Greg and Kat's blog

I have posted some initial pictures in my gallery:

• Our first days in NC. The pictures there are around the UNC campus; playing bocce at Keith and Sabrina’s; the area in front of our new apartment.
• Kat’s science pictures. These are around the lab and her new bird room. As you can see, starlings are literally full of shit.
• The Carrboro Farmer’s Market. We went on Saturday. I didn’t get a lot of pictures, since we were more focused on the market than the pictures.

The market happens every Wed and Sat. We bought a half pound cake from a wonderfully jolly old woman. Ended up telling her our life-story for some reason. She seemed interested.

“I just finished my PhD.” “Oooh, no, you di-int!”… “We moved from Vancouver.” “G’on… my lord!”

And ooh lordy [look, I’m integrating], could that woman make a pound cake! I think it’s probably the softer flour used around these parts. It was soft and dense at the same time. Great flavour. It had a lemon glaze that really didn’t add anything because the cake was so nice.

Now I made myself hungry. I hope she’s there on Wednesday, but I think the Wednesday markets are only farmers.

Now that I have Internet, I spent some time working on this. You need Google Earth for it. It’s basically a tour of where we’ve been for the last week and a half.

Download the Google Earth tour of our NC world.

Open this file in Google Earth. To take the tour, double-click on each placemark in-order. Make sure you double-click the blue link for each placemark: this will check the placemark (so you see the label and marker), and fly to it (so you see it in the map window).

Bless the gods of all things digital, I have an Internet connection!

After a false-start on Tuesday, the nice Time-Warner man came today and gave me a cable modem. No more flaky open wireless signals from the neighbours for me. I think I’ll download something right now… there, see how fast that was?

The Vonage box had come in the mail a few days ago, so I have a phone at home as well. We have a number in Vancouver, Seattle, and Chapel Hill, so pretty much everybody can phone us with a local call. I’m not going to post the numbers, but drop an email if you want them.

On the other hand, I no longer have any excuse for not getting down to work. I am still on the payroll for the summer, after all. I guess I’ll have to start feeling guilty about not working tomorrow.

To recap: I was tired to start with, and had walked every single aisle in a Super Target by this point in the day. Super Targets are bigger than regular Targets, you know.

The two that were leaving the new apartment were having trouble getting everything packed up. We had already told them that we were coming into town with practically nothing, so we were happy to take their futon, desk, and whatever. They didn’t want to move it. Everybody wins.

This set off a couple of calls from them: do you want an old radio? a desk chair? Sure! So, it’s hard to say we didn’t encourage them to leave stuff. When we got there, the house had a bunch of stuff left, and the general appearance of clean. Not all useful stuff, but not bad.

But, the more we looked around, the worse it got. Everything looked clean, but every surface in the kitchen was a little sticky; all of the floors were a little gritty; the bathrooms had been cleaned in a short-term way (toilets, surfaces wiped down), but were by no means clean (built-up gunk around taps, mildewed shower curtain). Pretty much everything needed to be cleaned in one way or the other.

And the stuff! Every door and cupboard was a new surprise. Twenty different old crusty bathroom cleaners. A whole cupboard full of disposable plates and cups. Three boxes of wooden matches, a case of matchbooks, and a few other packs of matches (all in the same drawer). Three part bottles of hoisin sauce, and another three ketchups.

Two days later, and thing are looking a lot better. We still have a few things to take care of, but the place is definitely liveable.

To give you an idea of my status… we went to get a few more groceries yesterday afternoon. Actual groceries this time: food to eat, not to have stocked in the kitchen. We were in aisle 9 (of maybe 16) in this store, and I honestly wasn’t sure I was going to make it to the end.

I took the evening off, and I feel a lot better today.

I was already tired and well shopped-out when we realized that the 10% discount wasn’t just for the first purchase on the card, but the first day. We could still make another trip and get the discount.

So, at about 6:30, we unloaded the car and headed back to Target: did I mention that it is a “Super Target” that’s bigger than a regular Target (like a Walmart Supercenter)?

We needed bikes: it’s a very bike-accessible town, the buses aren’t great on the weekend, and we want to avoid buying a car. We don’t need quality, since they only really have to not fall apart for a couple of years of commuting. So, cheap “real” bikes at $300 weren’t worth it. To Target and the sub-$150 price point.

We ended up buying two bikes, a back-seat full of groceries, and some rope. Why rope? Two bikes don’t fit in the Kia Rio we rented. We had to take off the front tire and awkwardly tie the rest into the trunk. Of course, we didn’t have a knife, and about 50 feet of rope, so it took some time: 20 minutes in a Target parking lot, trying to secure them.

We returned and after all this, finally got into the new apartment…

I haven’t blogged for a couple of days: no time. It’s been busy. I’ll parcel out the story over a few posts.

On Sunday, we went to a local mall. This is the sort of thing that calms Kat down, and wears me out. After, we went by a Winners-like place or two on the way home and got a bunch of kitchen stuff.

Monday was our day to move in to the new place. We weren’t going to get in until the afternoon, so Kat worked in the morning and I drove around Carrboro to try to figure out where stuff was.

In particular, I was looking for a good grocery store. The only one I could find near our house was the Weaver Street Market. Vancouver types can think of Famous Foods–very granola-hippy-earth-loving. Lots of all-natural stuff that the biologists we met assured us we’d love. But sometimes, you just want to buy paper-towels without feeling like you’re personally responsible for ruining the planet.

After some effort, I found a Harris Teeter about the same distance from the apartment. It’s a nice, regular grocery store, maybe like a Save-On-Foods. I was pleased: I wasn’t going to be leaving Kat in a place without accessible groceries.

The people still weren’t out of the apartment, so I picked up Kat and we went shopping. We went to a Target (think: one step up from Walmart) about 30 minutes away. The goal was to get cleaning stuff, the last kitchen stuff, fans, and all the other stuff you can’t live without. Because we were buying so much, we signed up for a Target card and got 10% off. Nice.

Then, things started to turn…