More Visiting Old Homes: 14 Cannonade Boulevard

I had some time to myself yesterday morning before the training started, so I drove over to my old neighborhood to look around. Pulling up in front of 14 Cannonnade Boulevard, a house we rented for about a year, I took a deep breath and rang the doorbell. What the heck, I thought. The owners either show me around or they don’t. Nothing to lose, right?

A woman appeared around the edge of the house, holding a shotgun! Ha ha! Not really. She was an older woman but seemed friendly enough. I walked over and introduced myself.

“You don’t know me, ” I said, “but I used to live in this house about thirty years ago.”

She immediately brightened up and introduced herself as Vincentine Williams. She and her husband John moved into the house about two years after we left and have lived there ever since. They bought the house for “a song” because apparently there was a lien on it and they happened to know who held the lien. They were the first owners after a long string of renters, which included us.

Vincentine is a piano teacher and was used to having people in her house. She happily showed me around the jungle of a backyard, pointing out the places where massive oak trees were felled by hurricanes past. I gleefully snapped pictures as she narrated all the troubles she’s had keeping the yard in shape.

The house itself always held magic in my mind. The back yard truly is a jungle! Banana trees sprout everywhere. Bamboo bushes now tower over everything. Massive oak trees dot the yard (though not as many as before). It was the first house we lived in with a basement, which provided a wet bar, a sump pump, an outdoor staircase and other basement-y attractions. Standing in the yard brought me back to the age of eight again, racing around the patio on bikes and Big Wheels with my brothers on many sweaty Alabama nights.

Vincentine’s husband was just waking, which made me feel bad about showing up, but Vincintine was still happy to show me the basement of the house (where the wet bar used to be). It was now festively decorated with black and white tiles, on which two beautiful grand pianos were displayed.

Vincentine also showed me the kitchen area, which had changed very little outside of a nice reflected-light ceiling that had recently been added. I wondered if the old ceiling bore any evidence of the grease fire we had one morning when we lived there.

The house was built in 1958 and was so novel at the time that Vincentine claims it once graced the cover of Better Homes And Gardens magazine. It had an in-house vacuum cleaner and an intercom system, nice touches even today but nothing less than groundbreaking back then. By the time we lived there the intercom was a squealy mess, though the vacuum system was still good for childish entertainment.

When we lived there the house had a flat roof which led to some funny incidents. One night my parents heard footsteps on their roof above their heads and called the sheriff. My dad had to lead the way for the deputy who responded, who was scared to death in spite of being fully armed. Eventually they got to the roof and surprised the suspect, a critter. Maybe a raccoon. Everyone had a good laugh and went to bed.

I thought Vincentine might want to hear stories of when we lived there but all she seemed to do was tell me the great things about the house. She was almost trying to sell me the house, in a way! I do believe she would have invited me in for the whole day had I not had to go to work. She kept telling me how much it meant to her husband when they went back a few years to see his old Midwestern childhood home, which she called the place “Gruesome Grove,” though I can’t find it anywhere.

I was fortunate to meet Vincentine and to get such a wonderful tour of my old home. We didn’t live there long but it sure was fun to be there as a kid. It makes me happy to know its been in good hands ever since.

Blogger Business Cards

I’ve carried business cards around for my full-time jobs for years. Now that I’ve been blogging for over six years I figured it was time to get business cards advertising my blog. I remember attending Linux Expo and taking home the first blog business cards I’d seen – those of Slashdot founders Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda and Jeff “Hemos” Bates. That was, oh, eight years ago.

On a recent business trip, I stopped by a coffee shop who got their business cards from VistaPrint. VistaPrint offers free business cards in quantities of 250. The catch is that every card has “Vistaprint – free business cards” on the back – essentially an ad for the service. Pretty savvy marketing, in my opinion. At least it makes some bloggers write about you.

To get your free cards you have to click through about 20 dialog boxes offering additional (fee) services, but it can be done. If you successfully navigate the dialog gauntlet your total cost for cards will be around $6 for shipping.

Spanish Fort Again

I’m in Spanish Fort, Alabama tonight for a day of training tomorrow. It feels good to be back to a place where I once lived 30 years ago.

I’ve written about my old homes here before, so some of y’all will be familiar with it. On my last trip I hoped to take pictures of my old homes. Unfortunately, the dime-store film camera I bought for the job didn’t offer enough firepower for the fading light of day. This time, though, I packed my Nikon D50 and got some successful shots tonight, more of which I hope to get in the morning.

The flight from RDU to PNS on AirTran was really a gamble. I was initially booked for a late-night arrival to Pensacola (actually arriving about now), but I figured I’d try my luck at an earlier flight. The gamble is that everyone at the airline told me the last leg was oversold with a 5-person waiting list and there was no way I would get here early. The flight out of Raleigh at 2PM was a breeze to get on and arrived at Atlanta over 30 minutes early. I simply had to walk down a few gates, present myself at the Pensacola gate, and boom, I got a seat. That’s how I managed to get to Spanish Fort before the sun went down.

I don’t fly AirTran too often, but I do like the XM Satellite Radio at every seat. I don’t really like the seats themselves, however. My backside was actually feeling sore after the flights. They could use more padding in the seat cushions. The pilots didn’t help matters, either, since both landings were a little harsher than I’m used to. Even the Chinese pilots of Air China flew far better than this: smoothly kissing the runway to the point I couldn’t even tell we had touched down.

