—thousand-year-old antiques—well-maintained and sometimes cleverly displayed by the archeologists right here on our very own campus.

Our trips to the campus museums have all been unguided, impromptu descendings-upon more so than organized events. I like to keep things interesting for the person manning the front desk by turning up with fifteen freshmen and letting them loose because, you know, they’re adults. The people at the front desk are not always convinced of the whole Freshman/Adult Phenomenon, but the woman at the Museum of Natural History was far more zen that the woman at the Paulbreabryant Museum, so I felt pretty good about the whole affair. And I don’t really just turn them loose. We do, after all, have to think about something vaguely constructive. Typically, we walk to a destination and I dole out a few questions for the group to think over and consider carefully before shooing them off to take notes and think deeply. I had intended to give my students their questions on the front steps before going inside.

“Hey, gang, let’s gather up here on the steps for a minute—”

“Why?” Mark cut in before I could get any further, shifting his backpack on his shoulder and grinning. “So you can get a picture?”

Truly, it’s amazing how much my students humor me. The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind until he said it, but of course, I did have my camera . . .

Cheesecake snapshot secured, we waved at the bright red OPEN sign, climbed the steps and shoved our respective ways inside, coming face to snout with a big brown bear, neatly preserved and standing freely in the front foyer, begging to be touched. Of course, we all respected the sign urging us not to touch it, but I really, really wanted to. Really. Just a quick pat on the head. Deep down, all large-scale taxidermied mammals are definitely, definitely begging for a pat on the head.

What wasn’t begging for a pat on the head was the giant, room-filling skeleton of the zeuglodon, or the Basilosaurus cetoides (there’s some debate about what it “should” be called) on the museum’s second floor. Turns out that Alabama is home to several impressive, complete skeletons of prehistoric whales. Whales! Because pretty much the whole of the southeast was well and truly covered with water. And whales. And sharks with pointy teeth.

Anyway. The zeuglodon hanging out on the second floor is almost a complete skeleton and he’s mighty big. He’s also a fine specimen of Alabama’s Official State Fossil. Until the moment that the very earnest woman at the museum’s front desk uttered that phrase, I hadn’t known that state’s had Official State Fossils. Everyone know that states have nicknames (Heart of Dixie), and state birds (yellowhammer) and flowers (camellia), but fossils? Come on. I know that we all like to thumb our noses at other states and make out like things are so much better on our side of the invisible boundary (road conditions and highway maintenance notwithstanding because, dear god, we all have better roads than Mississippi and Eastern Tennessee; Eastern Tennessee should secede and nickname itself the Orange Construction Cone State) but really? We’ve digressed to fossils? Surely we have more pressing things on which to pass official legislation. The fairly pressing water shortage in the Southeast, for example. Or possibly that pesky war we went and started in someone else’s desert.

Of course, our zeuglodon kicks my old home state of Massachusetts’ ambiguous “dinosaur tracks” three times around the block. Just, you know, as long as we’re digressing.

The museum itself is somewhat impressive for what it contains: a large collection of pottery from the Mississipian Native Americans who lived in Moundville; a handful of impressive skeletons from all over (including a mammoth skull from Beloit, WI!); a gorgeous collection of beautiful hand drawn native Alabama fish illustrations; the authentic Studebaker wagon that Professor Eugene Allen Smith used to traverse the state and catalogue it’s wonders in his mid-1800s geological survey; and, my personal favorite, the only meteorite known to have struck a living person.

Imagine, if you will, lying down on your living room couch for a nice afternoon kip when suddenly, a chunk of space rock a little bigger than a softball comes flying through your rental house’s roof, hits your giant old-school 1950s wooden radio, and ricochets toward the couch you happen to be lying on, whacking you in the arm and very much disturbing you nap. Welcome to the life of Ann Hodges, a Sylacauga, Alabama, resident and the only person known to have been struck by a meteorite. It caused quite a scandal. Lots of seizing of the meteorite by various official bodies and landlords, a lawsuit, a few newpaper articles. And now, it sits on the second floor, somewhat eclipsed by the suspended zeuglodon, safe behind Plexiglas, preserved for anyone who wanders in to see.

But that’s just it, isn’t it? Anyone who wanders in. Aside from school children and families, who really wanders in to the Museum of Natural History? Who really cares about Professor Eugene Allen Smith or the building (Smith Hall) that bears his name and houses his Studebaker wagon? Would my students, for instance, have ever gone into the museum were it not for our walking field trip or some other class that used the museum as a teaching tool?

More to the point—perhaps more uncomfortable to consider—would I?

Maybe. Eventually. Probably not.

But hey, look what I can say since I got to go: my Official State Fossil is better than your Official State Fossil.

Now go find your Natural History Museum, wander in, and prove me wrong.

You Can't Always Get What You Want

2008-03-13T10:41:00.004-06:00

(Aside: I wonder how many hundreds upon hundreds of blog posts have started with that same overused but apt title.)

So you've probably noticed the comics I occasionally usurp and use here on Scooter Nation--my dear friend and fellow ex-desk hostage the Cooking Junkie turned me on to Married to the Sea and Natalie Dee a while ago. It's this husband and wife team in Ohio and I have to say, I'm glad CJ pointed me in their direction because hitherto, in my opinion, the only good things to come out of Ohio were the Wright brothers and my MFA thesis adviser (not at the same time, obviously). Not only do I find some of their comics terribly apt and wickedly funny in that not-laughing-out-loud-but-will-chuckle-to-myself-all-day sort of way, but I also love their T-shirts and very much want to own several of them (note to Expat: my birthday is in April. Hint, hint).

But I am sadsadsad at the fact that I will really never be able to own or wear even if I did own (and really, what's the fun in that?) this shirt.

Our dear friend the Fabulous Public Sphere Theorist refers fondly to all musicians who pay the bills with church work--myself and her own organist husband included--as "whores for the Lord." It's true. I haven't attended a church as a member or a parishioner since I was about 17 and started getting paid to show up and sing. This doesn't cause me any spiritual angst and it hasn't yet motivated any existential crisis. But this . . . this T-shirt changes things. In all my years selling my voice to churches, I've never really felt that my wardrobe was restricted, mainly because you can wear a choir robe over anything. Yet in this incarnation of my church job, I'm not the director of an adult choir. I'm the director of children's music. Imagine, if you will, the questions from a hoard of 10-year-olds if I showed up wearing this shirt. And then imagine the hoard of parents. The phone calls. The emails. The moral outrage of suburbanites who feed their kids McDonald's on the way to soccer practice. "This is Alabama. We take God seriously here. We do not want our children exposed to cartoon people gallivanting in champagne saucers. On a Wednesday."

But beyond the simple logistics, the sad fact is, no one at my current church job except maybe my friend and boss, THE Tenor, and quite probably all the other voices for hire, would get it.

Maybe I could wear it on a Thursday.

Nation News: Really, I Just Want to Show You My Laundry Room

2008-03-05T21:20:00.009-06:00

First, let me preface everything by saying that our house was a definite steal thanks to the abysmal housing market (thank you, W--couldn't have done it without you). We have way more space than we ever thought possible in a first home; a great lot with a wonderful yard; and very nice, quiet, largely retired and elderly neighbors who have all come by and offered to let Expat and I borrow (1) a chain saw, (2) a pressure washer with a 40 foot hose, (3) a full-sized pick-up with a cap, and the people across the street are coming by sometime next week "when it's convenient for y'all" and (4) bringing us dinner. I'm not entirely sure if this warm welcome is due more to our neighbors having naturally giving natures or if it's more relief to see that the house on the corner is inhabited once again, but either way, I'm not one to turn down a free dinner. After waiting 4 months for this house, I feel like we've earned it.

The Elderly Shyster whose house we now own went bankrupt sometime before we started negotiating a contract. The thing is, he didn't tell anybody, at least, not right away. As I hinted several months ago, we were supposed to close in December, then they asked to move it to January so we said "Sure." But then we got home from Christmas Down Under and found out that (a) they were bankrupt, (b) we were now buying from the bankruptcy court, and oh by the way, (c) someone had "found" the hidden key that the seller's real estate agent had left out for the pest inspection folks and "stolen" the washer and dryer that we were supposed to be getting as part of our contract.

I ask you, what kind of opportunity thief steals a washer and dryer? Particularly a washer and dryer from 1976? The house was still full of all their other stuff, like the antique writing desk in the front hall or the crystal in the china cabinet in the dining room. Crystal and writing desks will fit in a trunk. But a washer and dryer? That takes planning. If they were really stolen by mystery thieves, well, I'll eat Expat's Fluevogs.

Anyway. We had to wait 23 days for the case to go before the court and for the court to approve the contract. You wait 23 days because the courts have to list the property as being for sale for that long to give potential buyers the chance to scrape some cash together, etc. Mr. Bankruptcy Lawyer, who was now acting as the trustee for the Elderly Shyster's assets, assured us that these things almost always go through and could Expat and I just get dressed up and troop down to the courthouse for a few minutes during the hearing? Of course we could. Why not?

Court went well. We showed up, looked earnest and responsible when we waved to the judge, and were set to close on Valentine's Day. Turns out the Elderly Shyster actually owned lot 22 and a sliver of lot 23. Mr. Lawyer hadn't realized that the Elderly Shyster had 2 deeds--one for the house and one for this piece of land. Never mind that knowing these things is Mr. Lawyer's job: even I had to acknowledge that the Elderly Shyster must be one of the World's Most Frustrating Clients.

So where is lot 23 and what does it have to do with the house? Ah, grasshopper, lot 23 is the strip of land by the street running the entire length of our lot--where our driveway sits. What's so big about the driveway? Well, aside from being ridiculously steep, the bank wouldn't give us a loan on lot 22 until we had the deed situation with lot 23 sorted out because otherwise, technically, we would have no entrance or exit (egress) to the property, so technically we couldn't use the property, so technically they couldn't loan us the money.

I told them that technically, the house has more than the carport entrance and that technically we could just park on the lawn or the street and I promised to technically only use the front door, even for the moving truck.

My very good-natured banker just laughed and it was like I could hear the voice of that woman from Little Britain, "Computer says no."

We rescheduled the closing for the 22nd. Mr. Lawyer worked some lawyer voodoo-magic and pushed the snippet of lot 23 through in less than a week.

And this time, finally, it happened. We closed. We even got the driveway.

In celebration we spent that entire weekend and the first part of the week ripping up carpet, taking down wall paper, and slaving like mad to get the laundry room cleaned and painted in anticipation of the delivery of our brand new, bought-'em-with-reimbursement-money matching Kenmore high efficiency washer and dryer, a.k.a. the Miraculous Machines.

