tim merritt [dot] net

Will made a big honking pot of chili from the ancestral Gadberry recipe. Oh my yes.

Shorpy posts vintage photos, with good quality and detail. Make sure to click through and look closely at the full-sized image. This is wonderful. My maternal grandmother, whom I am so happy to say I came to know pretty well, was about 2 years old in 1902—though living in Paris at the time. Having known her gives me a less remote feeling of connection to historical scenes like this; a person I spoke with regularly, as an adult, was alive in this world of horses, hats, Victorian dresses, and nascent automobiles.

Via

First Look: Travel organizer Tripit.com offers iPhone app, from The Unofficial Apple Weblog. Must learn about this app, and use it with Ellen, so we can keep track of each other.

It’s just past 10:30 on Saturday night and I’m just back from walking Gracie. Early in the walk I was musing on the dinner party I’d gone to with Ellen and the folks we visited with, and the fact that when we came home we found that Gracie had chewed up the nozzle of a little spray bottle of eyeglass cleaner. We had turned the corner a few houses down from ours, and I watched her sniffing the grass and wondered motivates her to chew things up from time to time. Does she need a crate, would another dog help, what… and I suddenly noticed how quiet it was in the neighborhood. No peepers, no crickets, no nightbirds. I also realized I had no idea what the names of the usual nocturnal noise-makers are. Another post for that sometime.

I had my phone, could have been listening to a podcast or some music or the radio, but it no, it was so quiet. She did her business, stopped in the middle of the street, and looked up at the sky as she sniffed the wind. We heard a dog bark from some streets away and stood there for a couple of minutes just listening. I shaded my eye from the streetlight and tried to see the fleecy clouds in the light of the half moon. They didn’t seem to be moving. It was chilly, but not cold. It felt satisfying to hear just the night breeze in the trees, the occasional car go by on the main road outside our street, my own clothes rustling as I walked and my shoes off-rhythm with Gracie’s claws on the asphalt as we came home.

We had unprecedented amounts of water running into the culvert in our front yard, but nothing like what happened in other places around Atlanta.

About to leave to pick up my mother for her 80th birthday celebration. It’s a surprise, and my sister Janine has worked for a long while to make this happen. We’ve got a room reserved at Violette, a French restaurant well north of downtown Atlanta but still within the inner burbs. We’ll have about 70 people from what I understand.

I’ll compose some thoughts about her to publish here. In the meantime, look for pictures soon!

Jill and Kevin’s Wedding Entrance Dance. Certainly blogged by half the web, more than 12 million views, I’m behind the curve, blah blah. I felt terrific watching this. I’m this happy being married to Ellen!

Outside the Montag freshman dorm on the campus of Georgia Tech, 11:03 this morning.

Recycled Racers, a greyhound adoption group in Colorado, has a great trove of information about greyhound adoption in their online Greyhound Care Manual. (It’s all about you, Gracie.)

We’ve got the bed, brush, toy, raised food dish, leash, and soon will have the compostable poop pick-up bags. We’ll see if we need a gate for the longer days she’ll be alone. So far she’s a bonafied cutie pie.

Update: Found more information at The Greyhound Project. So many greyhound-loving folks online – friends we haven’t met yet.

Saturday is one of two days a year that Decatur accepts just about any kind of electronics for recycling. We’ve got an old coffee maker that’s missing the carafe, a decrepit PC with a bad power supply, some old big batteries, cell phones, and some other odds and ends. Some of these things are toxic, and we don’t want them in landfills, and we’re very glad Decatur provides this opportunity.

You can probably do this in your town. Search for recycling centers in or near your zip code at Earth911.com.

Today we welcomed Gracie to the family. She’s a 5-year-old brindle greyhound who raced successfully for a long time in Florida and had her last race in January. The group that offers the dogs for adoption has lots of info, and screened us pretty well to make sure we’re committed to the needs of a greyhound. I thought we’d get her a week ago but today turned out to be the day!

