Moving!

[Please note this post is from 2010.]

Last week was a blissful blur. I had two job interviews, got two job offers, accepted one, celebrated my birthday, and am now moving to Charlotte, NC. Voila! Just like that.

Gotta run. I'm moving Friday, and the job starts Monday.

On the Road: NC and DC

For the past two weeks, I’ve been on an interviewing tour, first to Raleigh, NC, then to Alexandria, VA. A phone interview was in the mix as well. Busy busy.

I was surprised by how much I liked Alexandria. I loved it! At night, King Street glows with string-lit trees and with people having fun amid meticulously restored bars, restaurants, and shops. The city is beautiful, and the people are endearingly nice. Also, just across the Potomac River, National Harbor could be a vacation destination in itself. In fact, that’s not a bad idea...

Braving the "Bad" Part of Town

Before Friday, I'd never gone to the Artistic Perceptions gallery in Augusta. The gallery itself seemed fine, but the nearby nudie bar, gun shop, pawn shop, and tattoo parlor gave me the jeebs.

But my mom and I were out for First Friday, and the band wasn’t yet playing on the Commons, and Pyroteque wasn’t yet spinning fire in the street, and there we were, coughing pollen and ready to head home. “Hey,” I said, “There's this one other thing I was kinda interested in, but it’s kinda in the bad part of town.” “Pfft,” she said, “Whatever. Let’s check it out.”

So off we went. We strutted past that nudie bar like Tony in Saturday Night Fever. Just kidding, but we probably would have if their music had been loud enough. We ended up seeing lovely art, meeting lovely people, and having a fun First Friday.

Photographing Savannah Rapids Park

Despite spending a year in Augusta, there are still places around here I haven’t seen and/or photographed. This week I finally made it out to Savannah Rapids Park, and I wish I’d visited sooner. There are nice walking trails alongside the Augusta Canal and nice views of the Savannah River Fall Line.

One New (Re)Opening

Augusta’s Morris Museum of Art, which is dedicated exclusively to Southern art and artists, closed its doors in January and February for a bit of a spruce-up. Pieces were brought out of storage, displays were rearranged, et voila, the Morris was ready to reopen this past weekend. Of course I was there to see what they’d done with the place, as were lots of other people.

After that, I crossed the Savannah River into downtown North Augusta (shown below). I especially liked Lookaway Hall (shown at right). It's a Beaux-Arts mansion that was built from 1895 to 1898 and is now the lovely Lookaway Inn bed and breakfast.

Getting Ready to Relocate

After nearly a year of staying with wonderfully kind family in Augusta, I’ve decided it’s time to take a chance on moving to where the jobs are — or where more jobs are, at least. March 31 is my self-imposed date to move on, unless I’ve found work before then.

Now that I’ve made the decision to move, I’m excited, and I’m not sure I can wait until the 31st. The lists are made, the research is done, and the apartment and city guides are en route to my mailbox.

I should say, though, that my year in Augusta has been happy, healthy, and pleasant. Plus, I got to do lots of new things! I'm grateful to God for this year and for every year He gives me on this beautiful planet.

Snow in South Carolina?

OK, technically, snow in SC isn't a new thing, but it's rare, and this much snow in one day is reeeally rare. So I took photos:

Letting Go of Then

Remember when I consolidated three old notebooks into one new Word doc? That was such a refreshing experience, I decided to go through all my pre-2000 notebooks, pluck out the best items, and put them into a three-ring binder. I also created Word docs for my favorite quotes (from others) and my favorite fragments/musings (from myself), so the binder is surprisingly thin.

I can remember times when I looked at those old notebooks and thought, What if something happens to them? Fire, flood, tornado? I couldn’t stand to lose them! But when I actually read through them this week, I couldn’t wait to lose them. There was way too much complaining in those journals, which I suppose I thought would make for more dramatic reading later, or maybe I got therapeutic value from. Either way, I needed to grow up and get over myself.

Now that I’ve grown up, gotten over myself, and finished my consolidation project, I have only two notebooks. One is a small journal I began in 2003, and the other is my main notebook. I think every writer needs notebooks, but we don’t necessarily need to keep everything in them for twenty years.