Funk Babblings

The move is done! My stuff is here! In fact my stuff is piled high everywhere and we can barely get to the computers.

( Saturday )

( Sunday )

Yesterday we skipped work to recuperate and try to put things back together a bit. We returned the truck without too much difficulty, though I was either charged $20 too much or not charged anything at all.

And today we're back to work, and I continue to do little things to put the house back together, as well as planning how to get rid of some of my excess stuff in the garage, and gradually reintegrating myself into Columbus culture while exploring the more immediate surroundings (Pataskala to Buckeye Lake, Newark to Lancaster).

As of last Saturday, I am no longer a North Canton resident. I moved in with duriyah, changing my residence by about 130 miles southwest and putting me about half an hour east of Columbus.

The move didn't go entirely smoothly, however. ( Read more... )

So this week I've been working from my new home, and living out of boxes. I can't quite unpack many of the boxes yet because I don't have the shelves and drawers and such that things go on or in.

But we're heading out on a nice long vacation tomorrow morning. Then in September we can try to again to tackle this move, this time with a big truck. And furniture. (And if anyone wants to help at either end, let us know!)

This Saturday I'll be moving from the North Canton house where I've lived for six years to duriyah's house 30 miles east of Columbus. I've been gradually moving things down there for some weeks already (what would fit in my little car), and I suspect I won't manage to get quite everything packed up in time, but this weekend will be when I rent the moving van and get at least the big stuff.

So I have a lot to do this week. Including working out the logistics of getting everything loaded, moved 130 miles, and unloaded, in one day, without leaving any people or cars or furniture in the wrong city.

Then, after a week to settle in, we're disappearing for a much-needed vacation to Myrtle Beach. I'm sure by then it'll be needed even more.

Remember the Great Blackout of 2003? It apparently started when trees interfered with power lines in suburban Cleveland. At the time few realized that it meant the end of tree-lined suburban streets.

A couple weeks ago I got a note on the door from the power company, saying they'd be trimming trees away from power lines. (You may recall that I once posted a view of those trees from my bedroom window.) And my rather full maples were well into the power lines, so I knew it was no use fighting it.

( Yesterday it happened.... )

I'd be a little more disturbed by this if I weren't planning to move soon. But it could have been a lot worse. When nontacitare and I first moved in, there was a third maple closer to the house, right outside the bedroom windows (it would've been between the two existing trees in the last photo above). One morning we woke up to the horrible sound of chainsaws cutting it down.

P.S.: Although it was dark a few miles south, somehow this neighborhood was completely unaffected by that blackout four years ago.

Today I felt the need for another long bike ride; my last ride was almost a month ago.

Ended up going about 15.5 miles in a little over an hour and a half. (Faster this time because I didn't stop so much.) I think I felt the hills more this time though. I really need to get out there more often; my endurance isn't as good as it was before.

This was all zigzagging through residential streets. I really miss the Olentangy-Scioto bike path (well, mainly the Olentangy part) in Columbus. One of these weekends I should try to make it over to the Ohio-Erie Canal Towpath Trail. It's at least twelve miles from my house, along busy streets, so I'll probably want to drive the bike over there.

Just returned from my longest bike ride since moving to Canton. Round trip 13.35 miles in an hour and a half. For Canton people, that's from our place near the middle of North Canton, meandering south along the back roads, down to Canton's 30th St, then fairly directly back. It felt really good, although I seem to have put too much pressure on my left wrist along the way.

Good thing I installed those lights a few weeks ago. The sun had set by the time I got back.

In the wake of an ongoing conversation about the quality (or lack thereof) of education in various nearby school districts (particularly the abysmal reputation of the Canton city school district) came the news that 65 out of 490 girls are pregnant at one of the Canton city school district's two high schools. (Sorry, now I can't find the story in the newspaper.)

"The article reported that some would say that movies, TV, videogames, lazy parents and lax discipline may all be to blame," says the TV station re-reporting from the newspaper. No word on the mechanism involved in videogames et al getting girls pregnant.

All this caught the attention of Pandagon, who did some quick searching and discovered that Ohio Law basically requires that any sex education be of the abstinence-only-until-marriage type. Did you other Ohioans know this? I certainly didn't.

However, as far as I can tell that law is only about two years old, so I'm not sure how much of the blame it can take for Timken High's baby boom.

Update: Jeff found some more background on the Canton abstinence program.

Yesterday was a minor milestone for me: I turned 32. The main celebration is a getaway weekend with nontacitare starting in a couple hours, though we did have a friend over last night, and I took today off work. (Missed the Bob Mould show at the Grog Shop last night, but I'd rather hang out with people I care about anyway. In fact we've almost made it a tradition for me to spend time with nontacitare on nights I was originally planning to go to a show.)

Today was another milestone: I renewed my driver's license (yeah, a day late). No big deal, right?

My old license had my Columbus address. My license now has my Canton address. You may not think that's much of a milestone, but the key is that I've lived in Canton for three and a half years, and have resisted signs of "permanent residence" here. The first crack in that resistance was gaining friends here close enough to miss if we (or they) left. A major crack came when I took a job here three months ago with long-term prospects. And now for the first time my driver's license says I live here.

If we buy a house here then it gets really scary....

Every year around this time the mainstream press notices pagans, especially Wiccans. (Though chronarchy has been known to do special help with outreach later in winter.)

Locally, the daily paper discovered the weekly hangout of the Canton Area Pagans. (nontacitare and I have missed that gathering lately due to work, though I briefly considered going this week.) Interesting that they start the story with "Don't call them witches."

Then we have the national story of the day, "School Says Halloween Disrespectful to Witches". The big quote there is, "I do lots of things that are not revolving around wearing a black outfit and stirring a cauldron."

Meanwhile, I still need to think of a costume for this weekend.....

1. I managed to miss the Cleveland date of the Warped Tour this year. Oops. Ah well, I can stand to save the money (about which I may have more to say later). The Columbus date is Aug 17, but (among other things) I'm planning to be at Pennsic then.

2. After they finish the Warped Tour, Bowling For Soup is apparently coming to Canton to play a September 11 show at the local former minor-league ballpark (which I didn't even known existed). This is really cool, but seems very weird to me; I feel like there's more to this story that I'm missing.

Update: BFS is the headlining act of a local radio station's "All American Music Weekend" day one.

3. I often tell people that the best thing about living in Canton (compared to Columbus, at least) is being only an hour from Cleveland. I was reminded of this when I saw the schedule for the Vote For Change Tour. At this writing, Bruce Springsteen, R.E.M., and John Fogerty are scheduled for five dates. One is in Cleveland (Oct 2), one is in Ann Arbor (Oct 3), and the rest are nowhere near Ohio. And the $25 tickets go toward fighting to defeat Bush.

And speaking of Springsteen, John Kerry's use of his song "No Surrender" at his acceptance speech last week was kind of interesting to me. It comes from the Born In The USA album, which of course was Springsteen's hugest album and got mounds of radio airplay. So much so that I never bothered to buy the album; I figured I'd already gotten sick of half of it being overplayed on the radio, plus the misplaced jingoism that surrounded the album turned me off. So I knew "No Surrender" only from the quiet acoustic version on the Live 1975-1985 album, and I've always loved the song even though I normally prefer rockers like "Cadillac Ranch". Well yesterday I finally bought Born In The USA, and I was amazed that "No Surrender" is a rocker there! So now I like the song even more. (The other non-hits on there are great too, though I still skip over the overly-anthemic title song.)