Yule persistent.
Monday, January 23rd, 2006
It’s a dark and rainy monday morning in the ATL, but our living room has a bit of warmth and a rich spruce-y smell that comes from, well, that tree in the corner, there.
Yes, we still have our tree up.
And your point is?
I guess it’s almost become a tradition of its own…we get our tree in the very last few days before Christmas, often from the Lutheran church up the street which sells trees and uses the proceeds to help needy folks in the neighborhood. Because it’s the last minute, the pickings are often slim, but there’s usually one tree that has that Charlie Brown unchosen quality that I’m always drawn to.
And so, late to show up, late to leave, I suppose…we usually don’t get around to disassembling the web of lights and ornaments until about the end of January…nowish. But it’s still doing its job…it brightened up my monday just fine, thank you. Our little hedge (well, not a hedge, exactly) against early January Seasonal Affective Disorder.
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Elsewhere around here, it’s been a couple of weeks filled with PHP and database backup and terminal windows, and why exactly, hey, can no one FTP in, oh, wait, now they can. The assemblage of system software and open source code that brings this page (and those of several others I know) to the rest of the world is still settling in, and Bill and I are learning more than we ever wanted to know about the underpinnings of web technology. The technical details have moved in and have found space in my addled brain, right next to info on exactly how to load an Ampex ACR-25 quad videotape cartridge machine (circa 1980 technology) and how long to keep a black and white photo in the fixer before rinsing it off. You know, useful stuff.
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Despite today’s rain, this has been a great month for walking, and Sammy and I have taken a number of fine strolls off in various directions in our neighborhood. Often, we head for Piedmont Park, which, on a nice day, is choked with dog owners and iPod listeners, all in worlds of their own. En route, we pass a large number of construction/renovation/expansion projects, as our neighborhood of bungalows becomes, one-by-one, a neighborhood of “starter McMansions”—that’s what the AJC called them when they reported Friday that Mayor Shirley Franklin had declared a moratorium on the lot-filling grotesqueries.
These new iterations of intown housing seem to be striving to sell, more or less uniformly, for $1.2 million.
Yes, dollars.
I suppose I should be sanguine about what that means for our little investment we call our home, but I also note that lots and lots (heh) of these are being built on spec, and they sure seem to stay empty, with fancy real estate signs out front, for a long, long time.
