This weekend, Rusty got his truck washed for the first time in years:
Shiny!
Also, we went down to the bird fair in Forest Park and got two new zebra finches. They are named Puff and Stuff. The girl is Puff, because she’s bigger.
I’ll post more (and closer-up) photos soon. I didn’t want to disturb them too much while they’re still getting adjusted to their new home, so I haven’t been hovering around their cage with the camera just yet.
This weekend, I’m going on a retreat with Georgians for Choice. We’ll be staying in somebody’s cabin near Ellijay, and there won’t be internet access or a cell phone signal. Am I allowed to use the phrase “off the grid” to describe what my weekend will look like? (Probably not, because there’s a landline and electricity at the cabin.) I’m not sure what we’re going to do at the retreat other than eat and sit around; but that’s okay, because eating and sitting around sounds like a damn fine weekend to me.
On one hand, I’m looking forward to the retreat, but on the other hand, I’ll be missing Rusty and looking forward to getting back to Atlanta (civilization) on Sunday afternoon.
Oh, for those of you who don’t pay attention to my Twitter updates, our AC is fixed now. Last night we slept at our apartment for the first time in 11 days. There are other updates regarding this situation, but I’ll post them later.
And now that we can actually stay at our apartment again, I will post about the pole saga soon, too. Executive summary: Platinum Stages is a shady company that has fucking awful customer service. Don’t buy anything from them.
Rusty and I spent the weekend in Milledgeville, which is about two hours south of Atlanta. (Don’t you love how it’s possible to measure distance in hours?) We went on some tours, took a bunch of photos, and spent a lot of time in the big comfy bed at the B&B where we stayed.
I love when we take these little weekend trips. Even though the inn had free wifi of which we partook a bit, it still felt like we were “off the grid” for the most part. And even though I don’t usually go for touristy stuff, I make exceptions when the touristy stuff involves history or other nerdy pursuits. We really enjoyed the tour of the Old Governor’s Mansion and the trolley tour of downtown.
One thing that stood out to me about Milledgeville was that everything is so old. I know there are plenty of old small towns in Georgia, but something about Milledgeville in particular… it seems older. I don’t think that’s just a random perception, either. First of all, it wasn’t burned by Sherman’s troops during the March to the Sea, so there are a lot of actual antebellum buildings. (Peeve: we stayed at a bed-and-breakfast called the Antebellum Inn, but it was built in 1890.) It also didn’t get hit with a bunch of “urban renewal” in the 1960s. (I overheard someone talking about that while we were on the trolley tour, and I gleaned that Milledgeville had an active historical society way before most other places.) It was the state capital from 1803-1868, and, as the tour guide was saying, when the capital moved to Atlanta, Milledgeville pretty much became a ghost town. Its heyday was in the early/mid 1800s.
Speaking of ghosts… yes, of course we went to Central State Hospital! We didn’t go inside any of the buildings, because we’re not down with the B&E; in fact, we didn’t even get out of the car. (We rolled down the windows to take photos.) The place had a very creepy vibe, and I just did not want to be walking around.
Nevertheless, I may have inadvertently photographed a ghost. Generally I think the talk of “orbs” as something paranormal is crap. It’s dust on the lens, people. But what showed up in my photo was much bigger than your typical orb/dust. And I see the vague shape of a face in it (you have to view the original size to be able to make that out). Who knows, it could be something else… but, well, judge for yourselves:
There will be a podcast about our Milledgevile trip soon. In the meantime, check out my photos on Flickr: Downtown Milledgeville and Central State Hospital. And don’t forget to listen to our podcast reviewing two Atlanta swinger’s clubs!
The good thing about automatic del.icio.us and Twitter posting is that it makes it look like I update my blog every day. (Reminder: if you find those things annoying, you can always subscribe to the “actual posts only” feed.)
It’s been a good, calm weekend. Yesterday morning, my Online International Podcasting Expo session went well. Then last night we had dinner with some friends at the Vortex in Little Five Points - which was a lot of fun, but goddamn are some of the people at the Vortex annoying. (I would attribute that attitude to me getting old, but I felt the same way about such people when I was 21.) Today we did our requisite weekly brunch at Radial, I had my requisite afternoon nap and my requisite persistent headache; then we went to the Container Store and spent about $1,000 on elfa equipment so that we can build a closet in our lofted bedroom.
Once our place all set up, it’s going to be awesome. The upstairs in particular is going to be cozy and kick-ass (yes, it can be both). Also, it’s going to be our personal Porno Central.
Downstairs, the furniture arranging and box unpacking is coming along. We have so much space that we basically have two living rooms (or living-room-like areas, since there are no walls) - one with a TV and one without. The kitchen is another matter, however… I need to get on top of that soon, because eating out all the damn time has gotten really old.
