Normalcy advances

Coming back from a vacation in which there was little rest has been a tough adjustment. There's been a lot to do at work, which has resulted in slug like behavior at home. My wife did some more work on the back porch last night and I moved some record albums around while ditching some useless shelving.

Trying to get prepped for Wednesday's Grand Slam too.

My son started school this week and his bus has been extremely late in picking him up. So late we've had to take him to school. The bus home was an hour late the first day and 48 minutes late on the second. I do not consider that an improvement. Cannot get through to the transportation department, wonder why? Out of his first two days we spent about three and a half hours waiting for a bus.

Maybe they'll get it right by November.

Do not wait!

Saturday we were shopping in the Short North and came across a liquor cabinet. We have been looking for one for awhile. The price was good, even better on Wednesday. It's a large antique and furniture store that sells its items on consignment and lowers prices the longer they're in the shop.

So we decided to wait.

You can guess the outcome.

We were shown another, similar, item, but it was not even close to what we wanted.

Over dinner we were speculating what the buyers were going to do with the cabinet. Hipsters applying decoupage of faux old wine labels to the lid. Freaks using it to store jars of eyeballs. Damn, we just wanted a nice piece of furniture to put our booze in.

Insert all kinds of cliches about snoozing and losing here.

You know, if that was the worst thing to ever happen to us for the rest of our lives, things will be very good.

Recapping a busy weekend

Saw the Avengers on Friday night. An hour and a half of exposition that leads to an hour of carnage as a good portion of Midtown Manhattan is destroyed. Very entertaining, no wonder it has taken in a billion worldwide already.

Walked around the Short North on Saturday and may have found an object we've been looking for to go into the dining room.

Watched the Crew pay an ugly game on Saturday night, only to come out victorious.

Went to a newer place in the Arena District, the Three Legged Mare (dislike the name, but it's a festive enough place) on Sunday morning to watch Survival Sunday. Ten Premier League games going at once, seven being televised on U.S. outlets for the first time. A very dramatic morning of sports. I had nothing really at stake, (Everton ended up in seventh, finishing ahead of Liverpool. Yay!) but the race for the championship title came down to a dramatic goal by Sergio Aguero in the final seconds to give Manchester City the edge. It was incredible. A few dozen soccer fans, some of whom were Manchester United supporters all got caught up in the spirit of fair play and all that. Everyone called Joey Barton names. He should be banned, not given just a lengthy suspension.

Came up with an idea yesterday afternoon that had me tearing apart a behemoth of a computer desk, throwing it in the trash and arranging bulk pickup. We put the crap that was on the desk on bookshelves a friend gave us, and pitched out even more stuff. Now there's more wall space, and floor space which is reserved for an item we saw on Saturday. Watch this blog for further developments. It is a bit unsettling turning the corner into the dining room and seeing no desk. You get used to things after nine years.

This Friday I have a mini-feature at Kafe Kerouac. I'm taking part in an all night fund raiser for the Writers' Block poetry slam team to get them some dough for their trip to Charlotte in August. I'm hitting the stage at 10:30PM with some old and new. Going to be a fun night. 

Abode 3, House 1, Years 9.5

I do not recommend closing on a house when your child was born premature and is in the NICU. We had been looking throughout the pregnancy and might not have made a decision on this place. Then my son jumped out at us all. We could have kept looking for another month. Desperation makes people do desperate things. Our landlord was being an unsympathetic ass. There was another house we did like, a bit further east of where we are now. The house was brick, on a quieter side street, seemed solid and the basement was more usable. But flaky owners jacked up the price at the first sniff of two potential buyers.



So we ended up with this one instead. Close to where I worked at the time, there's nothing else around, really. There's a sad Kroger that way, and a sadder IGA where a girl got shot in the face the other. It could have been worse. That whole time was a blur of emotion and stress. There was too much crap, and all of her crap brought to our old apartment weeks before were supposed to move in here did not help next to all of my crap. My parents and sister came to help, they wanted to kill me for having too much crap. I did not feel to good about me either.

