Mah tahred hurts

Read it pho­net­i­cally. When I’m really tired, I fall back into the Alabama accent.

Made it to my appoint­ment this morn­ing. Made it to Katie’s appoint­ment on the other side of the world. Then the car wouldn’t crank. In fact, it wouldn’t do any­thing at all. Not even the auto­matic door locks were work­ing. No rea­son at all for it — I didn’t leave the lights on or any­thing like that.1
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How do you decide where to live?

Over the last two years, Sam and I have talked about mov­ing else­where. Geor­gia has almost no con­sumer pro­tec­tions for cit­i­zens, has a crappy sup­port struc­ture for humans in just about every way you can imag­ine, and has law enforce­ment who don’t care to enforce laws unless you’ve got enough money to get their atten­tion. Essen­tially, we want to live in a blue state, which means leav­ing the Bible belt. Cooler weather would be nice, too. Less humid heat, at least, would be a relief.

We haven’t really made plans, not want­ing to uproot Katie while she was in school and so on. There’s a lot of iner­tia, too, since I’ve been here all my life (except for the few years in Alabama before my par­ents moved us to Atlanta). Sam was born here, and wasn’t thrilled with New York or New Jer­sey when he lived there. Our fam­i­lies are here, which means some­thing, even if we don’t see them that often.
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Can you make citizens’ arrests for “‘unimaginably stupid’ conduct”?

From the Car­roll County Times of West­min­ster, Maryland:

Accord­ing to The Sacra­mento Bee, a fam­ily in El Dorado, Calif., is in trou­ble after spend­ing a fam­ily out­ing mak­ing pipe bombs and then test­ing them.… Accord­ing to the Bee, Justin Lee Brown, 29, was arrested on sus­pi­cion of sev­eral felonies. He, his girl­friend and their two sons, ages 6 and 8, had one of the more inter­est­ing fam­ily out­ings ever.… When asked about the activ­ity, Brown said he learned how to make bombs from friends and “decided to try it so he could show it to his kids.” … Brown is in jail and Tiffany Dean, the mom, is being inves­ti­gated for what deputies call “unimag­in­ably stu­pid” conduct.

I’m hold­ing my breath, hop­ing that no asso­ci­a­tion with the pagan com­mu­nity or Spi­ral Scouts will come to light. That’s what came to mind first, hon­estly. If it had hap­pened in Alabama instead of Cal­i­for­nia, though, I’d be rea­son­ably safe in assum­ing some degree of rela­tion to Dean and Brown. I’ve never regret­ted mov­ing to Geor­gia — specif­i­cally, to metro Atlanta. I’d be quite happy to move else­where, but as this story shows, you can find red­necks anywhere.

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