AKA: A Day In The Life Of…
Finally, after literally weeks of planning, our big moving day arrived, and as it coincides with my annual “a day in the life” post, I was on hand to document it…
In an ideal world, this would be the point I shut the computer off, pack it away and prepare to load it into a moving truck so it can make the 251 mile journey to it’s, and indeed our, new home. But alas it’s more than likely that it’ll be packed up and forced to sit for 5 days before being loaded into a moving truck for its 251 mile journey… Yes, our moving date has been postponed until Wednesday, which is good as Robyn’s last day at her current job is Tuesday. My last day was today and it was a little bit bittersweet…
Yes, I’ve said in the past that it sucked for the long hours and low pay, and even though I was only there a little over 3 months, I’ll actually be sad to leave the place as the people I worked with were a lot of fun, sometimes saying goodbye is sadder than you think. Speaking of goodbyes, we’ve got far too many to do and not enough time to do it in. Robyn’s work is throwing her a leaving luncheon on Monday, so that gives her a bit of closure in that respect, but we’ve still got all our friends to say goodbye to. Right now we’ve just been slammed for weeks on end packing, arranging stuff and every bad thing that goes with moving, so time is running out and it really sucks.
So yeah, we’re moving on Wednesday, a special day for me, it was Saturday January 24th 2004 when I first landed in Atlanta. I knew pretty much nothing about the city, all I knew was it held the Olympics in 1996 and the Braves were a good baseball team. I didn’t know where anything was, I pretty much hadn’t left the confines of Marietta before I started dating Robyn, now I can safely say I know Atlanta better than her, and she’s lived here for 22 years. Not a slight on her, I’m just good at getting my bearings. 3 years to the day, that’s actually kind of spooky really, it means my silly day in the life posts I make to commemorate it will be a bit more interesting than the 2005 and 2006 versions. Something for you all to look forward to.
Strange as it may seem, but I’ll miss Atlanta, sure it may be a sprawling metropolis where the main roads are nothing more than glorified car parks, but it has it’s cool stuff too. I’ll miss the monthly APWBWGTTD meetings, especially the ones I didn’t go to. I’ll miss all the bloggers of Atlanta, yes even Dave. I’ll miss the Atlanta Flickr group, far too many to name from there. I’ll miss going to Braves games, even if last year is best forgotten about, I wonder what my final record at Turner Field was, probably something like 15-9 (.625) (or *15-10 (.600)) which isn’t so bad overall. I’ll miss places like Decatur, Virginia Highlands, Midtown and various places I’ve ended up in a bar in. I’ll miss the continuing misadventures of Ron Mexico Michael Vick. I’ll miss Thrashers hockey, just as we were getting into it.
I won’t miss MARTA and it’s hit or miss schedule. I won’t miss the drive along 285 I have to take nearly every day, it’s the longest 6 miles in history. Along the same lines I won’t miss the construction on 400. Actually, that’s pretty much it, the horrible public transport and the awful highways, without those Atlanta would be an awesome place to live, instead it has that stigma of long, slow commutes. But hey, I learned to drive in Atlanta, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere…
Breaking up is hard to do, but worry not, for we shall be back in Atlanta next weekend, we have to clean up and repaint the inside of our condo so we can sell it, hopefully sooner rather than later, we’ve also arranged a bon voyage meeting at Meehams in Sandy Springs next Saturday, if you can make it then cool. We’ll also be back in late February as we have a date to see Spamalot at the Fabulous Fox on the 24th. So hopfully with these two opportunities we’ll finally see everyone we need to see. And if any of you usual suspects need a bed in Charlotte, give us advance warning…
So long Atlanta, it’s been emotional…
The much anticipated renaming of Cingular to AT&T has begun. See my previous thoughts on this here, in the meantime let Stephen Colbert explain it for you. Like Ma Bell, I got the ill communication…
On March 17, Web prankster Ze Frank will end his daily, year-long Internet video show to go all Hollywood. Good for him, but who will fill the void?
Another weekend in North Carolina, 3 out of the last 5 in fact, so many we should just move there… So we are. But first we had to find a place to live, and that wasn’t easy as we had a limited time frame and different ideas of what a future home should be.
It was also made a bit more difficult as we were trying for a particular area, that being Huntersville/Lake Norman area.
