Weesa back!
Well, after two weeks, I can finally get some time to do a little LJ update while we wait for the world-ending TWO INCHES OF SNOW to destroy life as we know it here in Richmond.
Wife Unit and I have settled in nicely to our new apartment, which I hereby, by the power vested in me as the guy who dragged us up here, dub the Refrigerator of Love. (As opposed to our place in Columbia, the Litterbox of Love, and my previous apartment, the Dumpster of Love.) See, it's a very nice place, but it's about 25 years old or so. And apparently, they hadn't invented insulation 25 years ago. Now, I remember that 25 years ago, Jimmuh Cahter was sitting in front of a fireplace with a sweater on telling us we all had to save energy or something, so I would figure that a building from that era would have enough fiberglass in it to make the Pink Panther jealous. Alas, no. Our heat pump is running about 21 hours a day.
We have a walk-in closet off the bedroom, a nice big one. But it's on an exterior corner, two outside walls, and has no heat vent. It stays around 50 degrees. We can use it as a walk-in closet and to store meat, if I don't mind my clothes smelling like pork loin.
I think I'm going to like my job, once I actually get something to do. For the past two weeks three of us have been wandering the halls homeless, shifting between cramming into an office built for one person, and a conference room. We don't have desks, we don't have anything to do but read documents and get in people's way. And we're getting paid for it. It's mind-numbingly boring, really. Hopefully soon(tm) they can find an actual place for us to sit, get us the rest of our network access, and let us start actually, y'know, working.
The suburbs out here west of Richmond have exploded. What used to be the edge of civilization is now just another overpass on the way out to the next mall. The place I work wasn't even a sketch on a blueprint when I moved out seven and a half years ago. To their credit, the folks that run the city of Richmond itself seem to have done a great job cleaning the town up. There are wide swaths that could still do with some Fallujah-style urban renewal courtesy of a couple of Marine infantry regiments and a battalion of M1 tanks, but the crime rate in general is down significantly and downtown has had something of a comeback, when it's not getting flooded out by tropical storms.
Some things never change, though. This is still a town with a wealth of history that can't quite figure out what to do with it. It's the capital of the Confederacy, full of people who would just as soon blow up the statues of Maury, Jackson, Davis, Lee, and Stuart on Monument Avenue. It's surrounded by bloody battlefields like Malvern Hill, Cold Harbor, Amelia Courthouse, and Petersburg, but has city councilmen who incite their constituents to burn and deface banners of Robert E. Lee. Three Presidents (John Tyler, James Monroe, and, if you want to get technical, Jefferson Davis) are buried here, along with JEB Stuart and George Pickett, but they insist on renaming bridges to try and eradicate anything Confederate. It's got over two hundred years of proud history as the seat of the government of the Mother of Presidents, but it can't name a baseball stadium anything more original than...The Diamond, which is on a street named Boulevard. It's been the capital of a nation, the capital of a state, and the murder capital of the South. It's a good town, basically, but it's groping for an identity.
And soon, the snow and freezing rain will start, and I will sit and look out my window and be glad I'm in here freezing my buns off, and not out there freezing my buns off.
Wife Unit and I have settled in nicely to our new apartment, which I hereby, by the power vested in me as the guy who dragged us up here, dub the Refrigerator of Love. (As opposed to our place in Columbia, the Litterbox of Love, and my previous apartment, the Dumpster of Love.) See, it's a very nice place, but it's about 25 years old or so. And apparently, they hadn't invented insulation 25 years ago. Now, I remember that 25 years ago, Jimmuh Cahter was sitting in front of a fireplace with a sweater on telling us we all had to save energy or something, so I would figure that a building from that era would have enough fiberglass in it to make the Pink Panther jealous. Alas, no. Our heat pump is running about 21 hours a day.
We have a walk-in closet off the bedroom, a nice big one. But it's on an exterior corner, two outside walls, and has no heat vent. It stays around 50 degrees. We can use it as a walk-in closet and to store meat, if I don't mind my clothes smelling like pork loin.
I think I'm going to like my job, once I actually get something to do. For the past two weeks three of us have been wandering the halls homeless, shifting between cramming into an office built for one person, and a conference room. We don't have desks, we don't have anything to do but read documents and get in people's way. And we're getting paid for it. It's mind-numbingly boring, really. Hopefully soon(tm) they can find an actual place for us to sit, get us the rest of our network access, and let us start actually, y'know, working.
The suburbs out here west of Richmond have exploded. What used to be the edge of civilization is now just another overpass on the way out to the next mall. The place I work wasn't even a sketch on a blueprint when I moved out seven and a half years ago. To their credit, the folks that run the city of Richmond itself seem to have done a great job cleaning the town up. There are wide swaths that could still do with some Fallujah-style urban renewal courtesy of a couple of Marine infantry regiments and a battalion of M1 tanks, but the crime rate in general is down significantly and downtown has had something of a comeback, when it's not getting flooded out by tropical storms.
Some things never change, though. This is still a town with a wealth of history that can't quite figure out what to do with it. It's the capital of the Confederacy, full of people who would just as soon blow up the statues of Maury, Jackson, Davis, Lee, and Stuart on Monument Avenue. It's surrounded by bloody battlefields like Malvern Hill, Cold Harbor, Amelia Courthouse, and Petersburg, but has city councilmen who incite their constituents to burn and deface banners of Robert E. Lee. Three Presidents (John Tyler, James Monroe, and, if you want to get technical, Jefferson Davis) are buried here, along with JEB Stuart and George Pickett, but they insist on renaming bridges to try and eradicate anything Confederate. It's got over two hundred years of proud history as the seat of the government of the Mother of Presidents, but it can't name a baseball stadium anything more original than...The Diamond, which is on a street named Boulevard. It's been the capital of a nation, the capital of a state, and the murder capital of the South. It's a good town, basically, but it's groping for an identity.
And soon, the snow and freezing rain will start, and I will sit and look out my window and be glad I'm in here freezing my buns off, and not out there freezing my buns off.