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© 2000-2008 Anton Zuiker, a Zuiker Chronicles Online website. Sweetened with Textpattern, Textdrive, OSX, skEdit and memories of Paama.
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Gotta be, centerfield
The radio in our Toyota Sienna had been under repairs for a few weeks, but now it’s back in, so I’ve been jamming to the tunes and catching up on domestic and world news via NPR on WUNC.
Yesterday, on one of the local rock stations, John Fogerty’s Centerfield was on. That’s a song that always makes me smile and cringe at the same time.
During our senior year in high school, Julie Countryman and I read the daily announcements over the school’s PA system each morning. I usually ended the segment with a quote of the day, supplied by my grandfather.
But, on opening day of the 1988 Major League Baseball season, I somehow convinced the principal, Bernie Looney, to let me play Centerfield in its entirety. By the time I got down to my Calculus class, I could tell that my teacher — and most of the other faculty members — weren’t happy with me for taking so much time out of the class period. I spent the rest of the day feeling as if I’d been stuck out in left field.
Super sushi
Last night was a date night for Erin and me, our first since we moved to this new house in Carrboro. So, we drove over to Timberlyne for sushi at Oishi Japanese Restaurant and enjoyed the opportunity to talk and listen and listen and talk.
This morning, I read this article in The Atlantic about changes in American sushi. I’ll mention it next time I’m at Oishi or Akai Hana or one of the other local sushi restaurants.
Trapped
Back when I was in high school, one of my assignments for science class was to use a mousetrap to build a vehicle. Not having a mousetrap around the house, I called my grandfather and asked him he had one to spare.
“Grandpa Sisco, can I have a mousetrap for a school project?” Grandpa was always giving me chocolate bars and two-dollar bills and bank calendars and new tube socks and golf pencils and more. “You’ve got everything.”
“I’ll check, Anton.” He pronounced it An-tin. “Come on over.”
I walked the two miles across town and climbed the steps to his apartment. As I walked in, he had a sheepish look on his face.
“I don’t have any mousetraps,” he reported. Later that night, he stopped by our house and handed me a brown paper bag with two new mousetraps. For the next 20 years, he always had a spare mousetrap in his desk drawer.
I thought about calling Grandpa again this weekend after I discovered mice in the garage. They were living among the many boxes piled in there — boxes yet to be unpacked after only two weeks in this new house — and had been gnawing at the hammock, building a nest of soft fibers. We’d left the garage open into the evening one night last week. I’m hoping the beautiful three-foot-long rat snake the girls and I watched slither across our street recently hasn’t followed the mice into the garage.
On my next visit to the grocery store, I picked up a couple of traps and put them to work.
“Dead one time,” I said yesterday morning upon discovering the first of two mice to succumb to the lure of the swiss cheese I used for bait. That’s the Bislama phrase we used in Vanuatu.
Of course, in Vanuatu our traps were set with roasted coconut and meant for the rats that liked to scamper across our ceiling at night. Pima the puscat got his share, but there were always more rats than a hundred cats could handle. (See my post Bugs in the night to learn more about our adventures with creatures on Paama.)
This weekend, we went to dinner with friends. One told a story about discovering a bat in the bedroom of her infant daughter. I spared her my own story about bats.
One summer in college, working on the farm in Sugar Grove, I got the job to clean out an old barn that was to be renovated into a high-class apartment. The spacious and dark barn, as it happened, was home to hundreds of bats, and so I spent a couple of weeks setting mousetraps with peanut butter, discarding bat carcasses and sweeping out guano.
As I’ve since learned, bats are important and to be protected.
The interlopers in my garage being mice, the traps are set.
The Big Move
So, we’re three weeks into our new home in Carrboro, and I’m finally sitting down at my desk to write about this move, the fleeting grief of leaving a beloved home, and the adventure of making this brand new house on a brand new street all our own.
At the moment, I’m in this front office, looking out the window, across the porch and small yard to other new houses in various stages of construction. It’s Memorial Day, but there are crews erecting walls, installing floors, laying sidewalks. We’re the third family to move into this neighborhood called Legends at Lake Hogan, and over the summer a dozen other houses are slated to be finished and occupied.
Our house is in the middle of the street. It’s a very fine house. (See this Orange County GIS page.)
We’ve moved here because we needed more space, wanted to be in the Chapel Hill/Carrboro School District, and scored a fantastically low interest rate on a 30-year mortgage. There’s room for our family to grow, for us to host Long Table dinners and BlogTogether Backyard Barbecues, to welcome visiting family and friends. The county is planning to develop a large park just north of us (see this page and scroll down to Twin Creeks), so we’ll have plenty of space to play, too.
The old: 5506 Loyal Avenue, Durham.
The new: 235 Legends Way, Carrboro (but with a Chapel Hill address).
