constant narrator

The decision-making lobe of my brain has checked out on me. After I did the signing on Thursday I left the building with my brother, who kindly accompanied me for moral support, cried on him a bit and then couldn’t decide what to do. He quizzed me: “Do you want me to go with you to your new house?” I don’t know. “Do you want to pick up Michael and go?” I don’t know. “Do you want to grab some food and head over alone?” I don’t know.

I couldn’t even decide where to drive or whether to get in the car. He finally told me that I was going to drive down and get Michael, pick up the bottle of wine that I’d been saving and go over to the house, where I would take off my shoes and walk around barefoot.

So that’s what I did.

Later that night Michael was kind enough to decide that we were going to eat Thai food and watch The Incredibles. My brain needed a break.

I can’t say that the decision-lobe is back online yet. I met with an electrician yesterday and have an appointment for him to overhaul my breaker boxes so the house actually won’t explode and has a ground. That was all I could decide yesterday. Well, I got a level. Which was really pretty exciting. It’s one of those big-kid tools I could never justify without having a proper workshop and now… I have one! Eep!

I’m still freaking out. At least my neighbors seem quite excellent.

Lobe… has… chopstick… lodged… in … it…

Bug, Samantha, Edward and I went on a little field trip today to Gonzales, Texas, home of Discovery’s architectural salvage. It was a scouting mission for me to see if they had some of the things I will need for my apartment build-out of the house.

[Back story: Although the 4 people reading this already know, my 2 months of house dating have ended and I am through all of the hoops with a finalized loan on a house in the Cherrywood neighborhood. I close on Thursday. My brain is exploding.]

It was a pretty drive with all the pastures green and the blue bonnets showing off with the Indian Paintbrush. Some of the ditches were rioting with it. There were big, gorgeous thunderstorms off in the distance on all sides, and we eventually drove into one that had this blossoming sort of thunder. We waited out the downpour a bit when we pulled into Gonzales, then hopped into Discovery’s.

Wow, they have everything. It was almost as good as the mammoth architectural place in Chicago, which is really saying something since Chicago generally has much more interesting and old buildings that are torn down and scavenged. They had some gorgeous doors and lots of crazy doorknobs and some mint condition clawfoot tubs that made me drool. The real deals seem to be in the wood floors they reclaim or mill themselves. I approached the front desk and ended up talking to the owner for 45 minutes (boring my compatriots into retreating to the van).

Funny thing about Brad Kittel, owner of Discovery’s (with his wife Suzanne)… I was describing the house I’m buying and out of the blue he said its street name. Now, the street is one block long and out of the way. I looked at him sideways and he told me he had rehabbed most of the houses on that street and knew every one. Seems he rehabbed half of my new zipcode, back when it was one giant crack den.

How very strange.

At any rate, I found plenty of goodies to come back for and he was very forthcoming with his knowledge about how to lay things on top of slab foundations, obscure eco-heating inventions and many other topics. I shall return, and they shall claim some of my money for their own.

… I was evidently thinking about the same stuff I’m thinking about now, although in a much more rudimentary form. I stumbled across this research project I did for one of my last college classes in early 1996. The class was awesome and terrifically bleeding edge at the time: International Internetworks. We looked at networking in the developing world and how it could faciliate research and relationships. We also looked at some of the technology people were starting to set up in remote places.

I remember one component of the project was we to interview an expert about our topic and include it in the report and how much I enjoyed bantering over email with my interview subject. I wrote about Building Women’s Web Spaces, which included a lot of my earlier women’s studies research, but half of the paper talked about content creation, information architecture and basic usability. I also notice that I had been writing online long enough (4 years) to already have my cheeky web-writing voice planted firmly in the paper. Some of the writing is horrible, but some makes me laugh. I remember being especially proud of the Clean Design<tm> of my project. Look at that fly header with the drop shadow! w00t!

I think it’s cool that UIowa maintains this page. It’s a nice time warp into what people were looking at back then from the scholarly angle.

I just received a pleasingly fat package in the mail that contained my “advance copy” of Conversations with Texas Writers. I did an interview with Austin writer Katherine Tanney for the book and it’s finally been published after some delays. It’s really well done and pleasant to hold. They’ve used good paper. Cruising through it, there are some good pictures of the authors interviewed and some eye-catching quotes. I’m especially happy for Katherine because it will give her some more exposure and I really like her writing. It’s dark and funny and can make me squirm with recognition.

Yay, I’m stoked!