Then there were the twin ugly QVC rocking chairs that broke less than a year after we had them. Thanks for adding to the pile of junk. Gosh, being a first time parent was starting out so well.

Yes, it was a mess. And I won't even mention the killer ceiling fan incident.

I got this 82 year old house in the divorce, refinanced it a couple of years later and am now trapped here, underwater. At least the reassessment lowered the value of the house considerably, taxes are incredibly low. There, one advantage. And there is a roof over our heads that does not leak the way the toilet now does, again.

So this is my Scottish Wife's mansion. She's done a great job cleaning up my crap and making it a lovely home. She gets it when I die. The streets of America are truly paved with gold.

No, really. Can I win the lottery and give this house to the first taker?

Home Number Two

With yesterday's post about Schiller Park, it may be a good segue to post about my second abode in Columbus, which was a short par 3 from the park. Lived here from March of 2000 to October of 2002.

The wedding date was 3/17/01 and we had been looking for places to live in the Victorian Village, Grandview and German Village areas. Nothing really stood out until this one.



It was the left half of the house, with the other half lived in by a ninety plus woman who was more or less deaf. I was lucky twice in a row. She was a very sweet woman who lived there for over thirty years, saw the house built when she was a child.

The apartment had a small living room with built in bookshelves than went into a dining area. The kitchen had decent size. There was even a portable dishwasher, which was used rarely but good to have. It was one of those dishwashers you had to attach the hose to the faucet in order to use, roll it by the sink, and start. A bit of work!

Upstairs was a tiny bathroom, two small bedrooms and a large front bedroom. The back bedroom opened up to a small private second floor balcony. Had I wanted to, I could have sunbathed in the nude.

The location was ideal, her Grandmother lived on the street behind us. We were within walking distance of the park, a good bus line, all the cool stuff in German Village and a grocery store. Should have been great. Maybe the car that crashed into the house next door a month after we lived there was an omen.

Had to move when she became pregnant. We could not afford the reasonable, but higher costs to rent there. Our hand was forced even more when she gave birth to our son three months early. The landlord was a bit of an ass and only returned part of our deposit. Still, I miss the location.

The First Home

We first came to Columbus in late October of 1989. My wife had been accepted to Graduate School at a major Midwestern land grand university and we had a limited time frame to look at the city a little and find a place to live.

It was a freakishly warm weekend. I know we had lunch outside on the patio of A La Carte, which is now Alana's. We looked through the Dispatch for apartments with little knowledge of any of the neighborhoods. We found an apartment that sounded decent, by the ad, and called them from our hotel room.



This was the first place we looked at. The upper right hand apartment. Walking in we both had an instant feeling this was the place. It was not large, but looked comfortable. A decent sized living room. Functional kitchen. Two bedrooms. Basement storage. We wanted this apartment. We had appointments for two other places, but after driving to them we realized we did not even want to look at them.

Luckily we got it.

I lived here for over ten years, she moved out after eight.

It was not a horrible place to live. A bit small for two, especially when times were rough. We did have a few memorable parties. It was not air conditioned and we broiled in the summer. Opening the front windows did not provide much coolant, and the noise from the busy street did not help. The windows were casement, so finding a decent air conditioner was difficult.

The location was decent, just a short distance from campus. Relatively safe. We never had a problem, but our downstairs neighbor was broken into and had her car stolen. Right on a major bus line, close enough to shopping. Because of the street noise, I do not miss it.

It had a backyard that backed up to a ravine, so we had families of raccoons and other assorted critters visit all the time. Our downstairs neighbor had lived there, and still does, for over 40 years. She was nearly deaf so our noise never bothered her.

I finally moved out to live with wife two. I'd been there for ten years and four months. I'd worn of the place and it showed. The landlord was generally attentive, and I got my full deposit back.