Details
Andrea and Peter Owens were our agents in both the sale of the Loyal home and the purchase of the Legends house. They kept us on track, dealt with all of our obsessive strategizing, and represented us quite well. A big thank you to them.
Tom Holt stepped in at the last moment to provide legal counsel — I was careful to read each and every word of each and every document associated with the purchase of Legends, but I wanted an attorney (other than the closing attorney, determined by the builder of the house) to help me understand some key passages. Tom found an important error straight away, and proved his value.
Jim Graves, sales agent for David Weekley Homes, is working hard to fill out the Legends neighborhood. Stop by and see him the model home, tell him I sent you, and move in down the street from us. (My only incentive is the joy of new neighbors.) Jim Talbot, the builder of our home, has been very responsive and attentive to our questions and needs.
Moving day was nearly a disaster — our boxing preparations were behind schedule, our two banks went down to the wire in transmitting the final documents to the lawyers and caused our closing meeting to be delayed, the All My Sons moving crew showed up early, and rain dampened not only the furniture but our spirits. The large price tag on the new house added a large dose of worry, too.
Keeping us grounded in all of this was our good friend, Harold McCarty. He spent a full week with us, and his assistance was invaluable. The Great Lakes Brewing Company beers he brought from Cleveland helped to end our long work days.
Parting thoughts
Leaving Loyal after five years was difficult. The house looked the best it had ever looked, the yard was groomed to perfection, and the towering trees seemed reluctant to let us go from their embrace. Loyal was a place of friends and neighbors and memories and growth and habits. I grieved those days during which we emptied the house and prepared it for other occupants.
Making a new home at Legends, though, is filling the emptiness. There are afternoon breezes and iced tea on the screened patio, trees and creeks and bike paths, sparkling stars and hooting owls long rat snakes, new neighbors and a nearby playground, grass to mow and Carrboro town to visit.
When we gather
I went to my first Seder dinner last week, guest of Bora Zivkovic and his family. It was a great experience, and, sitting there, I realized that the Long Table concept has been around quite a very long time.
Zinsser on Zinsser
In the American Scholar, William Zinsser gives us Visions and Revisions, a history of his iconic book On Writing Well, now celebrating its 30th anniversary.
If you write, you must read that book.
Ruhlman and ratios
In preparation for the move next month, I’ve begun to pack the last of my books. One shelf is devoted to Michael Ruhlman and Alex Frater, and this morning I was admiring their amazing output of great writing.
Ruhlman has done it again with the release of Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking. Read his blog post about the book.
I plan to get my copy at The Regulator Bookshop tomorrow.
Below the surface
A couple weeks back, there was this news about submarines colliding, which followed \ reports a month or two earlier about American subs colliding.
That news reminded me of an early evening on the Frederiksted (St. Croix, USVI) pier, as my family and I watched a U.S. Navy sub glide up in preparation for docking for the night. The captain had seemingly given command of the ship to an underling, because when the sub came in too fast and rammed the pier — making us all jump back in surprise — he quickly ordered the sub in reverse. The second attempt went much more smoothly.
I spent a lot of time on that pier during my first months on St. Croix. I was 13 years old and fascinated by warships. The F’sted pier got a steady stream of visiting ships, in our waters to test their radar and sonar systems. When I wasn’t touring the visiting ships, I was in the Frederiksted library poring over the encyclopedic Jane’s Fighting Ships, or at Rainbow Beach a mile up the coast, reading a tattered copy of Run Silent, Run Deep.
On one tour of a sub, as my dad and I were in the control center, a sailor scurried into the room and began taping cardboard over various sensors and screens. “You’re not supposed to see this,” he said. There’d been other tour groups through the sub before us, including, most likely, the regulars — the lesbian couple who always had their cameras and telephoto lenses ready even before the ships were visible on the horizon, and a few silent men I imagined to have foreign accents.
Another St. Croix memory is in this post.
Birthday bust
In my tally of the last weeks (previous post), I seem to have forgotten that I also celebrated by 39th birthday on April 2.
I was still sick, and the day at work had been a tough one, but Erin and the girls set the table for a delicious meal and mouth-watering cupcakes. I’d bought myself an iPod Touch a couple of weeks earlier, but sitting at that table with my family was simply the best gift imaginable.
By 8:02pm I was fast asleep.
Spring at 5506, our last
Sure enough, February was a down month, as I recovered from the ScienceOnline’09 conference, and March gave me a three-week stretch with back-to-back colds.
But Spring also brought a series of highs — Erin and I found a buyer for our house in Durham, we decided to buy a new house in Carrboro (where we lived our first three years here in North Carolina), my college roommate and now company CEO Stephan Liozu was back in town, the Tar Heels advanced to the championship game, and the brilliant duo Elmer Abbo and Angelo Volandes came back to Durham after seven years for the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and a long brunch discussion about health care policy and reform with us today at Guglhupf.
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