Duck

A little late, but... pictures from our family vacation in Duck.

Why I’m glad I live in Atlanta

So, often, I fill out forms online. They ask me for my address, or I am going to a store locater to find a store near me. Living in Michigan, when you get to the state tab, you hit "m" and then the down arrow a few times to get to Michigan. In Georgia, you hit "g" and you're good to go. Hurray for only one G state.

In interesting unrelated corollaries:

(that's what my computer's sidebar weather widget looks like right now...)

Word of the Day

nostalgización - in English, nostalgization (well, it's not really a word in either language)

I read that in the book I just finished, Cien años de soledad (One hundred years of solitude). It always amuses me to find quirky things like this when I'm reading Spanish lit - things that cross language boundaries, that authors in multiple languages do. In this case, the nouning of a verbed noun. I've also come across several idioms that are the same in Spanish as in English - like "we're in the same boat." Makes me wonder when the idiom developed - first in one language, then literally translated to the other? Both developed simultaneously? Developed before the languages branched off?

No offense, Atlanta

Drivers here really enjoy running red lights. Now, it's probably just that I grew up in a city of 40,000, so I'm not used to "big city" driving. Driving home from work (at least until I find an alternate route) requires me to take a fairly busy road (6 lanes) that crosses I-75, the highway that goes from Michigan to Florida, right through Atlanta. Even when I leave work at 6:30 at night, traffic is bumper to bumper the basically the whole time I'm on that road. And, the traffic lights aren't synchronized, so when light A turns green, light B is still red, so the whole stretch of the road between A and B is packed with cars. So, naturally, the cars waiting at light A pull out into the intersection. By the time light B finally turns green and the cars can pull forward, light C is back to red, so there's more roadblock. And when light A turns red again, 8 cars are still in the intersection, effectively blocking the cross street traffic from going anywhere. Granted, most of those cars are trying to turn onto the street I'm on, further blocking the intersection. And if a driver is lucky enough to be close to an intersection when the light is changing from green to red, they might as well go through the intersection. I mean, the line of cars is going to move forward sooner or later, right? So they might as well be "through" the light.

I'm glad I only live a few miles from work, so even in traffic it only takes me 15 minutes to get home...

I live in Atlanta now.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry - practically everyone I know (well, okay, three people) have been begging (well, not really) for pictures of my new apartment. So, here they are. As you may notice, I'm kind of lacking in the furniture department at the moment... I'm thinking about creating furniture out of my myriad cardboard boxes.