Greg and Kat's blog

We spent a little more time today making traps. I did manage to finally take a ride around Carrboro and Chapel Hill with our digital camera.

Rather that writing about it, I have captioned the pictures in our gallery, and I’ll point you to that.

One other story from today: At one point during the tour, I was waiting to walk across an intersection and there was a crazy-looking, toothless old guy standing there too. “Great,” I though, “he looks like the kind of guy that will start up a crazy conversation for no reason”. I was bracing myself for something like “All the chipmunks are plotting against the Mormons, you know.”

Just then a young, well-groomed guy carrying groceries walked over. Apropos of nothing, he said something like “Not everybody could carry these groceries, good thing I’m such manly man. Dang, you know it.” He had like three bags. He went the other way across the intersection.

Toothless and I looked at each other, smiled, and shrugged. Just goes to show, you never can tell.

[The links here are to pictures from the gallery of pictures from today.]

Today was the day to make traps to catch birds. What we had to make were “funnel traps” Basically, picture a bird feeder in a wire mesh cage. The cage has some “funnel” shaped entrances.

The idea is that it’s easy to get in, but hard to get out. Not really a “trap” per se, just some kind of probabilistic thing that on average contains more birds as time goes on.

So, we got some hardware cloth (chicken wire with small gaps) and other stuff at the hardware store. We had to cart this back to campus–the bike came in handy, but we got some funny looks.

We set out to make the cages and the funnels. It all came together pretty well, I think.

But, cut hardware cloth has a lot of pointy bits. It looks like I’ve been attacked by an angry cat.

Kat’s plan this week is basically to do everything she can to get some birds. Keith gets back next week, and she’ll definitely have something to say.

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…

Nothing too eventful today. We saw the new apartment. It’s nice and fairly roomy, at least by the standards of our place in Vancouver.

Speaking of which…

Two days before we moved here (the Monday, I guess), our landlord in Vancouver asked to meet with us to talk about “our schedule”. It turns out that his girlfriend is moving into his place with her son (the landlord lives upstairs). That will be too many people for their space upstairs. They need to expand into the basement, where we live.

So, we’re getting kicked out. Gently. The landlord knows our schedule sucks for this, so he’s being as helpful as possible–offering whatever help he can to find a place, or move (he can get a good rate on movers, apparently). But, it doesn’t change the fact that we have to move in Vancouver while living in North Carolina.

The current plan is to get the place packed by the movers (they come and put your stuff in boxes, then take it to the new place). I was going to come back to Vancouver briefly in mid-June anyway. It looks like that’s going to be extended, so I can get our stuff to a new place on July 1. I’ll probably leave the place (mostly) packed-up, and come back at the end of August to deal with it.

Of course, this added stress that we didn’t need when trying to pack for the pseudo-move to NC. If he’d told us a week sooner, we might have been able to get everything ready for the movers, put everything in storage, and saved the rent. Maybe.

Practical upshot: we need to find a new place in Vancouver for the start of July. If anyone comes across a two-bedroom place in North Burnaby, email me. We’re also thinking about the Univercity (stupid name, though it may be)–it’s close to work, and we know all the units are new, at least.

We may also have to move in NC on August 1 (it’s a sublet, so we knew that). That would be three new apartments in one summer. Shouldn’t that qualify for disaster relief or something?

Not too eventful today. We got a TV (19″ LCD) and DVD player (recorder actually–looking forward to seeing how it works).

I actually did some looking around online for prices: it turns out that with the US dollar so low (CDN$.90) and a little less sales tax here, everything costs almost the exact same amount. At least we aren’t getting hosed by the exchange rate. I can no longer say that George Bush never did anything for me.

We drove around Chapel Hill and Carrboro, trying to get the lay of the land. Found a dive-y pizza place that was packed full of people in Chapel Hill. Very good–exactly what we wanted.

For those who don’t know the situation, we are staying with Keith, Kat’s new supervisor, until our apartment is available on Monday. That means living out of suitcases, which is annoying, but I’m getting used to it. Today, Kat decided to re-pack all of the suitcases, so my nascent understanding of where everything was has evaporated. But, Kat found her Tevas, so there’s that.