They came a week ago. These are the sexiest pieces of plastic and steel you've ever seen. They are so silent that even James Bond could learn a thing or two about working in stealth from them. The washer has a time-delay cycle in case I want to load it the night before and have it kick on in time to ave clean clothes in the morning. The dryer has a setting called "Hang Dry" for clothes that aren't supposed to go in the dryer. Even on the normal setting, when my clothes come out of the dryer, they aren't hot like they have always been at the laundromat, they're just dry. Forget sports cars and yachts: my washing machine can wash 12 bath towels at once in under 45 minutes. We don't even have 12 bath towels, but if we did, I would wash them. All of them. Just because I could.

So the next time you visit, we'd love to have you stay with us here in the 1970s (and really, the wall paper is getting it's very own post soon). Oh, and bring your laundry. I really don't mind.

The laundry room before, with their junk and the machines that got "stolen."

The laundery room after (ignore the vintage linoleum). Sexy, sexy!

Black Warrior Files: Bama’s Pluck and Grit

2008-02-18T21:09:00.012-06:00

Type “college football museums” into Google and inside the first five hits, you get two for the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend, Indiana, and three for the Paul W. Bryant Museum located right here in good old Tuscaloosa, Our Fair City, right next to the Flagship State U conference center. The shadow of Paul William Bryant, known of course as Paul Bear Bryant (in local parlance, pronounced always as one word: Paulbearbryant, or phonetically, Pawburbri-an, with a long i), hangs over everything that is Bama to the point that I sometimes feel, walking around, like I’m living with a walking ghost. It’s a very different vibe to being on a campus with that other winning college football coach at Big State U in Pennsylvania. That other coach is no ghost, he’s a living legend. Literally. When you see him walking on campus, he smiles at you as you rush past to teach your next. He donates money to the English department and the library. He still runs out onto the field with the football team. Sure, he’s got a full-sized bronze statue to him out in front of the stadium, but he’s alive.

But Paulbearbryant’s ghost is bigger than any figure any living coach might cut walking across any campus to date. Case in point: Big State U has an All-Sports Museum; Flagship State U has the Bryant Museum. Granted, the Bryant Museum does cover the entirety of the Alabama football tradition, but the video at the heart of the exhibit is about Bryant’s life and his legend, about 1/3 of the museum space is dedicated to Bryant pictures and memorabilia (like his entire office right down to the Green Bay Packers mug on his desk), and shrines to Bryant appear around practically every corner. My personal favorite? The Paulbearbryant Coke bottles and the crystal replica houndstooth hat on the velvet revolving turntable in the lighted display case. I’ll bet the hat is even the right size. Nothing says “overkill” like crystal that would fit on your head.

I take a class to the museum every semester, partly because its very existence is bound to inspire a little writing, mostly because pretty much none of my students have ever been. This semester, I went with my Honors freshman comp class, which is focusing on living locally (I’ve cleverly titled it “Think Globally, Write Locally: Locavores, Rhetoric, and You”), among other things. Only one of my fifteen students had been before. I asked them to go, to take notes, to think about what it means or what it says about Tuscaloosa, Our Fair City, that we have a museum dedicated to the Bear. Some of them might write about it on their blogs. See, we’re trying a little experiment this semester: each student will keep a comprehensive blog in place of a final paper. We’ll see how they work out. I’ll have them all linked to Scooter Nation by tomorrow. And I’m not going to lie. I’m shamelessly using my own blog space to (ideally) spur my students on to a little writing of their own. We’ll see how that will work out, too.

As for the museum, well, even an Auburn fan like yours truly has to give credit where credit is due. Bryant more than just defines the sports tradition here in Tuscaloosa. In a way, Bryant’s legacy defines the best of Southeastern Conference football: a sense of history, of pride, of deep-seated tradition that’s handed down from family member to family member. It’s the sort of stuff we like to trot out when we’re making fun of the South, and admittedly, the parents who name their children “Bryant” or saddle some poor unfortunate kid with the middle name “Bear” really do need to reconsider their priorities (and to be fair, so do those Auburn fan parents who name their kids “Aubie”). Tradition and custom in the South are a catch 22. On the one hand, let’s all agree that any state that does not make an effort to recycle glass and that, in response to recent school shootings, is considering allowing students and teachers to carry guns on college campuses (because obviously arming more unstable young adults is a good way to ensure everyone’s safety) is not the most “with it” of states. On the other hand, there’s something comforting about settling into a place where barbeque sauce recipes are handed down from one generation to the next, where family names get passed along like hand-me-downs and everyone who’s anyone belongs to the DAR or the United Daughter of the Confederacy or both, and where one man’s legacy has the power to inspire thousands long after he’s passed. Southerners are fearless in their pride. Then again, I guess it doesn’t really take a crystal houndstooth hat to tell you that.

Crystal you could wear on your head.

Gen-u-ine Paulbearbryant Coke.

Local News Tuesday: Fat Only Feels This Good Once a Year

2008-02-05T21:26:00.000-06:00

Attention, attention! We at Scooter Nation have a very important PSA: Mardi Gras started in Mobile, Alabama. That's right. The Zulu Krewe might be strutting their stuff over in NOLA, but over in Bienville Square (could we sound more Frenchy?), the Mystics of Time are sending throws and moon pies out to the crowds, too. Not only that, but in case you're not from around here, Mardi Gras doesn't just stop with the big cities. Mardi Gras is part of the Gulf Coast identity. Every small town from Texas to the panhandle of Florida and beyond gets into the action. Public schools give everyone a four day weekend. The local Mardi Gras societies throw balls. The whole region buzzes with a collective on-your-second-beer-and-don't-you-feel-good vibe.

And before you turn your mainstream Mardi Gras nose up at those small town parades, consider this next point very carefully: Mardi Gras is not about getting drunk or even about flashing your boobs at every Tom, Dick, and Bubba--Mardie Gras is about catching free stuff. Never mind that you don't really need two pounds of silver Mardi Gras dubloons; purple, green, and gold thong underwear; inflatable bananas the size of a German shepherd; or piles of moon pies of varying quality (good = Lookout; so-so = small foil-wrapped no-name ones; stellar = Lookout double-decker moon pies zapped for 20 seconds in the microwave. Amazing). Mardi Gras isn't about need. It's about glut and decadence and catching obscene amounts of cheap plastic shiny beads that smell like motor oil because let's face it, whatever they're coating those things with can't be good for the environment and yet we allow small children to chew on them anyway.

Catching obscene amounts of beads that smell like motor oil requires focus and strategy. You can get drunk on cheap beer and show your boobs to random men any day of the week, but that's not going to help you map out a smart way to catch the Knights of Ecor Rouge parade four times in one night or make the crucial dive at just the right moment to scoop up that one perfect strand of elusive aqua blue beads. And in small towns, you can find a place to park and you can walk to the parade without the fear of being shot or mugged and no, I'm not exaggerating. And at the end of the parade, when you've caught more than you can hold and you don't really need or want any of it because where will you put it when you get it home and what could a grown person possibly do with beads that smell like motor oil, you can hand your entire plastic grocery bag stash to the nearest passing grade schooler and he will smile shyly and take it all and you can walk back to your car whistling to yourself, sated. The thrill of Mardi Gras is in the hunt, the chase, the perfectly timed dive.

But save a few moon pies. And try them in the microwave, just once (unwrapped on a plate, people). And if you get a banana one--one of those ones with the impossibly orange coating--mail it to me. God knows I love a banana moon pie.

The Black Warrior Files: Nature Trumps Nurture—Again

2008-02-04T21:41:00.000-06:00

What sets the South apart from the rest of the nation—and I mean really sets it apart—isn’t the drawl. Texans have that, too, and as any good Southerner will tell you, Texas is its own country and ain’t no friend of mine thank you very much. It’s not in the manners either (Midwesterners are quite a lovely and polite people, too), or the overuse of Cool Whip as one of the top five dessert ingredients (Jell-o pudding, sweetened condensed milk, Karo syrup, and butter, for you curious types). It’s not even the religious devotion to SEC college football, the prevalence of lifted trucks with oversized tires, or the “Honk if you love Jesus” and “W: The President” bumper stickers. What really sets the South apart isn’t something we’ve bought or created, rather, it’s a part of the region just as much as kudzu is a part of the landscape: Humidity.

You might think that you know about Humidity—that everybody knows about Humidity. She fills your bathroom, fogs the mirror, and wraps around you when you step out of a hot shower. She sits on your skin like plastic wrap when you walk into the locker room after your daily workout. These little, tentative brushes with Humidity might make you think you understand her, but really, you’re just flirting, waving to her when you think about it. Ignoring her when you don’t. We who live in the southeast, though, we passed flirting sometime between when Jesus walked the earth and the Baptists came to tell it on Red Mountain. We’ve long since married Humidity, divorced her, married her again, and resigned ourselves to the idea that she will always, always sprawl over more than her fair share of the bed and want to cuddle when you just want to sleep.

Such is Humidity’s presence in the South that I can write about her at the beginning of February because she waltzed in today without so much as knocking and plunked herself smack down in the middle of winter. My first clue came as I stepped from this morning’s shower and the residual drops of water left behind by my towel didn’t instantly evaporate into the thirsty air. My second was the practically audible sucking sounds of my skin rehydrating after two months of forced air central heating. By the time my hair burst into a frizzy halo and all the ringlets around my hairline came out to play, I was already past caring. trudging across campus somewhere around 11AM, I lost my will to be a productive and engaged citizen of the world and instead found myself longing for clichéd and vast veranda, for a Cracker Barrel rocking chair, and for a tall, clinking glass of sweet tea. The rest of the nation might think that we're just lazy and can't move at a normal pace, or that it’s the heat that slows Southerners down, and we let them think what they will because we don’t want them to know. In truth, we yearn to give in to Humidity’s seductive caress. To feel her warm breath on our hair. To hear her contented sighs as she bathes our glistening skin and sinks into our very bones until we are drunk with moisture, shedding coats and scarves without cares and driving home slowly, dreaming of cold fruit and cold drinks in tall, clinking glasses. Even at the beginning of February.

The camelia buch outside of Gorgas House on U of A's campus also likes the humidity.