I can’t believe it’s already 9:00 p.m. This weekend has flown by. I still might edit a podcast tonight… we’ll see.
I’ll be back to writing posts about feminism and shit next week, I imagine. For now, this is what you get. -Oh! I would like to say publicly, CONGRATS to Jenny on landing an awesome new job in Washington D.C.!! It’ll be great to have you on the east coast. :)
It’s going to be a jam-packed (in a good way) weekend. Here’s the run-down:
There will probably be live-blogging from SoCon07 tomorrow. See ya!
Well, it was a jam-packed weekend! Where to begin. Rusty and I had a blast at BlogSavannah. A lot of the sessions were centered around the intersection of blogging and business, or blogging and mainstream media. Those were interesting but also at times infuriating, especially when one person kept trying to dominate the conversation (clearly some people don’t understand the concept of an unconference!). The Women and Blogging session was good except some of the people kept trying to derail it, and I was just sitting there in awe wondering what the hell crawled up their ass and died. This one woman kept accusing Gennie (the session leader) of “not being honest” because she cusses on her blog but doesn’t cuss in front of her son IRL. She wouldn’t let it go… she said it like 5 times and then was like, “But, you don’t have to defend yourself.” WTF?? Oh, I’m just going to rake you over the coals; but no, it’s not like I’m asking you to defend your choices. I wanted to really go at it with her but I didn’t want to take the session even further off the rails. Also, a lot of the people were really big about “if you blog and you get fired it’s your own damn fault, employers can do whatever they want and you don’t get to complain or have an opinion!!” That floored me as well. Oh, and then, the best, was when this one woman said something like, “If you work nights as a stripper, of course you should get fired from your day job.” Oh lord, how I wanted to tear her a new asshole. But, again, didn’t want to derail. Instead I just looked daggers at her and said I didn’t see why that mattered. Also I called Drew out for not letting the women speak at the Women and Blogging session; with any luck you’ll hear that on the forthcoming podcast. Look, it’s nothing against him personally; I think he did an amazing job organizing this whole thing, and I will surely be sending him a bunch of emails picking his brain for nuggets of wisdom I can apply to PodCamp. But, if you’re a man in a session called Women and Blogging, and you start trying to dominate the conversation, well, I’m going to call you out on it, because that’s some shit and you need to recognize that you don’t get to dominate every single conversation.
Oops, I just realized that I’d been writing in one big long paragraph. Sorry… it kind of reflects my train of thought at the moment though, as I only have a brief window of time here at work to write this. So if this recap is somewhat jumbled, that’s why. Anyway, overall, BlogSavannah was awesome, we had a lot of fun, and met some really smart, interesting people. Oh, and thank goodness we were with Phil after dinner Saturday night, when we discovered our car had been locked in a parking garage. :P He tracked down the person with the keys for us! My BlogSavannah photos are on Flickr, along with about 250 more in the group pool. (I’ll post more photos soon.) Sherry has good coverage of a lot of the sessions.
Moving on… Saturday morning we drove to Vidalia to meet with Wilson Smith of What Is Goin’ On? It was great to finally meet him in person, and Vidalia appears to be a quintessential Southern small town. After our super-secret meeting of which I can reveal no more, Rusty and I were off to Andersonville for an investigation with the Henry County Ghost Hunters. Yep, we got full access to the prison site and cemetery, and spent about four hours wandering around with digiral recorders and flashlights. We got scared at one point by what we thought was a ghost, but it turned out just to be a possum. Anyway, soon there will be a podcast up from that night, and hopefully it’ll include some EVPs!
Also, podcasts from BlogSavannah will also be up in the next week or so… we’re going to start a GAPN network program called (Un)ConCasts where people can put recordings from any conferences they go to. In the foreseeable future we’ll be posting stuff from BlogSavannah, SoCon07, PodCamp Atlanta, and further down the line, Dragon*Con and ConvergeSouth 2007.
Okay, that’s all for now… gotta get back to work. Maybe later this week I’ll actually catch up on reading blogs. At the moment I’m avoiding eye contact with my BlogLines account.
Well, after putting 700 miles on my car this weekend, we’re back home! This is just a quick update to say yes, I’m here, and it was an amazing weekend. Will write a proper recap later. Must go to the grocery store, and then SLEEP. Thanks to Thomas, Nikki, et al for bouncing the shiny around with my latest troll this weekend. Y’all rock (well, not the troll; but the rest of you). Note to other, somewhat quieter troll: I bought more sexy outfits today, so there will be more photos eventually. This is just to give you a headstart on the eye-covering and tearful masturbating.
Okay, I must go to the store now, for real. Tomorrow I’ll be playing catch-up with blogs and email, and will hopefully write more about our road trip.