Speaking of China, I’m in the Spanish Fort Holiday Inn Express now and found it funny that the last Holiday Inn I was in was in Beijing. Its a long way from there to here.

The Forbidden City in Beijing has its own Starbucks, hidden from view but definitely detectable from all the coffee cups being waved around. Spanish Fort, however, does not yet have its own Starbucks…yet! Its getting its first soon at the mall across the street, joining Bed Bath And Beyond, Best Buy, Ross, World Market, and a handful of other Cary-like stores. I find it easier to believe Starbucks is in the Forbidden City than I do Spanish Fort.

I sat next to a pleasant older woman on the plane to Pensacola with whom I exchanged some friendly words. As I waited for my bag, she walked by arm-in-arm with her husband. This guy turned my head because he was the spitting image of my long-deceased maternal grandfather: same height, same gait, same hair pattern.Same facial features, even. If he’d been wearing glasses it would’ve been perfect. As if being in Florida again (even briefly) wasn’t enough to make me miss my grandparents, that certainly did.

This place just makes me want to write. I don’t know why that is. Perhaps its the colorful reminders of the history here. My old neighborhood is filled with street names like Cavalry Charge, Smuggler’s Gap, Southern Way, Confederate Boulevard: names that fire a young boy’s imagination. Even thirty years later there’s a sense of mystery here.

Ah well. I’ve got a good book to read, Bill Bryson’s The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid, so I’ll cut short my own reminiscing in favor of Bill’s. Good night!

Slashdotted By Google

Monday I had the mixed blessing be the top Google search result for the query “Jason Ray UNC.” I was pleased to get lots of visitors but was sad that the reason they visited was because Jason died.

When I noticed the hit count for my first entry about Jason, I thought it prudent to update the post with information on where donations could be sent. I hope people took advantage of that.

That first post instantly became the most-read MT.Net post ever, with close to 3000 views. I only wish the circumstances were a little better. I think Jason posted a lot to the walled-off, so-called “social networking” sites like Facebook and Myspace but because Google doesn’t venture there few results came back for his own pages.

Go Down Emmanuel Road

This song is irrevocably stuck in my head thanks to a Dan Zanes DVD we were given.

Go Down Emmanuel Road
As Performed By The Sandy Girls and Dan Zanes

go down emmanuel road girl and boy fe go break rock stone
go down emmanuel road girl and boy fe go break rock stone

break them one by one (girl and boy)
break them two by two (girl and boy)
break them three by three (girl and boy)
break them four by four (girl and boy)
break them five by five (girl and boy)
Continue reading →

Shred Of Integrity

I just got word that another shred event is taking place in the Triangle, this time sponsored by NBC-17 and scheduled for Saturday, March 31st from 10 am to 2 pm.

Come bring your old bank statements, credit card statements, and whatever else you’d like to shred to the SunTrust bank at Stonehenge, 7320 Creedmoor Road in Raleigh, and it will be shredded for you for free. Note that any Nigerian oil executives who may approach you are not associated with the event, no matter what they tell ya.

See the details on NBC-17’s website.

Time Travel

I don’t know how I did it, but I did. Tuesday morning I unknowingly figured out the art of time travel.

Maybe I’ve become too comfortable with travel. Or bored. I don’t know, but I know I should have planned things better. I had a day’s work to be done in Boston Tuesday and so I scheduled an early flight to get a head start. Thinking that the Boston flight would last as long as my familiar flights to Newark, I saw the arrival time of 8 AM and assumed the flight would leave at 7.

Uh, no.

I woke at 5, showered and dressed, and kissed my sleeping wife goodbye. As I picked up my bag, I fished out my flight details and got a shocker: my flight was leaving at 6:05. I had thirty-five minutes to be on board!

I raced to the kitchen and grabbed two granola bars: my breakfast. I remembered I had promised to leave a picture on the fridge for the kids, so I quickly drew a heart on it. Then I bounded down the front steps and drove away, thinking there would be no way this would work.

The one advantage to being late for an early flight is traffic: there’s usually none. I-540 had few cars and those it did were moving at a nice clip. I behaved myself in traffic, too, getting passed by a dozen cars on my way.

It was about 5:40 when I drove up to the airport. I parked on the fourth parking deck and checked in at the American Airlines ticket counter. Then I hotfooted it to security, where two gates were open and only one passenger was in each line.

As luck would have it, my flight was on an Embrarer jet, so it was parked all the way at the end of Terminal C. Without even tying my shoes, I bounded down the concourse, reaching an empty gate and a closed jetway door.

“Mr. Turner, I presume,” the gate agent said with a smirk. Out of breath, I nodded. “I was waiting to see if you were going to check in,” she said as she turned toward the ticket machine.

I moved to follow her. “No, stay there! Stay there!” she barked. I felt like putting my hands up or something but instead I just stopped in my tracks.

She fetched the ticket from the machine and handed it to me. “Have a good day,” she told me as I raced down the jetway.

I walked into a mostly-full plane and calmly proceeded to the back of the plane. No one even batted an eye.

I casually looked at my watch and my eyes about fell out of my head. It was 5:55. At 5:30 I was kissing Kelly goodbye. I had gone from home to my seat in an astounding twenty-five minutes! We didn’t even pull away for another ten minutes. Amazing!

I still can’t figure out how I walked out of the house, drove to the airport (legally even), parked, checked in at the counter, passed through security, ran from one end of the terminal to the other, and took my seat in only 25 minutes. I should have never made it, but I did.

Maybe I’ve got some luck left in me, after all.