First up was a house located on Rainbow Row of Birkdale Village, which, coincidentally, is the same neighbourhood that Robyn’s sister lives in and we love it dearly. This is a super cute little house, but that’s the problem, it’s a little house… The bedrooms barely have enough room to swing a cat, let alone the three we have and even though it’s double the square footage of our now dreadfully cramped 1 bedroom condo, there wasn’t enough room for everything we want. Another minus point was it has the most expensive rent of all the houses we saw, which is a shame as we actually wanted to like it so much as they are super cute little houses to look at.
But at that point in time it was the lead house, pretty much by default. Later on that day we went to see a townhouse around the corner from the Rainbow Row Easter Egg house, this was much nicer, but the big downside about it was, well, people were still living there and we need to move in next weekend. But no big loss as we would see two near identical houses the following day.
This townhouse was vacant, the letter was really flexible, but while it was nearly identical to the house the previous night, we passed on it as we saw another townhouse that was vacant, available and had upgrades over this house like a big bay window in the master bedroom, hardwood floors in the lounge and kitchen, it was basically just nicer. But we had to wait a long time on this as we needed answers to questions like “can we paint the walls?” as the walls were painted bright greens, blues and yellows, it was dramaticaly bright colours, not our pallette. We also needed to know if cats were allowed which as you can imagine, is very important to us.
To cut a long story short, we took the last townhouse, we’re allowed to paint it, the cats are allowed, it’s much nicer than the rest and it has enough room for our needs… But I’ll still talk about the huge house we looked at in another neighbourhood.
This was a seriously huge house, and the rent was comparable to the townhouses, but it was too big for us. 1800 square foot on the inside (but no garage which sucked) would mean spending a lot more money filling it out. The location was also not the greatest in the world, the main reason we were looking at Birkdale was it has a little town centre within walking distance (like 0.2 miles) which has a movie theatre, shopping, bookstores, coffeehouses etc and that was a huge appeal. I mean, why drive when everything we need is a couple of minutes walk away? Plus Lake Norman is within spitting distance and we’re trying to get out of the Atlanta mentality of driving everywhere. But anyways, this house was pretty awesome, if location, location, location wasn’t important, I would have seriously thought about this house based on the kitchen alone. We were joking that each utensil we have (and we have a fair few) could be given it’s own drawer with plenty left empty. The kitchen area took up half of the bottom floor, and in my rough calculations that equals around 400 square feet… for a kitchen! Our current condo is just over 700 square feet just to put it in perspective.
But we’re happy with the townhouse we chose, good size, good location, good price, so now we move in (hopefully) over next weekend, then we come back to Atlanta to fix up our condo and put it on the market to sell… We just hope it doesn’t take too long.
Anyone looking for a 1 bedroom, top floor condo with elevator access, attic access, close to GA400 and I285 and within walking distance of Sandy Springs MARTA station?
Yes, I’m finally back online, well I have been for a few days now but unpacking stuff takes away from my catching up time, so imagine my surprise when a full scale mutiny is going on at Flickr… Now I’d like to think of myself as old skool flickr, I joined early summer 2004, I don’t remember exactly when, but damn, some people will seriously get their panties in a wad over the most trivial of shit.
So basically it’s a few limits and a new login…
Let me say this once and once only.
Big Whoop!
Really, if you’ve more than 3,000 contacts and are tagging photos with 75 individual tags, you really need to get out more and smell the flowers you’re taking pictures of. One of the complainers has over 19,000 contacts (all marked as friends no less, I know this because I never even heard of him til today, but he’s already marked me as a “friend”) and has photos with a tag list as long as “War and Peace,” I’m unsure if thats fanatical devotion or a supreme waste of time, I think my most tagged photo has like, maybe 7 tags? And I’ve got like 170 contacts (only 40 are marked as Friends as it’s people I’ve actually interacted with in real life). So I think of myself as the average user, and these new limits don’t matter much to me, I’m not going to be all up in arms, laying awake at night in a cold sweat worrying about the going’s on of an online community. Call me old fashioned if you will.
As for the Yahoo ID, if you’ve been online for at least 5 years, chances are you have a Yahoo ID of some sort… Back in the day there was nearly no way around it. And folks, you’ve known this day was coming for over a year, so why you bitching now? I switched over once the Flickr Mobile site changed and you know what? It hasn’t changed my Flickr experience one bit, if anything it’s made it easier as my phone now remembers my Yahoo ID a lot better than the old skool cookie session id. Plus I’ve never seen the Yahoo login screen since I switched over, except when logging in on other computers that is. No complaints from me.
So this is basically a tiny proportion of the Flickr user base rattling their cages and creating a storm in a teacup, I guess they have nothing better to do?