Wow. What to say about this weekend?
I’m still recovering, since I’ve been going a mile a minute all day today with work stuff. But I need to try to put together some kind of wrap-up…
As mentioned previously, Friday night we hung out at the Hyatt with some fellow bloggers and their entertaining friends. A podcast resulted. (Sorry about the lackluster sound quality, but we were in a crowded, noisy bar; whaddaya want?) I’m pretty sure we were invited to an orgy. Well, it was either a thinly veiled invitation or just a statement of fact, though given the general environs I think the former is more likely.
Saturday morning I had to get up early to go get my bi-monthly haircut. After that, breakfast at Radial, and a quick trip to Junkman’s to get more appropriate attire, we were back at Dragon*Con. We participated in a panel entitled Interviews: Getting and Doing, which was part of the new podcasting track. And shockingly enough, a podcast of the panel is available by clicking the link on the panel name!
After that panel, Rusty headed home to watch football. I stayed and met up with Leann of Tag in the Seam and Laura of The Coffee and Tea Show and The Rocky Horror Podshow. They both are awesome, amazing, and hilarious, and I’m really glad we finally got to meet IRL! I also ran into Sam of The Bear’s Grove, another kick-ass GAPN affiliate.
Later that afternoon, I participated in the Women in Podcasting panel, the podcast of which should be available tonight is now available. Leann tried to persuade me to stay around for some more events and general debauchery after that, but I was so wiped out that I went home and went straight to bed.
Sunday morning we got up early and set out for Augusta, on a mission to photograph the locations of a bunch of former nightclubs from 35+ years ago. These were all clubs advertised in the 1971 magazine, “The Scene in Greater Augusta” (see Flickr set or listen to the podcast). We managed to track down most of the places we were looking for - although a few of the locations are in dispute from people who would know better than me, since they were actually alive at the time. Anyhow, it was a lot of fun, and you can see the photos here. On the way home that night, a long discussion ensued about how we love history, architecture, and especially when the two come together and include people’s personal memories and anecdotes.
Monday? Back to Dragon*Con to participate in one more panel: Podcasting Directories. The recording of that one should be up within the next few days.
Overall, the weekend was a blast. I had way more fun at Dragon*Con than I’d expected. Next year, we want to plan ahead and really do it up. (And who knows, maybe we’ll be big hotshot podcasters by then! Eh, probably not; but we’ll still throw a good hotel room party.)
Anyway… It was great to meet so many fellow podcasters this weekend. I would try to list them all, but I know I’d forget someone and then feel like an ass - so I’ll just say, you all know who you are! I would, however, like to give a special shout-out to Swoopy and Derek of Skepticality and thank them for putting together the podcsating track. I can hardly wait for next year!
Now… maybe eventually I’ll get caught up on blogging, blog-reading, etc., amid dealing with the obligations of my day job and trying to get some sleep!
An exhausting - but fun! - 3-day weekend is winding to a close. (And I have to do work tonight, booooo.) Right now my body is more focused on the “exhausting” part, so expect a more detailed post about our weekend adventures, soon.
However, I would just like to apologize again for all the spam. I haven’t had enough spare time to sit down and seriously try to do something about it. My comments RSS feed had about 130 new items in Bloglines today, and I know it sucks to wade through and try to pick out the real ones amid all the crap. Sorry. Although, it could definitely be worse… all the spam is so complementary! The bots just want to thank me and tell me what a great design I have! Bless their hearts… don’t they know flattery will get them nowhere?
A few notes from this past weekend (yes, I know I’m a day late [and a dollar short?])…
This has been your requisite weekend recap.
Courtesy of Bitch|Lab:
I usually can’t bend my knees like that, though, because they start to hurt. I’m getting old.
In other news, I am already itching for another blog redesign. I’m sort of over 0.95em Trebuchet. Can’t say I’ll actually have time for a redesign any time soon, but we shall see.
It was a whirlwhind of a weekend. Fun, but exhausting. Excerpt from an email I sent Jenny and Niki last night: “Would it be too cliché if I said, ‘I need a weekend to recover from the weekend?’ Damn, I just said it!”
Saturday morning/afternoon, of course, we were at Pride; the podcast should be up today or tomorrow. More photos are also forthcoming.
Saturday night we went to the Atlanta Urban Photography Exhibit, which was awesome. (And yes, I think I’m going to finally give in and put photos on Flickr. But just a taste, to drive people to my Gallery.) We met some fellow bloggers and podcasters, and I experienced my second-ever “blogger sighting” (ie, someone I didn’t know came up to me and said, “Are you Amber? I read your blog!”).
