Aug 06, 2008 19:06
So, I'm back. I haven't had time to sit down and really write anything until now, when my room is in the middle of being moved in to and I don't quite have Internet yet.
The past two weeks have been a blur. Of what, I'm not even sure. I spent a couple days hanging around at home, going over to a party at Mike's, then went over to Jen's for a weekend. We saw The Avett Brothers on the 26th. I had seen them in Wilmington a few days before I left for Germany last September, and a couple days after coming back, I saw them again. I thought it was a nice sort of symmetry. Except this time I could order a beer. The woman at the booth looked at my ID funny since it was three years expired. And the Avetts played an awesome show.
The next day we saw The Dark Knight, and the day after that we saw She & Him at Cat's Cradle. They played a pretty good show too, though I wasn't as familiar with them.
Shortly after getting back from Jen's, my dad picked me up and brought me down to where he lives now: in a marina on the Neuse River near Havelock. On a boat. He bought a sailboat on the cheap from a seller who was hurting for probably mortgage-related reasons and moved into it. It's actually pretty neat. It's got a lot of cabin space for what it is, a 41-foot sailboat, and sleeps three-potentially-four and has a galley, two heads, etc. The wiring had to be completely redone but now he's got everything electric organized and labeled.
We went out to seafood restaurants to eat, once in Oriental and once in Beaufort. It had been so long since I'd had real proper seafood and not just fried shrimp and fish at Nordsee. It tasted so good. I still need to reacquaint myself with steamed crab though.
This past Friday Steph had a party/GGT at her house and between that and Mike's party I got to see a lot of my Clayton friends again. It was nice, because I hardly ever see them anyway and I wanted to make sure I saw them again before I went to Chapel Hill for another two semesters.
Saturday I moved in, and that's where I've been since. My apartment's pretty nice, really, and thanks to one of my roommates talking the landlord down in price and my other roommate paying a larger share for the master bedroom I'm not paying nearly as much as I probably should for this part of town. There's a country club on the road behind the complex, and riding down that road on my bike gave me profound feelings of not belonging. But fuck 'em, that way is Trader Joe's.
My two strangest feelings of 'wow, I'm home' have been in Havelock and in a Waffle House. Havelock because it's a town with everything of worth built around a highway, with parking lots and shopping centers and huge signs for chain stores as far as the eye can see, and Waffle House because it's a place that stays open all night and serves cheap food and cuts corners in price any way possible yet still takes Visa. Not that they were both entirely positive feelings - though I'll admit it, it's hard for Waffle House to give me negative feelings - but they were home feelings.
America - fuck yeah.
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I tried biking up the hill to campus today to get to someplace where I could use the Internet. I had to get off and walk halfway up it. It's about a 15-20 degree gradient and is maybe a quarter-to-half-mile long. I think I need to bike more.
At least going back down will be fun.