Local News Tuesday: Gittin’ Trashed in Tuscaloosa

2008-01-29T22:08:00.000-06:00

Up until about five months ago, I had never dug in a trash can except when I thought I’d thrown away money. In fact just eight months ago, when I was sitting in my cubicle in Madison, slaving away at the Evil Desk Job and considering my future new life in Tuscaloosa, digging through trash cans never really crossed my mind. Likewise, I can safely say that retrieving someone else’s Mostly-Empty Beer Bottle from the gutter or someone else’s Forgotten Aluminum Soda Can from under a desk didn’t factor in to my plans for hobbies I would pursue once I started my new job as Hip Young College Instructor.

We’ve already mentioned that Tuscaloosa isn’t, perhaps, the best place to live for someone who enjoys saving the planet one #2 plastic bottle at a time, but I never expected the non-recycling mentality of my students and neighbors to so radically change my own actions toward what I’m sure most of the human race considers trash. Take, for instance, the Mostly-Empty Beer Bottle incident from a few months back, which could be viewed by some as the Beginning of my new hobby. It’s December and cold-ish for Alabama (read: low 50’s, high 40’s) and Expat and I are getting out of the car heading to a reading put on my some of my fellow MFA-holding instructors. We’re downtown in the evening. We park in one of the street-parking spaces outside the downtown furniture store. I notice as I step onto the curb that there are 2 out-of-place, empty glass beer bottles kicked onto their sides and resting in the gutter. I start to walk past them and instantly, I have a vision of some city worker reaching down and tossing them into the bag before throwing it onto the trash truck. I shake my head and say to myself “Forget about it.” And then I feel guilty. I mean, if I don’t pick them up, who will?

I sigh. “Hand on a minute, Expat.” I trudge back to the car, pick up the bottles, open the back hatch and stick them inside.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to take these home and rinse them out and we can take them to Birmingham with our glass recycling.”

He looks at me and blinks. “You’re going to start collecting trash?”

“It’s not trash. It’s recycling.”

But folks, let’s face it, trash or recycling, I am nonetheless picking up someone else’s cast offs. Someone else’s waste. I’m touching things that someone else has drunk out of (since most of what I pick up are, indeed, beverage containers of some kind or another). Still, it’s like I can’t not do it. I save my own trash until I can find someplace to recycle it. At any one time I probably have at least one plastic bottle in my backpack, just waiting for me to walk past a plastic recycling bin. At that rate, what’s the big deal about picking up someone else’s? It doesn’t weigh much. No one will know that it’s not mine when I throw it away. There’s only the minor inconvenience of someone Witnessing Potentially Embarrassing Behavior.

I’m of two minds about the Witnessing. On the one hand, I recognize that to most folks, it seems icky and weird to pick up someone else’s trash. On the other hand, when they see me pick it up and watch me carry it to a recycle bin, there is some small part of me that hopes they might be motivated to do the same with the next plastic bottle they come across. Perhaps I’m being idealistic, here, but part of me can’t help but think “Hey, if I can get just one person to consider before they chunk their Diet Coke can in the trash, that’s something, right?”

Of course, if it were simply a question of picking up obvious cast offs and stopping there, that would be one thing. But friends, it doesn’t stop there. Hello, I’m Sparky, and I’m a Trash Can Retrievaholic. It’s true. Everyday when I leave the classrooms where I teach, I pick up the small can by the door and pick through to fish out the recyclables. I usually find 2 or 3 cans and 1 or 2 bottles per day per class. I then take said cans or bottle and carry them across the hall to the recycle bin, which, in most buildings, is less than 10 steps from my classroom. And for the one building I teach in that doesn’t offer recycling? Well, my students know that if they finish off a bottle of water during class, they can hand me the empty bottle at the end of class and I’ll do what I always do: carry it around in my backpack until I find a recycle bin. Could my students do this very same thing themselves? Sure. Would they? Um, no.

Now add to this the fact that right now, this week in Tuscaloosa, all of the city recycling trailers—those ones I wrote about in that other post—are full. This past Sunday, I decided to empty out my garage of the mounds of recycling that I’ve been collecting for the past month, so I did what I always do—I packed the back hatch floor-to-ceiling full of paper, plastic, aluminum, and steel and trundled off to the collection area. Unlike most times I’ve been to drop our recycling at the recycling trailers, this past Sunday, the trailers were completely full. Of everything. People had begun piling their bags and boxes of recyclable goods next to the trailers. Plastic bottles and sheets of newspaper were blowing everywhere.

“Well,” I grumbled, “At least people are recycling . . .”

I decided I’d just hold on to my recycling rather than leave it outside. So I went home. But rather than unload the back hatch, I just left everything there. “I’ll take it to a different site tomorrow,” I told Expat.

I didn’t get to check any of the other drop off locations on Monday, but today I made a point of driving to the location near campus in between my classes. I had it all planned. Walk to the car. Drive to the other drop off point. Unload the car. Park. Walk back to teach. Perfect. Except that my plan B site was just as full, if not fuller than plan A. With plan B, I managed to squeeze all of my magazines and the aluminum cans in (barely), but there was no hope for the plastics, which were taking up the bulk of my trunk. I gave up and drove back to campus, but who knows how many well-intentioned recyclers will be so disheartened that she drives home and just throws it all away? Not only that, but how much of the environment am I saving when I waste heaven knows how much gas tooling around town looking for an empty, or at least not-overflowing, recycling trailer?

So now I really have no choice but to endure Expat calling me “Trash Lady.” I am. I think when you’re carrying other people’s things around in your back pack, it’s one thing. But when you’re trucking them around in your back pack and your car, to the point that you can’t even fit one bag of groceries in the back hatch, well . . . as some of the more refined Southern ladies might say, that’s just tacky.

Somehow, I don’t think this is quite what folks had in mind back when I was in college in Birmingham and my friends used to say they were heading over to Tuscaloosa to get trashed. I don’t think this is what they meant at all.

Scooter Nation on Vacation: Brisbane

2007-12-30T06:09:00.000-06:00

Whatever you do, don’t pronounce Brisbane the way you think you should pronounce it or you run the risk of getting laughed at and called an ignorant Seppo. In local parlance, it’s Briz-b’n. As far as Seppo, that’s short for septic tank or Yank, which is what everyone from the US is to your average Aussie, whether you’re from north of the Mason-Dixon or not.

We landed in Brisbane after a 13 hour flight from L.A., during which time I watched Ratatouille, Nancy Drew, and Shrek the Third on the in-flight, on-demand movies before falling into that long-flight stupor that inevitably overcomes you when you’ve been awake and moving from airport to plane to airport to plane to airport to really big plane for more than 20 hours. This time, upon landing, I did not make the mistake of intently watching the seductive and hypnotic baggage claim go around and around the way I had five years ago after my first Ridiculously Long Flight, which meant that this time, my center of gravity did not suddenly slip away and I did not suddenly pitch backwards into the wall. I took this as a good sign and felt very much like a Wise and Seasoned Traveler. And this time, I got to go through the Australian and New Zealand nationals customs line with Expat (a.k.a., the Short Line) because after five minutes of waiting alone in the Other Line, the nice man in front of me pointed out that, since I am now Expat’s wife and not the girlfriend, I count as family and therefore get to reap the benefits of Expat’s nationalness.

We are visiting Expat’s family for the Christmas holiday and Brisbane was the first stop. Expat’s grandmother—his dad’s mother and Expat’s only surviving grandparent—lives in Brisbane. Expat’s dad, the German Australian Father In Law (GAFIL), was coming up for the few days we were in town before we went to visit Expat’s mom in Melbourne. Oma is a tiny woman—both Expat and I have tiny grandmothers on our respective father’s side. Tiny and active. Oma’s house is built in the traditional Queensland style: elevated by one floor with the garage underneath. Initially, Queenslanders were told that this was to prevent flooding, but really, it’s to make repairs from termites (or white ants as they call them) easier and less costly. It’s a lot cheaper to replace a stilt than it is to replace a whole wall. As a result, everyone walks up a flight of outdoor stairs to get to the living area of most Queensland houses, which means that Oma walks up and down a flight of stairs many times every day just to get from her garage laundry room to her living room. Like I said, active.

A brief geography lesson: most Australians live on the Australian east coast (the side that faces the Pacific, closest to California). As we all know, Australia is in the Southern Hemisphere, which means that going north in Australia is a lot like going south in the US—the climate gets more mild and more moist as you get more towards the equator. Granted, moist is a relevant term for a country that’s been in severe drought for the past six years, but you get what I mean. Anyway. Much like the Southern US has a reputation for producing uniquely odd residents, so does the northern part of Australia. Of course, this doesn’t exactly apply to Oma. For all that she likes to say “This is an Australian household,” Oma herself is German.

Expat’s grandparents immigrated to Australia after World War II when the GAFIL was only 5 years old. Germany was a wreck, job prospects were few and far between, and after serving for more years than anyone cares to remember, Expat’s grandfather wanted to put as much distance between himself and the German army as possible. I’m a little fuzzy on the details as to why they chose Australia—I think it was simply a case of opportunity and means—but they arrived, they settled, Oma and Opa found work, they bought land, they built a house, they merged old German traditions with new Australian ones. Still, at no time is the family’s German heritage more evident than at Christmas. As Expat likes to point out, only a stubborn German would crank up her oven and bake 12 different kinds of traditional German Christmas biscuits (cookies) in the middle of a 100 degree Australian summer in a house that does not have air conditioning. But Oma does. Every year. Last year, Expat asked Oma for the cookie recipes, which she wrote down on three sheets of paper and mailed to us. I tried making a few. Expat said they were good but not quite Oma’s. This year, I got to try Oma’s Christmas cookies myself and I had to agree: last year’s attempts were pretty good, but Oma’s . . . Oma’s are perfect.

FYI, even though it’s balmy and in the upper 70s to mid-80s in December, the major shopping areas in Brisbane still decorate for Christmas with snowflakes. Despite the abundance of palm trees, they truck in live evergreen trees. They do take advantage of the climate and plant the poinsettias right in the ground, and they do get around in brightly colored sun dressed and flip-flops (thongs), which are, also FYI, not allowed in the new casino that’s taken up residence in the old, historic Treasury Building. Gambling is 100% legal in Australia—well, “pokies,” as they call the computerized slot machines, are legal in all sorts of bars and the retired services clubs, which are like the VFW halls in the US. Expat and the GAFIL like to take $10 each and go play the 1 or 2 cent machines and drink beer, which is exactly what we were headed to do in Brisbane at the Treasury Building casino when the security guard stopped me and told me “No rubber thongs allowed.”

My first thought: What underwear am I wearing today and how does he know and surely it isn’t rubber?

My second thought: Wait, these flip-flops are suede, thank you very much. And beaded. And they match my dress.

The Treasury Building casino.