Sunday was the Pride parade (which turned into a deluge, and a subsequent very soggy MARTA ride home), then preparation for a podcast party (I made baked ziti and everyone seemed to like it), and then the podcast party itself. The episode we recorded of the GA Politics Podcast is already up, and it turned out really well. (We had conservatives present this time!)
I am so glad this is a three-day weekend. I really needed some time off - and although this weekend certainly hasn’t been all ass-sitting, it’s still nice not to have to get up for work on Monday morning.
Actually, it’s been a pretty busy weekend, up until today. Friday night Rusty and I went to see Vicki Blankenship’s Indiegrrl Showcase at Eddie’s Attic. Even though we got there late, we were still able to take in a lot of awesomeness. And I bought two CDs, because I’m all about supporting independent musicians. Not coincidentally, you can also hear my interview with Vicki on the Georgia Podcast Network.
Saturday morning I had to get up early to get my hair did at 9:30. At 10:30 Rusty did a Skype interview w/ an independent candidate for governor. Skype rocks my socks.
After that it was off to lunch at the Brickstore Pub, where we did another interview (seriously, we have been a couple of interviewin’ fools lately) with a porn dude, which will hopefully be available later this week. Then we took in some of the Decatur Arts Festival until we realized it was just too damn hot to be out walking around. Rusty got a few photos, though.
Saturday night was the Doll Squad’s Spring Fling show at Smith’s - and guess what, that coincides w/ another interview we did. Unfortunately, we had to suffer through two crappy bands beforehand, and so it was almost 12:30 by the time the Doll Squad actually started their show. Which meant we weren’t able to stay for the entire thing, because we’re old fogies. That pissed us off, because we wanted to see it, but I don’t understand why everything has to start so goddamn late. It’s like the shows at the 40 Watt in Athens… there is no need to wait until the middle of the goddamn night. It would be just as cool at 9:00 p.m.
Yesterday was back to the Decatur Arts Festival again, where Rusty scored some interviews while I sat in Starbucks appreciating the AC. And… well, now this recap has gotten way too long, which should give you an idea of our weekend overall. And now, I must go put away my laundry and do some cleaning; then I’ll have earned the right to lie on the couch watching Grey’s Anatomy on Tivo.
Don’t expect any blogging over the weekend; Rusty and I are turning off the computers and cell phones (well, I can’t turn off my cell phone, in case my mom calls) and indulging in some pure, unadulterated (and well-deserved) ass-sitting. There will also be lots of fucking (of course), eating whatever the hell we want (probably at the Brickstore at least once because I’m addicted to that place now), watching movies, a picture-taking expedition to the south side of the train tracks near East Lake (just wait, the pictures will be awesome), and - our one brush w/ technology this weekend - going on the Cup o’ Joe show Saturday night (8:00).
See all you fools Monday.
This morning Rusty and I actually got up before noon on a Sunday, and ventured up to Alpharetta for a preview of the North Fulton Drama Club’s production of Love’s Labour’s Lost. They performed scene 1 from act 1 of the play, and they did a great job, noise from traffic and the crushed ice blender thingamabob notwithstanding. We were very impressed, and we’re looking forward to seeing (and hearing) the full show, which opens in a few weeks. Also, the first episode of the North Fulton Drama Club podcast will be up when the Georgia Podcast Network officially launches next week! Congrats to Nikki, Thomas, Alyssa, and the entire cast - you guys rock!
After taking in the ambience (and barbecue) of the Alpharetta Arts StreetFest, we ventured to NorthPoint Mall, to play with a MacBook Pro at the Apple Store and look for jeans and a bathing suit for me. We rocked out with the MacBook Pro and found the jeans just fine, but the bathing suit? Not so much. Mall stores, we concluded, cater to two main demographics: geriatric and jailbait. After having no luck in Geriatric Fashions (a.k.a. Dillard’s), we moved on to Jailbait Central (a.k.a. PacSun). We felt equally uncomfortable in both stores. We left the mall talking like a couple of disgruntled old people (approaching the former demographic?) about how we don’t understand “these new fashions these days.” I ended up just ordering a bathing suit off the internet; here’s hoping it’ll actually fit.
I know I never did a Blog Against Heteronormativity Day post, but get over it. I actually do have an idea for a topic now. Teaser: did you know that in the U.S., up until the 1950s pink was considered “for boys” and blue was considered “for girls?” Well, it’s true! Stay tuned for more… eventually. I need to take a nap now, and then do exciting stuff like go grocery shopping. Oh, and my internetz are actually working at my apartment now; lucky me, I just spent 30 minutes on the phone w/ Comcast. (The technician was appalled when I said I didn’t have Internet Explorer.) Boooo to the no-worky D-Link range extender; no sharing Rusty’s wifi for me.
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