Gracie – who raced under the name Nimby Midge – was spayed just Wednesday and has to have her staples out next week. In the mean time we’ll start learning to adjust to each other’s rhythms, but we’ve already gotten very attached. She’s so easy-going but I’m sure she’s also tired from effects of her surgery Wednesday and overwhelmed by all that’s new.

We’re so glad to have her. We also have Jeanie visiting from Charlottesville, a long-time friend Ellen knew from her time there in the early 90s. It’s a fun day at our house.

Clark’s Trading Post needs a new Wolfman! Auditions are this weekend. The Union leader has a story here. I know Janine and Janne used to drive by Clark’s and scream “Free the bears!” and that Janine at least has taught her kids to do the same….

I found the link at Making Light, a website I read pretty regularly. It’s a group blog mainly written and edited by a couple who are both editors at Tor Books, one of the biggest SF publishers. Another of the regular contributors is Jim MacDonald military officer and a current Nationally Registered Wilderness EMT-I who lives in New Hampshire and often writes at Making Light about life in the Granite State. He’s an EMT (and publishes fascinating posts at Making Light about emergency care for lay people), a published SF author, and all-around Smart Person.

We are going to see if we can adopt a greyhound tomorrow. We’ve been talking about it for a few months now, ever since we saw some adoptable greyhounds one Saturday at a Petco. Ellen’s already spotted a few eligible dogs, to the right, which she found here.

Ellen loves the idea that they mostly want to lie around for up to 16 hours a day, and get hugs and take a walk here and there. I kind of hope we can get a second one – these folks say that two keep each other company very well for working people. There are dozens of videos about greyhound adoption, too. I haven’t lived with a dog since before I was out of high school, and I’m pretty pleased with the idea.

The adoption folks seem devoted to helping adopters find suitable dogs, and adoptable dogs find suitable owners. It’s remarkable how committed they are, and it seems that greyhounds make terrific companion dogs. More to come!

A different Tim than me, of course. Ellen’s colleague from work, Tim Stewart, met us in Jonesborough Tennessee for a thumping good breakfast at the Blair-Moore House bed and breakfast, where Ellen and I stayed last night. Then we went to hear Sheila Kay Adams at the international Storytelling Center. (I’m on my phone now; I’ll add links later.) Good fun and lovely mountain views, the leaves beautiful with fall colors.

In which I post to a particularly on-point post from Lifehacker about cleaning up my desk, which you see here, snapped from my phone. Part of cleaning things up begins this morning with backed-up posts I want to get on line, so that reduces the pathetic factor a little, I suppose.

Serious Eats is a seriously fun food blog, and while they enjoy and usually write well about fine dining, they also know how to point readers and eaters to good inexpensive eats as well. My mother – a.k.a. Mom, a.k.a. Nana – is travelling to Montreal and Quebec City with a dear friend from Switzerland early next summer. 48 Hours in Montreal: A Guide to Eating won’t entirely be to their taste (they don’t worship quite as ardently at the altar of the pig, for example) but they should find some valuable ideas here and it the comments. I may travel there next year too, but whenever I do, this will be one of my key references.

Watching the Yellow Jackets beat up (sloppily) on the Duke Blue Devils. Ten minutes to go in the 4th quarter, Tech is up 17-0. Go Jackets! And happy 50th to me!

Update: 27-0 final score and a photo.

Later update: Finally got the photo up; the Wordpress client on my iPhone wouldn’t behave. Meh.

Will is setting up his new MacBook Pro. After choosing several different laptops, and even eating the cost of a Lenovo restocking fee, he chose the Mac. A key determinant: the included 8GB iPod Touch. I’m pleased, almost excessively so. It’ll be fun to watch him adapt, but difficult to keep my fat Mac-familiar nose out of it while he does.

Our anniversary is always on a hot and muggy day, and in the evenings people like to blow stuff up, often up in the air. It’s Independence Day but for us it’s also the day we got married, and I like to think we just keep getting better at it.

Love you, sweetheart.

Will gets his high school diploma tomorrow!