Really, there are no Mummies in my Basement

The assessment on my house arrived in the mail from the county yesterday. The auditor lowered the value of my house by $22,000. I'm a bit stunned, but not completely surprised. We're not in a desirable neighborhood, but we're not in the middle of urban blight here either. This part of town has no real amenities, no coffee shops, no movie theaters and it's not walkable.



Last night at Writers' Block was the final qualifying slam for IWPS. I was prepared as it would be my final slam of the season since I will not be in the country for finals. Drew the third slot out of six poets and brought out a debut. If you were not there you missed out on "Crispus Attucks Speaks through my Oujia Board" which does little to extinguish the flames of the Race War that Scott Woods is trying to start. Must be experienced to be believed.

Went into round two in first place. Asked Gina if we could end it there, she was not able to. Read "My Thunder" and I brought it like a weak cold front as three other poets passed me and I finished fourth. Congratulations to Rose Smith for winning it all. Vernell finished in second, Megan in third.

It was a good slam season. I respected the "No Repeat" rule and adhered to it, even counted the two poems I read at Rust Belt even though I did not have to.

A couple of months off from slam and it all starts again in January. Got to improve the writing, always.

A Vegetable I like

Gardening is completely new to me, and I believe, to my Scottish Wife. She's grown things from seeds before, not me. I kill colonies of Sea Monkeys. Pole beans though, are a childhood memory, one of the few good ones. Our neighbor grew them along the fence between our houses and what came though to our side we'd eat off the vine. Delicious!

I cleared out most of the space in the yard, she put the seeds down and the tepee trellises. I added the larger poles and the wood trellis. If all goes wrong, it's an experiment.

So we're watching the vine grow. I swear it grew about six inches yesterday. It's stretching from pole to pole. One vine was growing out behind the fence, on the ground. They're doing what they should, but it's hard to tame them!




Did some weeding around it, tried to put the vines where they're going up instead of across - we'll see what happens.

When do the beans start showing up?

Tried to upload a couple of pictures but the ones I took off the iPod, Blogger would not upload. First world problem.

I was able to upload the picture about seven hours after posting.

William Shatner is Eighty Years Old Today.

Two of my poems have been published in the online journal The Legendary. Fifth name down on the left if you do not know my name. There is also audio for one of the poems. You can do a lot with an iPod Touch.

It's exciting, something I've wanted to do but never quite had the gumption. Saw they were accepting submissions, found a couple of poems and sent them in. A couple of days later they contacted me and accepted both poems. Not the prestige of having your work put into a book, but this is a start. A small but significant goal achieved, you may say.

Here is an old poem. From late 1998, right after a divorce. I've been thinking of home poems recently as so many other poets have been writing them. I've primarily lived in three places in my life and feel a disconnect to all of them. I miss the one I lived in the shortest amount of time the most, and the one I lived in first not at all. I've more or less been in Columbus the longest, there are often times I feel like an outsider, even in my own community.


Islip Terrace in the Seventies

you could smell the salt in the air
when the wind came from the south
it was the only time you ever felt
if you were on an island
in the fall, or spring
when the night were cool and mist filled
and lots of thickening fog
late at night
i'd put on my raincoat
and walk
unaccompanied
through the suburban streets
houses all looking the same
washington, jefferson, garfield, roosevelt
who in the hell was stellenwerf?
the streets where i came from
i'd walk, and see the lights
of neighbors no one knew
going off as others prepared for
the next day
mine had just started
in the summers i'd be on ten speed
riding, riding in the darkness
through the mosquitoes, crickets, and squirrels
searching, fruitless
for one who didn't exist
those were my better times
i was fast then
i could run
rueful, brooding, wistful
i was best when alone

There's not much from the 1997-2005 period that I would consider revealing today. That was a long time ago.

Here's a Live Journal post from three years ago in which I call stardom for Florence and the Machine.

Got that one right.