But no, it didn’t matter. In the end, all I got to see was the outside of the historic Treasury Building because some fuckwit concerned citizen of the world decided that clearly, all people in flip-flops are bums and don’t deserve to see the inside of the Treasury Building. For the record, Expat was wearing shorts and a T-shirt (untucked) and boat shoes. The GAFIL was wearing his usual uniform of sneakers and baggy, sporty khakis, and some work-affiliated polo shirt. I was wearing a very nice, calf-length, empire-waisted sundress with said matching fancy suede beaded flip-flops and a lovely Vera Bradley handbag and make-up, for crying out loud. As we left, I tried to find a woman on the street who wasn't, in fact, wearing flip-flops. I couldn't. Maybe the Treasury Building casino is just sexist.

Still, there were plenty of flip-flop friendly sights to see in downtown Brisbane and the suburbs beyond. Expat’s grandmother actually lives in the somewhat southern suburb of Yeronga, which boasts all sorts of lovely houses; fascinating plant life (I actually got to see a mango tree—a mango tree! In somebody’s front yard! With real mangos on it!); interesting birds; and very nice local cafes which serve all manner of tasty pastries and pretty coffee. Fact: all Australian cafes (and there are a lot of them) serve pretty coffee. Beautiful coffee. Positively brilliantly made, espresso-based coffees with the perfect balance of rich espresso, fresh milk, and delicate foam that make me want to weep when I consider what I have to go back to. Drip filtered coffee as Americans know it simply doesn’t exist in Australian cafes. When you ask for a coffee, they ask what kind and yes, you pay $3.60 every time but with the exchange rate, that’s more like $3.05 and anyway, it’s brilliant so who cares?

The Yeronga Bakery.

The mango tree on the way home from the bus.

Pretty coffee!

When Expat and I left for Melbourne 3 days later, Oma sent us with $100 for spending money, a tin of her Christmas biscuits lovingly wrapped, and most importantly, her love.

If the rest of the trip is anything like this, I may never come home.

The GAFIL, Oma, and Expat. What a cute family!

Black Warrior Files: Fall Comes . . . And Goes . . . And Comes . . . And Goes . . .

2007-12-04T20:50:00.000-06:00

So back in, oh, September when the fall foliage reports started coming out for New England and the upper Midwest, I started getting ready for the fall that would surely come south eventually. I hauled out the sweater boxes and checked that the sweaters we all there and clean and ready to be worn once we finally got that first fall day. I dug out my knee-high men’s tube socks that I started wearing under my jeans that first winter I moved back up to the Frozen North in 2002. I found my favorite scarf. I was ready for Fall.

But like a bad date who leaves you waiting on the porch for 35 minutes, Fall didn’t show.

As some of you may recall from my last winter in northern climes, I am not one to necessarily cherish temperature extremes that tend toward the negative. Trust me. Back in February, when Expat made the decision that the job in Alabama was The One, I did a happy little gig in my snowboots in my cubicle right there under the roof of my former Very Corporate Employer in front of God and everyone (read: the industrial Cannon laser printer that shared my cube). Still there is something of merit to the way the air snaps in those first fall days, to the way the sky looks So Blue it almost hurts. I knew that in coming to Alabama, I would be sacrificing a few things, I had just hoped (quietly) that one of them wouldn’t be fall.

And then, just as my heart was laid low by the endless string of mid-to-upper 70s weather the start of November, just when I was truly running out of fall-ish T-shirts and was about to resort once again to springy aquas and limes and sleeveless dresses, Fall showed up one day wearing Rainbows, a Hawaiian shirt, and a slightly sheepish grin.

“Where’ve you been, man?” I asked him.

“Oh, you know, around,” Fall said and scuffed his toes in the dirt.

He brought with him the scraps that had fallen to the bottom of the fall foliage bag and started scattering them judiciously around the Flagship State U campus. One week before Thanksgiving, just in time for Indian corn and pumpkins and my Grammy’s open-faced apple pie, a few trees erupted in a riot of color. It was subtle, elegant, and all the more impressive because it was so selective. Unlike a New England fall, the Southern fall doesn’t inundate you with color. The Southern fall is all about the second glance, the quick double take, the rounding of a corner only to have your breath knocked out by the one, lone, fiery maple.

I turned to Fall. I was impressed. I said so. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”

“Neither did I,” he said. “I’m all out, though.” He gave the bag one last shake and folded it under his arm. He reached into the breast pocket of his Hawaiian shirt and pulled out a pair of Ray-Bans. “Think I’ll head to Destin. I’ll send you a postcard.”

It was true. The fall foliage map on the Weather Channel’s website didn’t extend past Birmingham, as though the rest of the state was simply boycotting anything other than brown that year.

Today, we had our first truly fall day, temperature-wise: down into the 30s at night, the 60s during the day. The students are running around in hats and Columbia jackets and those unfortunate Ugg boots that don’t seem like they’re going out of style down here anytime soon. Expat used it as an excuse to finally break out one of those sweater vests that make him look particularly English-professory. I finally unearthed my little red coat with the hood and put on a pair of knee-length socks. Sure, it’s odd for Fall to wait so long, but he made it in time. Just in time for the holiday sales. Just in time for Christmas.

This weekend, the city of Tuscaloosa will host its annual Christmas Afloat parade, where residents along the Black Warrior River light up their boats and parade down the river after dark and spectators side out on the banks on lawn chairs and huddle under blankets and drink hot chocolate. And maybe by then laid-back Fall will have sent me that postcard from Destin. One of those ones with a palm tree lit up with colored Christmas lights, or a girl in a bikini wearing a Santa hat. “See?” he’ll write. “Aren’t you glad I waited until December?”

I sure am, Fall. I sure am.

Close Encounters of the Worst Kind

2007-11-28T13:43:00.000-06:00

They say “good fences make good neighbors,” but for those of us who fall into the Renter category along with some 34 million other U.S. households, that little piece of folksy wisdom could stand a little updating. Something along the lines of “good plumbing habits make good neighbors.” Specifically, perhaps, “Not flooding your upstairs bathroom and then not telling your downstairs neighbors makes good neighbors,” but that might be a little too wordy to work as folksy wisdom.

Yesterday afternoon at approximately 4:00PM, just when I was settling onto the couch to work up the latest Local News Tuesday post, just as Expat was headed to take a shower and change into more Appropriately Professorial Attire so as to cut a dashing figure at the evening’s lecture and dinner to follow, just as we were getting on with our Very Important Lives, Expat made a discovery.

“Honey? Come here for a minute.”

I walked from the couch to the bedroom to find Expat crouched on our closet floor, smelling his hand.

“Uh-oh. Is one of the Pre-Kids protesting?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. What do you think?”

I crouched, too, and pressed my palm onto the cheap beige carpet that covers the floor of every apartment in our entire Yuppie Apartment Complex. It squelched when I pressed it. Regardless of how much protesting it was doing, no cat had that much pee in its bladder. An exact, dark replica of my handprint was left when I pulled my palm back and sniffed. “I think it’s water. I wonder where it’s coming from.”

We stood up, looked around, scratched our heads. I walked around to the bathroom, which is just on the other side of the closet. I flipped on the light and stepped in the puddle. “Shit.”

The water was coming from the air conditioning vent over the sink. It had completely covered the floor in front of the sink vanity. It had saturated the carpet in front of the bathroom. It had crept down the wall and oozed into the closet, saturating the carpet there as well. It was leaving long, dark stains across the ceiling. It was creating a bubble in the plaster next to said air vent. And it was still dripping fairly steadily.

I called the apartment complex office while Expat hauled clothes off the closet floor. I told them to hurry. Then, I decided to go upstairs.

Our upstairs neighbors are a very nice middle-aged, middle-class couple with two Mercedes and three school-aged kids. We think at least one of the parents works for the new Mercedes plant. The kids come home from school, lock themselves in while they wait for their parents to come home, and then, from what Expat and I can tell, either: (A) jump like monkeys from one substantial piece of furniture to another; (B) shoot sizable, thudding arrows at the closet door; or (C) reenact death-defying action movie sequences in the living room, some of which require very energetic footraces and the overturning of said substantial pieces of furniture. On any given evening, we sit on our couch and determine their afterschool activity by the severity of the wild swinging of our overhead living room fan and the amount of plaster dust that sifts down from our popcorn-blasted ceiling.

The daughter answered the door when I rang the doorbell. I’d guess she’s about 13 and is definitely the Middle Child.

“Hi, I’m Sparky, your downstairs neighbor and I was just wondering if your bathroom was, perhaps, flooding.”

“Well, my brother came home and found it all covered with water. We weren’t sure what happened.”

I put on my very best Understanding Adult smile. “Oh, how weird. Well, do you know if the water is still running? I mean, can you tell where it’s coming from?”

“Um, well . . .”

“Tell you what—can I come up and have a look?” I walked past her as she opened the door, her face relaxing with visible relief at not having to explain the situation.

The bathroom in question was locked. Younger Brother (about 9 or 10) was stamping around on the carpet outside, soaking up the water with what appeared to be a baby blue bed sheet. Middle Sister pounded on the door, telling Older Brother (about 14 or 15) to open up. He did. Their bathroom wasn’t just covered, it was submerged in what I guessed to be a little less than an inch of water. The cheap hall carpet, while gradually absorbent, seemed to be acting as a partial dam when faced with such a large quantity, allowing the water level in the bathroom to rise enough to make the plastic wastebasket bobble a bit in its place beside the toilet. The toilet in question was sitting silently—in fact, no running water could be heard at all, which I took to be a good sign—but the noticeable brown smudges around the upraised toilet seat didn’t add much to my comfort level.

“So what happened again, exactly?”

Middle Sister slid her eyes from my face to the wall just beyond my head. “We don’t know. My brother just came home and found it like this.”

“Ah, right. Okay, well, I’ve already called maintenance and they should be stopping up here first, so when they come, be sure to let them in, okay?”

“Yes ma’am. Thank you.”

I headed back downstairs. Expat went ahead and took his quick shower. Then the maintenance men began showing up in a steady caravan. I explained what I knew. They nodded. “Plugged toilet,” they said.

“All of this?” I said, waving my hands toward the heap of soggy towels I’d used to soak up the water, to the stained and suspiciously bubbly ceiling, to the squelching carpet.

“Yes, ma’am. Toilet stopped up and overflowed.”

“They said they don’t know how it happened—that they just came home and found it like this.”

“Told us that, too. But you caught it just in time—it hadn’t soaked into the underlay.”

“So it probably happened this afternoon?”

“Probably.”

“And I’ll bet they just didn’t know who to call.”

