Arthur and Melissa’s Notes on Everything

You can see a minature snow drift against the fence. The cars are shiny from a light layer of snow coating them.

Those white specks in the picture really are falling snowflakes, not rain!

It snowed this morning! Well, for about 45 minutes it did anyway. By this time, it’s already starting to melt away from most surfaces, since it wasn’t below freezing when it was actually snowing. Fortunately, we had the camera handy for this one! On the other hand, it doesn’t even begin to compare with my first real snow experience in Philadelphia last week. That was snow — the kind where you’re breathing in snowflakes and you ask yourself, “at what point do they stop being called snowflakes and become snowballs falling from the sky?”

While cleaning off the memory card for my camera, I ran across this picture of one of our local residents. I’m not sure if this guy knows where his home is; I was up on our walkway when I took the picture.

Ok, I’m a poor witness. Not long ago, I heard squealing tires in the road that loops through our apartment complex. That’s not unusual. Hearing it a second time is, so I walk over to the balcony, and I’m still hearing chirps and squeals from tires. By this point, I’m thinking, what the heck is going on out there? There’s not exactly a whole lot to squeal about in around us – it’s a 1 and 3/4 lane driveway with parking scattered around. Normally the tire squealing is done in the enclosed parking garage under the apartments, where you really could kill somebody doing that.

So I come out on the balcony, and there’s this light-colored SUV (it was dusk already, turning in to night; hard to tell colors) that appears to be attempting to make a 15-point turn in the middle of the zig-zag in the road — as you pass our balcony, there’s an entrance to the parking garage to our right, then the road bends left (away from us) as our building extends further into the property on the other side of the garage entrance. By the time I could see the SUV, they had apparently squealed their way up into the bushes hiding a number of electrical distribution boxes (the big high-voltage ones), and was squealing around trying to get turned around, digging a giat rut in the landscaping while doing so. While this was going on, I ran back inside to grab a pen and paper so I could write down this asshole’s tag number. Finally, they freed themselves from the bushes, but still facing the proper direction. Apparently whoever was driving only knows full throttle and full brake, because they decided to gun it in reverse (squealing their tires of course) back into the garage entrance, finally allowing other cars to pass. For some reason, they gunned it back into the street, then back into the garage and turning, then squealed around in the garage a bit. I heard a few soft thumps, but I think there were just doors closing.

Despite all the time I had to study the roof of the SUV, I never did get a good look at the license plate. The second & third positions were characters involving vertical lines; perhaps I’s, 1′s, or maybe a U. Between the bushes and the rapid reverse into the garage below me, I didn’t get much opportunity to read it. At any rate, after the squeals subsided, I put my shoes on and walked the garage… wouldn’t you know it, none of the light-colored SUVs in the garage were either hot (hoods were cool to the touch), or had similar license plates. Drat! Whoever it was must have slipped out quitely while I was going downstairs. <sigh> I know at least two other people saw almost as much as I did, because they came out on their balconies at about the same time, but they didn’t have a view of the license plate. Oh well.

While driving around yesterday, we noticed quite a few people standing on major street corners holding signs for various stores or apartment complexes, and very few signs stuck in the ground or on poles or trees. We’d seen a couple of fast food people out before during lunch hours like the Quiznos drink cup guy at Roswell and Abernathy, but yesterday there were a lot more people and they weren’t doing any marketing tricks like dressing in a big company costume. Melissa & I guess that Atlanta must have some kind of anti-sign ordinance the prohibits companies from sticking little signs along the road, so the accepted alternative is apparently to pay people to stand on street corners. It’s a little odd, coming from places where telephone poles look like they are made out of staples…

I think I’ve finally put my finger on what Atlanta’s deal is with urban sprawl and horrific traffic. Today while we were inadvertently exploring the edge of Alpharetta, I realized a key difference between the greater Atlanta area and the greater Houston area. Part of what makes Houston function as well as it does as a large, sprawling metropolitan area without crippling traffic (it might be bad, but it doesn’t cripple the city like it does in Atlanta) or effective mass transit is that the jobs are not all centralized in the city. Odds are, unless you have a particularly specialized vocation, you can find work in any general area of Houston. Thus, it is not necessary for all Houstonians to commute from their outlying neighborhoods to within the 610 loop. Many people do, but by and large, the whole 4 million people of the city do not hold a Chinese fire drill twice a day. (In fact, you’ll find there is a significant part of Houston that commutes backwards, working further away from the city than where they live.)

Maybe it’s a Publix thing, or maybe the Atlanta area schools teach origami as a required class, but I’ve noticed something odd: Every time we buy groceries at Publix, the cashier will always fold our receipt at least twice, and sometimes more. It doesn’t matter how big or how small the receipt is, they always make two folds. Bizarre. I would write it off as a Publix thing, since their marketing is so geared toward promoting their better service for the higher-end grocery consumer, but I have noticed a few other clerks do the same thing at other stores. Of course, they could be ex-Publix employees. It’s hard to tell whether it’s an Atlanta thing or a Publix thing from here — it seems possible that any given clerk in Atlanta might have worked for Publix at some point in their life. They’re everywhere out here. The three closest grocery stores to us are Publix, Publix, and Publix. Kroger is fourth, although there may be another Publix hiding somewhere that we haven’t noticed.

Nothing like driving out of Atlanta during the evening, and adminiring the stars… uhh, dozens of airplanes holding to land at Hartsfield International… :-O

Here’s a sign that the Olympics are on the air far too long every night: We were watching the local news broadcast following last night’s Olympic coverage, and the anchors were having problems reading the teleprompter. They botched phone numbers and other minor things, but then during a segment about a local youth organization’s gun trade-in program, where people in this ghetto neighborhood could hand over their weapons to the police with no questions asked, this little gem came out of the anchorman’s mouth: "[participants] received a $60 gift card at the DA’s office"

What? "Hey kids, got an outstanding parking ticket? Dope charge? Trade in your gun for a $60 credit toward your next offense!"

Let’s try that again through the magic of ReplayTV. This time let’s move the punctuation to where he was supposed to have it: "[participants] received a $60 gift card. At the DA’s office…" (and on to somebody talking about how wonderful it is to be getting guns off the street.)

Hey, NBC, you might want to let your local newspeople run their show at its usual time during the Olympics. They can’t handle this midnight news broadcast here in Eastern time.