“Most likely.”

“And I’ll bet they tried flushing the toilet more than once.”

“I’d say. Probably embarrassed.”

“Probably.” I nod. I can understand this. Kids get embarrassed. They worry what others will say. They worry that they’ll get in trouble.

Expat understands it, too, but can’t quite get past something. “Poo water? We had kiddie poo water dripping into our bathroom?”

“Well, it was clean water by then, you know—just overflow from the toilet.”

“Which was clogged with kiddie poo. I don’t want no kiddie poo water dripping on my head!”

I know my husband is serious when he trots out the double negatives.

Yet in light of this, in light of all of this—the poo water, the bulging plaster, the severe and wild swinging of the overhead fan—I can sit down on my couch and smile.

We close on our new house in about 1 month. A 2,100 square foot house. A monument to 1970s wallpaper that surely deserves a post of its own.

Before that can happen though, we have a few updates from Local News Tuesday and the Black Warrior Files that I need to get back to.

And before that can happen, I need to go by some renter’s insurance. You know. Just in case.

Away-Game Weekends, or Who I Saw at Barnes & Noble Friday Night

2007-11-09T20:31:00.000-06:00

It happened. I told you it would.

It happened tonight as I sat in a plush overstuffed chair in the cafe reading (alternately) the Barbara Kingsolver book I'm assigning next semester for my freshman class on acting locally and the serial young adult fantasy book that I've been stealing peeks at in every chain bookstore we've been in since this summer. I read a lot of books that way—bits at a time, two books at once. Admittedly, I was indulging more in the book on the 6th grade reading level, but it discusses socially concious actions and treating te environment with respect as well . . . just the environment in a magical kingdom far away. With mind-talking ponies. And dragons.

It happened just like I predicted in a post in the not-so-distant past. There I was, sitting in my chair, and Daine, the main character, had just turned into a squirrel but had turned herself back into a person again with the help of a magical badger and her mind-taking pony when all of a sudden—

"Well, look who it is."

"An English teacher sitting in a bookstore reading a book on a Friday night."

I blinked and tucked my embarrassing paperback under my right thigh, pulling the respectable hardcover onto my lap and opening unconvincingly to some page in the middle. "Oh! Hi, guys!"

Two of my 18-year-old male students grinned down at me in my overstuffed chair.

"Whatcha reading?"

"Just this book for one of my classes next semester."

"Oh yeah? Hey, what are you teaching next semester anyway?"

Crisis averted. We chat for a few minutes about my spring class schedule. I introduce them superficially to Expat, who's sitting in his own comfy chair next to me, engrossed in his book about the evils of Blackwater. Expat grunts. My students wave and venture off to their own Friday night browsing.

I slip my paperback from under my thigh and start to open it when another passage from Kingsolver catches my eye. She makes her own cheese. In her own kitchen. With milk she buys at the grocery store. I didn't think you could make cheese with milk you buy at the grocery store . . .

Expat gets up and wanders away from his chair. I'm reading about the New England Cheesemaking Supply. Expat sits down next to me and heaves a huge sigh and I look up and see the wrong sneakers, the wrong jeans, the wrong color shirt and—

"Rocky!"

Rocky is grinning at me like a little kid who's just managed to get you with salt in your coffee instead of sugar.

"Hey! Stella and I are on a date—like an actual date, without the child—and we came here and look who's here already!"

Rocky is a fellow instructor at Flagship State U. Stella is his tenure track wife who teaches in the composition program with Expat and the reason that they're here. Rocky is from Philly. He runs every day at 5 in the morning, except a few weeks ago because his cruising baby daughter pulled a solid metal lamp onto his foot.

Stella appears and laughs nervously at herself and Rocky and their failed date. "It's been so long since we went out that we don't know what to do when we go out." She wrings her hands and glances around anxiously.

"Expat and I are kind of on a date. But we just come here for fun whenever."

Expat walks up and we all laugh again and I slide my young adult fiction into a side cushion in my overstuffed chair.

I told you it would happen.

Local News Tuesday: Wear the Old Coat, Buy the New Book

2007-11-06T20:58:00.000-06:00

Last week, a glorious thing happened here in Tuscaloosa, Our Fair City: we finally got a bookstore. A real bookstore. One that doesn’t specialize in used textbooks or local SEC football team merchandise like framed watercolors of dead coaches or that giant wall clock my dear, dear husband keeps threatening to buy. One that actually sells books that you want to read. One with a CD section that features more than Kelly Clarkson and Unfortunate Country Albums. One with a café and a café menu chock full of overpriced, Not-Quality Lattes (NQL) and overpriced, Calorie-Laden Gooey Things (CAGT). One that epitomizes Corporate America and all that it wrong with mass market book publishing today, where you can get everything that Oprah and Dr. Phil have ever written, along with a smattering of Real Literature and excellent calendars, bulk greeting cards, and Nifty Bound Writing Journals perfect for aspiring zen haiku-ists.

Expat and I haven’t been this excited about a Barnes & Noble since we lived in Small Town, PA, where an evening trip to the B & N did double duty as both a hot date and a research excursion. Even then, though, there was a small, local alternative bookstore, one that was just a short walk from campus and that actually made really good tea. One that still sold used books you actually wanted to read, not just last year’s edition of your organic chemistry textbook (because it was definitely not my organic chemistry textbook. Maybe yours. Maybe my college roommate’s.).

But here in Tuscaloosa, Our Fair City, there is no small local establishment that purveys anything other than T-shirts with witticisms like “Rammer-Jammer is Everything” and “Got 12? WE DO!” and approximately 8 million copies of that Sports Illustrated issue that came out over a month ago featuring a profile of the new coach written by our local, tarnished celebrity journalist. Not exactly stimulating reading material.

The entire English community at Flagship State University is as giddy as a kindergarten class with a new playground. When the invitations for the special sneak preview/open house from 6–9PM (the night before opening day) appeared in our faculty mailboxes on campus, the buzz around the department was audible, a persistent simmering hum. When we got word that the composition committee was, in fact, supposed to meet that very same evening starting at 5PM (and we all know that committee meetings always take more than an hour), the grumble among some instructors was drowned out only by the wailing and gnashing of teeth of others. In Tuscaloosa, Our Fair City, missing your chance to get first dibs on the NQL, CLGT, and that heady New Store Smell was something worth gnashing about.

The sneak peak was Tuesday. The official opening was Wednesday. Expat and I held off until Wednesday afternoon. I was worried it might be crowded and it was somewhat busy, but we could still find a good table in the café. We felt like we were cheating on Capture, but even so, we sat. We did our respective work for our respective classes. We drank our respective NQLs. We browsed our respective favorite sections. We ogled the cookbooks. We sat and read books that we had no intention of purchasing, just to read them, just because we could.

There are dangers, of course, to the Glossy Corporate Bookstore in the Small College Town. Dangers that might only be seen by an English faculty member, dangers I had forgotten since leaving Small Town, PA. What would I do, for instance, if one of my many students caught me indulging myself with children’s picture books or quizzing myself in the latest Cosmo or devouring some Really Bad Fiction? The glory of living in a Mid-sized Midwestern City, like Madison, and not having a very high-profile job was the anonymity of it all—the ability to walk into Borders and not talk to or otherwise engage anyone except the Seattle’s Best barista. The ability to check out for the day, drop into an overstuffed chair, and read with reckless abandon until the store closed or I was too hungry to concentrate and the CLGT offerings just weren’t cutting it. Here, though, here I have to be on my guard. I have to be glib and ready to talk at a moment’s notice. I have to remain alert.

So is it worth it? Is it still worth getting excited over the glories of the Corporate Chain? Is it worth rolling around and reveling in that heady New Store Smell and drinking inadequate coffee, even though it makes me feel like I’m cheating on Taylor the Latte Boy and his fabulous local coffee establishment? Is it in fact worth wasting a Local News Tuesday update to regale you with my own sick, twisted, entirely contradictory Glossy Corporate Fascination?

I don’t know. Let me finish this Pumpkin Spice Latte and this issue of RealSimple and maybe read through this new cookbook while I wait in line to pay for my new Nifty Bound Writing Journal and I’ll get back to you.

Local News Tuesday: Recycling—So Easy A Caveman Can Do It

2007-10-30T20:11:00.000-06:00

The mid-sized, towable recycling trailers outside of Skyland Elementary were disturbingly empty. As I emptied the three large, handled paper retail sacks from The Gap and Pottery Barn that my husband and I had begun using as makeshift recycling bins into the recycling trailer that was closest to the road, I was overcome by the vastly empty, lonely feeling that I was the only person in Tuscaloosa, Our Fair City, who recycled. Anything.

The recycling trailer itself seemed to support this fear in appearance alone. Parked next to two others on a poorly mown strip of patchy grass next to the older elementary school, the trailer and its trailer friends were painted a stark bathroom white, mottled with patches of rust. In shape, they looked like huge, elongated coffins with sharply angled tops. Across the tops were five separate black doors, individually hinged and made from the same tough plastic as industrial 40 gallon trash cans, like five large cabinets. The doors were at shoulder height to your average adult standing on the ground, but they were angled and tall, which meant that opening them required you to stand very close to the trailer and exert a fair amount of force. They were also lettered in all caps—CARDBOARD, PLASTIC BOTTLES AND MILK JUGS, MAGAZINES, NEWSPAPERS, IRON AND ALUMINUM CANS. To dispose of your recyclables, you lifted the appropriate door and dumped the appropriate material into the appropriate compartment within the recycling trailer.

I started with the cardboard. Cardboard was the label on the leftmost door. Being an English major, it made sense to me to move from left to right, and besides, I had a station wagon–hatchful of broken down moving boxes that Expat and I had used in at least three or our past five moves and that were now too ratty to keep or pass on. Thankfully, all of them would be just small enough to pass through the door on the recycling trailer, so I heaved the door open and got started.

Heaving the door open to any large industrial steel bin is enough to cause me some small amount of anxiety, particularly in the South or during the warmer summer months in colder climes. Aside from the obvious fear of stench or decay, there is always the secondary fear of other things living in the industrial steel bin, like giant roaches or the occasional rat or possibly a stray possum. The Dumpster in the garden home complex where my mother lives in Southern Alabama, for example, is known for the skittering of large roaches, the contingent of angry wasps that guard the trash very closely, and the rather industrious raccoon that like to stare at you with reflective, beady eyes should you decide to walk your trash to the Dumpster during his prime foraging hours of about 10PM to 5AM. It had been a while since my last encounter with angry wasps or a raccoon. Admittedly, the trailers being set as they were against a lovely backdrop of open, abandoned lot and noisy highway and surrounded by absolutely no useful cover didn’t seem an especially conducive environment for larger mammalia. And in theory, since the trailers contained recyclables and not garbage, I shouldn’t have to contend with any of the pests frequently associated with decaying food. So while somewhat reticent, I nonetheless stepped in close to the trailer, swung open the lid-like door, and stood on my tiptoes to peer inside before heaving my crumpled boxes into the trailer’s belly.

What I saw inside did not do much to reassure me.

What I saw inside of the compartment so clearly labeled CARDBOARD were about a dozen 20 ounce plastic bottles and a glossy advertising supplement from the Sunday paper.

Since I've just moved from a state where signs like “Welcome to Middleton, Wisconsin’s Recycling Leader!” commonplace, the lack of recycling in Tuscaloosa has trumped even the lack of Quality Coffee Shops and the overwhelming lack of Quality Cheese. Here is a city where “trash” and “recycle bin” mean one in the same to most people, where rather than walk an extra 6 inches (inches!) to recycle the aluminum can they just finished chugging Diet Dr. Pepper from, they will simply throw it into the trash can and move on. Here is a city that does not recycle glass. At all. Never mind that, unlike plastics, glass can be recycled indefinitely because its actual molecular structure doesn’t deteriorate when it’s reprocessed. We’d rather just throw it away so the animal foraging in the landfill can get all cut up. Stupid animals. What are they doing in our landfills anyway?

Having gone to undergraduate in Birmingham, just a short 45 minute drive away from Tuscaloosa, Our Fair City, I thought I understood the Southern mindset on recycling: I’ll do it as long as I don’t have to do any extra work. The Pricey Liberal Arts College (PLAC) I attended did a wonderful job of this: recycling bins were on every floor of every dorm, prominently displayed in every academic building, and extras were placed at prominent entrances to things like the library. They were clearly labeled. They were, in many cases, closer than the trash cans. At Big State U up in the section of Pennsylvania that most natives refer to as Pennsyltucky—known primarily for its trout and its rivalry with Indiana for the highest annual enrollment in the KKK—they’ve taken things a step further. Recycle bins are not only prominently displayed in all of the buildings across campus, they also stand side-by-side with trash cans at every corner in downtown Small Town. Even the homeless people in Small Town recycle. I know. I’ve seen them.

The thing that gets me though—that really gets me—is that while the majority of people in other parts of the country might indeed identify as Christian, no one flaunts it as much as the folks south of Mason-Dixon. That Bible Belt moniker? They’re proud of it. Jesus is more than all right with them. So if we all love God, and if God created the earth, and if the earth is God’s “footstool,” as he mentions once or twice, and if he decided to “glorify the place of his feet” with firs and pines and whatnot like he says in Isaiah, then shouldn’t we be all about some glorification of God’s feet, too? Perhaps we could at least reconsider throwing glass away for God to step on.

This month at the Not-Quite-A-Mega-Church-But-Trying where I now work (when I’m not teaching for Flagship State U) has been Stewardship Month. Stewardship Month is really just church lingo for Money Month, or for Tithe-So-We-Can-Run-The-A.C. Month. For the past four weeks, the head pastor has been putting a brand new spin on the same old message: give God back his money, people. God’s the reason you have it, it’s not really yours, and so on. But as long as we’re being good Christians down here in the Bible Belt, what about being good stewards of the rest of that which God gives us? You know, um, the planet? Right. If we were really concerned with good stewardship, you’d think they’d be able to walk 10 feet to recycle. You’d think they wouldn’t leave it to those crazy Norwegians up in Wisconsin to make up for the havoc the good ol’ boys are wreaking.

And if that’s not enough to make you reconsider, think of it this way: if the man was turning water into wine, I would be willing to bet—only a small amount, since Jesus doesn’t really condone the whole gambling thing—that he would be all about turning old beer bottles into Glassphalt for paving some roads. Or, if you’re more into the phenomenological end of things, thinks of it as rebirth, resurrection: forget Easter baskets. This spring, lets trot out festively painted recycling baskets. Far fetched? Not really. Which one would teach your kids more about death and resurrection: bunny-shaped baskets full of teeth-rotting, calorie-rich sugary crap or taking a pile of dead cans to the recycling center?

Friends, luddites, people of Tuscaloosa, Our Fair City: what would Jesus do, here? What would Jesus do?

The Black Warrior Files: Who’d Have Thought That Love Could Be So Caffeinated?

2007-10-27T19:41:00.000-06:00

Tus • ca • loo • sa (tŭs'kə-lōō'sə) noun

An overly fashion-conscious, football-mad college town nestled in the big bend of the Black Warrior River. Established 1819. Population ≈ 80,000.
The home location for Scooter Nation (ironically lacking in scooters or any other fuel efficient vehicle).

[Origin: Choctaw/Native American black warrior; diriv. tushka, meaning warrior, and lusa, meaning black. For Choctaw Chief Tushkalusa, circa 1500s]

The city of Tuscaloosa has exactly one Quality Coffee Shop and I am currently sitting in it, as I tend to do, doing work on a Saturday afternoon and sipping a perfect sugar-free, fat-free latte (per Virtual’s individualized nutrition plan), or as Expat calls it, a Why Bother. At least, I tell him, it’s not a Super Why Bother. A Super Why Bother is sugar-free, fat-free, caffeine-free, and really, at that point, why bother indeed?

Sugar-free or not, Capture Studio Cafe makes the best lattes in town. This is partly because all of the baristas are arts and humanities majors or graduates; as we all know, a degree in the humanities develops excellent critical thinking skills and qualifies you to work one of three places: a coffee shop, an Italian restaurant, or a bookstore. The good lattes, however, are also largely due to the good coffee that the owner/proprietor of Capture, let’s call him Taylor the Latte Boy (TLB), uses in all of the shop’s coffee creations.

Now, Expat and I got all high on locally roasted coffee when we first moved to Madison and discovered Just Coffee. Local businesses could sponsor different kinds of roasts and, since Just Coffee is based in Madison, the roaster would roast them up, slap store-specific logos on them, and the sponsoring stores would sell them by the pound. The ACE Hardware on Willy Street was the place for the ACE Black and Tan blend. Jenny Street Market sold its great medium roast. Revolution Cycles peddled Revolution Roast, a dark, oily bean that made the whole house smell dark and nutty and warm. But good local coffee was just par for the course in Madison: every shop (and their were lots of shops), it seemed, marketed its own variety of locally roasted something-or-other, most of it fair trade, all of it 800 times tastier than the burnt-beans served up at the local Starbucks.

Fastforward. Scene change. Welcome to Tuscaloosa, Our Fair City, home to the University of Alabama, a mediocre SEC football team, no fewer than 15 barbeque purveyors, an oddly prevalent number of good consignment shops, and only four local coffee shops. Of the four, two are on The Strip, the major student area immediately off-campus, and are therefore Ridiculously Busy. One is an oddly Christian gifty-type shop just across the river in the neighboring community of Northport; it sells Foofy Coffee, big muffins, good shortbread cookies, and pretty much anything sterling silver that can be emblazoned with a cross. Which brings us back to Capture.

Capture started as a video production and photography company. It’s in the historic downtown part of Tuscaloosa in the bottom floor of an extremely cool historic 3-story, a little less than a mile away from The Strip, and a block away from the good consignment shop where we sometimes find Really Good Stuff for Really Cheap Prices. It’s too far for much undergraduate traffic but just right for professors and grad students who like working away from their desks. Now, I haven’t specifically asked TLB about the exact evolution, but to the best of my knowledge, the coffee shop was just a happy byproduct of having this company in this space in downtown Tuscaloosa, almost as if TLB and his crew of arts and humanities majors sat down, put their heads together and said hey, while we’re working on photos with these jittery brides or developing webpages for these hapless businessmen, why not ply them with a kicky atmosphere and some caffeinated goodness? Why not put our artistic talents to good use and come up with a clever urban logo and paint scheme and room design? Why not furnish the place completely in tables and chairs and couches from IKEA? And while we’re at it, let’s work up a good menu for that Panini press and oh, what the heck, let’s use some local, socially responsible coffee!

Higher Ground Roasters are located over in Leeds, Alabama, due east on I-20, in between Birmingham and Atlanta. They believe in buying fair trade, shade grown coffee at a fair price from farmers using sustainable farming practices. They sponsor local causes, like Black Warrior Riverkeeper and the local Literacy Council. Their goals, as stated by them: “To purchase the best coffee available anywhere, to roast it to perfection, and to make it available—fresh—to anyone.” That’s what Expat got excited about when he found their website one day up in Madison, while taking a break from packing. He had hitherto been making elaborate plans to keep our household well-stocked in Just Coffee—bringing a case of it with us, ordering it online, getting friends to ship it down on a regular basis, but one night he looked up from the laptop and smiled. “Honey, look! There’s a local coffee roaster in Alabama!”

“There is?!”

Having spent 12 of my formative years in the Heart of Dixie, I considered myself a fairly good authority on What Alabama Had and What Alabama Sure As Hell Had Not. Don’t get me wrong, I think that Alabama frequently gets a bad rap (yes, we have indoor plumbing—you’re thinking of Mississippi; no, we do not sit on our porches and play “Dueling Banjos”—you’re thinking of Georgia), but let’s be honest, Alabama—specifically Tuscaloosa—is not known as a major outpost of culture and open-minded social consciousness. By my reckoning, Alabama Had: barbeque; fried catfish; sweet tea; Republicans; guns; armadillos; banana pudding; Old Shitty Cars jacked up on New Giant Tires with Super Shiny Rims; katydids; roaches; water moccasins; Jesus; pickup trucks sporting decorative Rebel Flag frontplates, gun racks and multiple six-foot-tall antennas skewering paint-protecting tennis balls; Antebellum Houses with Large Porches; azaleas; SEC Football; Civil Rights museums; a boll weevil monument; peanuts; cotton; white sandy beaches; hurricanes; and a Small Contingent of Intelligent Liberals. Alabama Had Not: local coffee roasters; hybrid cars; Real Maple Syrup.

Yet here I sit on a blustery Alabama fall afternoon, drinking a warm Why Bother out of a kicky oversized mug, marveling at the tasty goodness of Capture’s fair trade house blend (Bolivian, medium roast).

Like I said, Quality.

Wedding Pictures (Finally)

2007-09-05T20:59:00.000-06:00

So here's a random post for you: in honor of our second wedding anniversary (a.k.a., the Fluevog Anniversary, on which both Expat and Sparky bought fabulous shoes they did not need because they were on sale at the Fluevog store in Chicago), Expat and I finally had actual, honest-to-god, sit-down-with-a-photographer, shots-to-send-to-relatives "wedding" pictures made by none other than Big (of Big and Little fame). We did this in June/July shortly before the Great Migration and I am just now getting around to sharing them.

The veil actually belongs to Little. Being that Expat and I trooped down to the local courthouse with representatives of the Matic and Seven Red clans in tow, I didn't actually have a veil of my own. Big said he wanted to "try something" and I long ago learned to trust him when he gets that maniacal look in his eye . . . Sepia-toned veil kisses: cheesy? Perhaps. Fun? Totally.

As for the shirts, Topspun and the Better Half of the Fashionable New Yorkers (turned Chicago . . . ans? Chicagoites? What do you call people from Chicago? Chitownies?) decided that Schmozer was a suitable smooshing together of last names for a girl who didn't want to change hers and a guy who didn't care. Here at Scooter Nation, Team Schmozer rules. The shirts were a Valentine's present to Expat (note who's number 1; consider who let him be number 1).

So think of this post not as narcissistic pandering to the collective ego of we here at Scooter Nation. Think of it as an omage to Big's amazing ability to capture an honest smile by making grown people do silly things.

Both Sides Now

2007-08-17T08:36:00.000-06:00

This time last year while I sat in my windowless cube and performed menial editing-related tasks for my Very Corporate Employer, I often contemplated Weathergirl's cushy college schedule with envy, thinking to myself "Man, I sure wish I had a fall break for no good reason. Those holidays are awesome. *sigh*"

This morning, I am finding myself resentful of said holidays, college-created or otherwise. Like Labor Day. Who needs Labor Day? Certainly not my freshman honors students. They should have to come to class and actually labor on Labor Day. Why? Because of my nice neat syllabus schedule, that's why. Because I forgot about Labor Day when I was putting it all together and now, thanks to some silly national holiday (for which half of the work force doesn't actually get to take off anyway—how many Bath and Body Works clerks have you seen taking it easy on Labor Day?), I'm having to cut readings and do some major Tetris with my assignment dates to fit in the 6 papers that the state of Alabama requires me to assign.

And don't even get me started with Thanksgiving. As Expat says, "Forget Thanksgiving. The students should just go eat a turkey sandwich in the caf."

Hello, shoe. Meet the other foot.

On the other hand, this is definitely the most pressing concern of my morning. My laundry is done, my kitchen is clean, and I have had 8 hours of sleep. Plus, I'm not even teaching yet, so I can stop playing Tetris with my syllabus whenever I want and go, I don't know, shop with all that money I don't have or read a book or actually set foot in the apartment complex gym and see what it's all about.

Oh woe, woe the impossibly hard life of a college instructor, doomed to sit in coffee houses and curse public holidays while sipping a skinny vanilla latte. The horror, the horror.

Scooter Nation Relocation: The Spider that Snapped the Freeze

2007-08-11T21:38:00.000-06:00

If I had forgotten exactly how big the bugs in Alabama are, the Massive Spider in our guest bathroom certainly served as a clear reminder.

I had been living for months—years, actually—in the relatively bug-less north, unconcerned with anything larger than a cricket. Granted, this was the year of the eleven-year cicada in Chicago, but we only really encountered those from then enclosed safety of the Subaru, so I don't really feel that they count. No, on the whole, I had gotten off easy. And in getting off easy, I'd gotten soft. No longer could I simply sense the coming of segmented bodies on skittery, jointed legs. No longer could I reflexively whip off my right shoe and aim a sure death blow even in the dark. No longer could I stand cooly with a drink in my hand while the interloper in question scurried along the living room wall and say with blasé calm, “Oh, leave him alone. He's just a little garden orb spider.”

I was not blasé when I encountered the Massive Spider. In fact, I believe my exact reaction was “Oh, shit it's fucking huge.”

And it was.

It skittered from possibly inside, possibly beside the guest bathroom to roughly halfway under the Brand New Toilet Plunger that we had just bought for our Brand New Apartment. I think it was trying to hide, but half of it's spider body and most of its spider legs were still sticking out, sort of like when a dog sticks his head under a chair and thinks he's hidden while the rest of him is still clearly hanging out in the living room. With the Massive Spider, it just looked like it was trying to walk off with the plunger.

The plunger, for the record, was sitting right next to the toilet. And I, for the record, was just sitting down on said toilet to pee when I heard the definitive rustle of the Massive Spider.

Expat and I had just come from a great Mexican meal with the head of Big Alabama U's composition program. We all started off with a Happy Hora margarita each; she treated us to whatever we wanted, then plied us with flan and a second margarita and by the time we were done, Expat and I were staggeringly grateful that La Gran Fiesta was only un pequeño way from home. We walked in our own front door too loud for the Pre-Kids to be very happy with us and proceeded to laugh at them and at the boxes in the living room and at the fact that it was Friday and we had almost been in Alabama for one whole week.

By the time I thought to pee, I Really Had To Go. I scattered the cats on my sudden sprint to the guest bathroom, whirled to shut the door and undo my pants in one fluid movement, and sat down on the toilet with a decided thunk. Then and only then did I hear Massive Spider in its frantic scurry for cover. I jumped up before expelling a single drop, hoisted my pants and opened the door in one fluid movement, and raced to the kitchen to grab our Brand New Can of Raid.

I once spent three months in a platform tent in the woods of Tennessee defending hapless (and harmless) daddy longlegs from hordes of shrieking junior Girl Scouts. I spent countless weeks trying to explain to 10-year-olds that the little spiders weaving webs over the girls' beds were actually more interested in eating mosquitoes than in biting sleeping Girl Scouts and that really, we were invading their homes, not the other way around. It didn't matter. Countless worthy arachnids died on my watch, many by my own shoe in a wild effort to stop the shrieking of said Girl Scouts.

The spider in my bathroom now was nothing new. Had I been sober, perhaps, and had the spider been in context (read: outside, next to the campfire pit) instead of my guest bathroom, I might have recognized it for what it was: a wolf spider, or more specifically, Rabidosa rabida—the Rabid Wolf Spider. Oh, it's a fearsome name alright, but the Rabid Wolf Spider is harmless to humans. They rarely bite and they never go on the offensive. If for some reason one should bite you, it's about like getting stung by a bee: not pleasant but hardly deadly. Wolf spiders don't like being inside; they like dry leaves and grasses and if you see them inside, they're there by mistake. The best thing to do for a lost wolf spider is to herd it into a Tupperware container and set it free in the backyard. The problem is, they're big—an inch-long wolf spider isn't uncommon, and that's not counting the legs—and they're hairy. Big hairy things that should be outside aren't usually well received when seen inside, particularly when they crawl out from unexpected places and surprise someone, particularly when they are surprising someone who is out of the practice of dealing with large bugs, someone who is somewhat tipsy from margaritas and who Really Has To Go.

Instead, after my initial outburst, I quietly and efficiently squirted the hell out of the Massive Spider hiding under my toilet plunger with an unnecessarily large, plum-colored aerosol can of unscented Raid, (roach and ant formula). It ran after the first squirt, darting around the toilet and up, into the light brown wicker waste basket I've had ever since I can remember.

And it wasn't until the next day, after Expat had come and flushed the Massive Spider down the toilet, after I had relieved my need to Really Go (in the other bathroom), after the only trace of the margaritas was that vague, hazy headache behind my eyes, that I stopped to think about the Massive Spider.

In case you haven't figured it out, I feel bad for killing it.

The Massive Spider wasn't doing anything more than jumping out from behind my shower curtain and saying the equivalent of a spider “boo.” I probably scared him more with my wild running/unzipping/door slamming than he did me. I mean, I wasn't the one trying to hide under the toilet plunger.

But this wasn't just a harmless encounter. This was my initiation back into Alabama culture. This was my right to claim, my legacy by virtue of living several states south of the Mason-Dixon line, where every household comes equipped with the KJV and a monthly Terminex plan.

And like any good Southerner coming home after years in exile, I reached out, grasped this legacy with both hands, and aimed, unflinching, at the skittery, jointed-leg interloper in my bathroom.

I Am Not Dead, I Do Not Sleep

2007-07-11T07:46:00.000-06:00

I am moving to Alabama in 2 weeks.

I. Am. Freaking. Out.

But never fear! I will be back with more gripping news and anecdotes regarding:

Our latest anniversary here at the Nation (a.k.a., Year 2: The Fluevog Anniversary, following on the heels, so to speak, of Year 1: The Hitchhiker Anniversary);
The fact that we've finally taken our wedding pictures;
Why Sparky suddenly became wildly blog-shy last month.

Oh, and the title lyric for this post might be a bit obscure for most of you. In absence of a true post, have a read from Mary Frye, 1932 (and the ensuing debate around the poem). You can also go here, install the Rhapsody software (it's free), and listen to Eleanor Daley's choral setting; it's number 12 on the list and it's one of only two pieces I've ever sung or directed that can reduce a choir to tears in just the first read-through.

Zoot Suit Debacles: Step Away from the Thesaurus

2007-06-10T18:00:00.000-06:00

The following post is brought to you by the Society of English Majors Against Wanton Thesaurus Use (SEMAWTU).

debacle n 1: a tumultuous breakup of ice in a river; 2: a violent disruption; 3a: a great disaster, or b: a complete failure.

I love the word debacle as well as the next person. It's fun to say—somewhat goofy sounding, yet descriptive. I have, in fact, used it in the past to describe most of the antics of my first roommante after college, the Mistress of Calamity, who was known to set our kitchen on fire by placing bags of potato chips on lit stovetop burners and who was also known to make up Imaginary Boyfriends with Imaginary Dogs who need to be taken to Imaginary Vet Appointments simply to get out of an afternoon of work so she could come home and either (A) ride her bike or (B) take a nap. In these instances, the events that followed the placing-of-chips-on-stove or the lying-to-boss-about-pretend-boyfriend's-dog are, I think, aptly described by the word debacle.

I do not think that, regardless of the multiple definitions Webster's affords us, I would have chosen to use debacle in the following context:

In 1943, Mexican gang members, known for wearing so-called zoot suits, clashed with white soldiers for eight nights in what is now called the zoot suit riots. Police arrested more than 600 Mexican American boys and men, most of whom were victims in the debacle.

I ask you, dear reader: whatever happened to connotation and denotation? While the denotation of debacle could certainly be applied to the 1943 riots, something about the connotation might prompt me to go with a more weighty or grave word, like mayhem or rout or even something as simple as conflict. Or perhaps just come out and say that the boys and men were "victims of harsh police action," since that's what you're going on to imply. But debacle? Does the author even know, truly, what debacle means?

Frankly, the whole incident smacks of Wanton Thesaurus Use, offering Attentive Citizens of the World yet another reason to avoid placing a thesaurus in the hands of a Would-Be Author hell-bent on using it. It's dangerous. It may be habit forming. It could, in fact, result in an excess of debacles. Or beatings. Or breakdowns, collapses, crack-ups, defeasances, defeats, devastations, disasters, dissolution, downfalls, failures, fiascos, overthrows, ruinations, shellackings, smashups, trouncings, vanquishments, or washouts.

Or "zoot suit debacles."

Remember, friends don't let friends engage in Wanton Thesaurus Use.

Confession is Good for the Abs

2007-06-02T20:02:00.000-06:00

Since the coming home of Expat and the visitation of the GAFIL, I have to confess, I have not been sticking to the nutrition plan that Virtual oh-so-carefully composed for me.

Now, before all 1.5 of you who bother reading my sporadic missives begin to chide, let me preemptively say that I have not completely thrown in the towel on the nutrition plan. I'm still (usually) eating Virtual Approved breakfasts, lunches, and snacks. I am still (usually) drinking sugar-free Foofy Coffees instead of truly Foofy Coffees. And I'm (usually) making Good Choices at dinner: I get the fish tacos and veggies instead of the bacon, cheddar, triple beef burger with fries. I eat smaller portions. I (usually) skip dessert.

And even though it's Killing Me Softly with Free Weights, I am still dutifully going to the gym and sticking to my lifting/cardio routine (even though I had to repeat week 2 of my lifting routine because I was frantically cleaning the house and packing and, oh yeah, driving the 15 hours to Pennsylvania to fetch said Expat), which involves lots of me standing on one leg and either bending over in some capacity without losing my balance or lifting various amounts of weights while balancing on top of a box and trying to maintain Good Form. If nothing else, by the end of my first month's program, Ralph Macchio will have nothing on me.

No, I have not thrown everything away. In fact, since the Two Weeks of Eating Out with the GAFIL at Restaurants that Expat and I Could Never Afford Ourselves began, I have not regained any of the five (yes, five!) pounds I lost in the first week and a half of my plan. I have Maintained and the Maintaining itself is, for me, a huge victory.

But oh, dear reader, I have sinned.

I have eaten fried fish. Fried cheese curds. Fried frites.

I have eaten bread—white bread—at dinner. With butter.

I have consumed non-sugar free Foofy Coffees. Non-diet soda. Very non-diet beer.

I have eaten occasional bites of chocolate. Of tiramisu. And of ice cream.

See here's the kicker. Here's the absolute truth: I just take joy in food. Not even in the eating of it, more in the spirit of it. Of what it stands for and who it brings together. You can invite a good friend over to just hang out, or you could say "Hey, let's go to Nattspil and get mussels and pizza and a few glasses of Prairie Moon." And you know, if you say that to one good friend, they'll suggest that you invite a few more, and before long, you'll be a laughing, talking, big group of friends out for a Good Time. People bond over food. Few things make us feel more cozy, more comfortable in our own skin, than a Good Meal because Good Meals are had with company we like to keep close.

And I don't think that Good Times and Good Meals should count against me. Not in the long run. I don't think they should somehow sneakily convert themselves into unsightly bumps and lumps on my body, since every calorie has been consumed in some act of love or bonding. Perhaps that's why they refer to things as Love Handles—they are not so much handles for loved ones to grab, but evidence to the rest of the world that you clearly have a handle on love. That you're not afraid to take your GAFIL out for Wisconsin beer and brats and cheese. That you're not going to miss out on Important Rites of Passage. Like the doctoral graduation dinner. Like the 21st birthday celebrations. Like the first time that the Fair Eyed Daughter of your good friends, the Fashionable New Yorkers, tries ice cream at the only farm in town where you can actually see the cows that your ice cream comes from.

You can't sit these things out. You can't stand in the wings, clutching your nutrition plan to your chest and muttering countercurses to the calories. You have to plunge in and order the single scoop of Oreo with peanut butter sauce and whipped cream and a cherry on top so that when you laugh as Miss Fair Eyes winces at the cold of her First Bite, then instantly and insistantly reaches for more, you can know that you're laughing with a shared delight. That this shared moment is Important. That Good Times and First Bites are fleeting.

And later, you can do 45 single-legged bicep curls to make up for it.

Parting pictures

Miss Fair Eyes and the Better Half of the Fashionable New Yorkers.

And, just for kicks, my Newly Doctored Expat. Heaven help us all.

Strange Way to Tell You That I Know We Belong

2007-05-31T21:28:00.000-06:00

The Pre-Kids and I had worked out a Routine. I would come home, peel the wedged and crumpled pieces of mail out of our impossibly small apartment building mailbox, walk slowly up the stairs, unlock the apartment and shove the door open, arms brimming over with the mail and the Tupperware from lunch and one of the several large bags I used to carry all of my Very Important Things. Wilbur would be waiting just on the other side of the door. He knew what the Subaru sounded like as it shuttled up the drive and into the parking space. He had watched me from the bedroom window as I gathered my armload from the backseat. He knew my footfalls on the stairs.

But I knew him.

When I shoved open the door I would hiss and tisk and scold him away from it. He played his part well, backing inch by inch until he would finally whirl and twist and run t stand next to the scratching post. Not scared of me. Just waiting. After dumping my whole armload on the kitchen counter, I would feed them. Wilbur knew this. He also knew that sometimes, when I was very tired from working my usual 12 to 13 hour day, I would forget that he was just on the other side of the door. And sometimes, because he is a cat and cats are never really Wholly Good, but always sometimes Devilishly Clever, he would slide past me with one fluid leap and bolt for the laundryroom door. This was not part of our Routine, though, so I won't talk about it here.

I would drop everything. Feed them. Pursue Orville with a plastic syringe full of liquid liver-flavored beta blockers. Medicate Orville. Collect my dinner from the refrigerator and sit on the couch, flipping on the television for company and watching whatever crime/detective/medical/suburban drama happened to be on at 9:00 CST. I ate at the coffee table most nights, except when I ate while standing next to the sink in the kitchen. Sometimes, I would get home at 8:00 and eat and then go to the gym because the Biggest Little Gym Ever also has the Most Amazing Hours and I could workout until 11PM. Most nights, though, I would eat, brush my teeth, change into my pajamas, and then sit on my bed with the laptop, looking at craigslist even though I knew I did not need a motorcycle or a free-to-good-home blue heeler pup or a vintage waterfall dresser with mirror.

The cats liked all this very much. I would talk to them sometimes, but for the most part, we were quiet, communicating with blinks and sighs and listening to the night noises of the Edge of the Edge of the Hood. When I sat near the head of the bed with my computer, they would assume their respective positions at the foot, Orville curled at the righthand corner, Wilbur in the left. When I finally turned out the light and slipped under the covers, I slept in the middle.

Now that Expat's home with the visiting GAFIL, Wilbur does not always wait for me on the other side of the door, but sometimes comes yawning from the bedroom some five minute after I have already been home. Sometimes, the Pre-Kids have already been fed. We are no longer silent together; they have to talk for attention and I have to talk to be polite, to appear Affable and Well-Adjusted.

Expat calls the Pre-Kids names and makes fun of their wimpy meows. He calls me names and swats at my bottom when I walk past him in the kitchen. He whines when I don't bring him his morning coffee while he's still lying in a coma-like state in the bed clutching all of the covers to his chest. He grumbles about having to cook to my nutrition plan while he's making another perfectly-seasoned, made-from-scratch dinner with the locally-raised meat and asparagus we picked up at the Dane County Farmer's Market last week. He hates that I use the snooze button on my alarm clock more than once. He snores just infrequently enough and just loudly enough to be Really Frustrating at 3AM.

And two days ago, even though he was out for afternoon drinks with his father, Expat left the bar and walked down the street to help me pick out a pair of Ultra Fabulous, impulse-buy sale shoes, just because I asked him to.

The Pre-Kids and I had worked out a Routine.

I still peel pieces of mail from the metal mailbox. Now, though, I have someone to help me sort it.

It's A Nine-Hour Drive from Me to You

2007-05-17T11:46:00.000-06:00

The sign I posted on my office door before closing it immediately upon arriving at work today:

Sparky is unabashedly Rocking Out to Fountains of Wayne. Feel free to interrupt her with questions, etc.

She didn't think you would want to hear her singing along at 7:30 in the morning.

I stopped the singing along part when my office mate, Mr. Reliable, arrived at 9:00, but the first 1.5 hours of my morning definitely, um, rocked.

Tomorrow, I'm blowing off work to drive 15 hours to see Expat (finally) graduate, to introduce my German/Australian Father-In-Law (GAFIL) to my Very Handy Father and Weathergirl, and to then drive said 15 hours back to Madison with said GAFIL and all of his stuff, and Expat and all of his stuff. I just dropped $350 getting the Subaru tuned up (apparently, it needed a new swaybar and a few bushings and a wheel alignment and . . .), I have cash and quarters for the obscene amount of tolls through Chicago and the Vast Flatness that is IllinoisIndianaOhio, and I know exactly which tollway service plazas contain my favorite venders of the very necessary Foofy Coffee.

I. Cannot. Wait.

Seriously.

Until then, I shall continue Rocking Out. Quietly. To myself.

And an Hour in the Shower is the Best That You've Got

2007-05-07T22:15:00.000-06:00

I don't know much about getting accurate weights and all that, so I don't know if this is a particularly meaningful number, but as of 10:45PM this evening when I completed Virtual's grueling Day 2 workout, and according to the fairly reliable old-school doctor's scale at my gym, I weighed three pounds less than I did last Thursday, when I weighed myself at approximately the same time in the same place wearing about the same thing.

Accurate or not, I still did the Dance of Joy right there in the locker room in front of God and everybody.

In my past life (read: ten days ago), this would have been cause for Celebration with Ice Cream.

Tonight, it was cause for Celebration with Long Hot Shower, Extra Steamy, with a Side of Uber-Girly Body Wash.

And now, it's time for some Serious Progressive Farmer Sleep, as my first roommate after college, the Mistress of Calamity and General Debacles and a former Progressive Farmer magazine intern, used to say. Not even the jackhammering road crew working on the beltline that is about .5 miles away from my open bedroom window here on the Edge of the Edge of the Hood can stand between me and my Dreams of fitting back into my favorite jeans.