Sorry for the long silence.

we're both up to our necks in work. we will surface shortly, we swear it.

The Phone Wars.

sorry for the long delay between posts, folks. this unpacking thing is a nightmare, mostly because i really just am positively DONE with things that have to do with moving. and yet they persist in not being done with me. the boxes look at me with attitude, and the apartment yawns with space waiting to be filled with our crap.

add 98 degree heat to this, and some very bad allergy attacks, and you start to get an idea of what it's been like so far.

actually, we've done alright. the big issues have been that the moving company lost the legs to my desk, and as it's now only suitable for children under 5 and adults with dwarfism, setting up my office has been put on hold while i find time to replace it. and the phone company has been acting like they don't know how to hook up a land line, which wouldn't have been a problem if the cell phones worked in here, which they don't (imagine the pure frustration of being on hold with the phone company for about 20 minutes, only to have your cell phone drop the call). yesterday the phone co. asked me to go to the phone box outside the house and see if it was getting a signal (which, last i looked, was their job, not mine). so this morning, in my pjs, i wandered from one end of the house to another outside, finally locating the phone box in questions behind a bush. i crept back there with a phone and a screwdriver, opened it up, and saw that someone had unplugged the phone lines. i plugged them back in and voila! phone service! on my own! i have many talents. you may now add phone service repair to my resume.

also, a trip to the DMV, with a wait on line for over an hour and absolutely nothing to show for it, was Eva's personal hell. that plus waiting on line at Hopkins for 2 hours for an ID badge.

we have moments, Eva and i, when we believe that Baltimore is just a bureaucracy. lines in person, waiting on hold, things that make no sense and don't work. you get the picture.

some things that have been swell, though, are eva's new car (a sweet little subaru), central air (hooray!) and thunderstorms, which are very frequent here this time of year. i've also been pretty busy with work, and have found what seems to be a good yoga studio. not bad, in all. here's what our first big thunderstorm in town looked and sounded like from our porch:

Charm City

A note from eva....

It's summer again. Unlike Hope, I like the humidity in some ways. I like feeling the world around me. Plus it's an incentive to wear cute dresses and tank tops-- rare parts of my wardrobe in Seattle.

It's always hard to arrive at a new home, because it can never match the old in terms of comfort and familiarity. But even without our stuff (yet), this is better then most moves have been before. Fran and Steve's warm welcome complete with frozen homemade food trays, and a landlord that we know beats moving to cities that I'd barely even been to before.

Anyway, it's still not Seattle. Today I'm looking for a car, with the mistaken intention for it to meet my hiking and outdoor needs that the NW has to offer. At the very least it will be good for the winters out here, but I don't know how much other outdoors I'll be able to do with this schedule. Of course, I still don't have my schedule...that will be something to look into tomorrow.

For incentives to visit Baltimore, check out the Visionary Art Museum at http://www.avam.org and Artscape http://www.artscape.org/ and the Honfest, which unfortunately, we missed this year http://www.honfest.net/. Plus, there's always the favorite Delaware beaches http://www.rehoboth.com/home.html and some nearby wine tasting.

Safe and Sound.

and so here we are, in our apartment with its lovely newly-painted walls (but not new carpet in the portion of the place not pictured - the 3 bedrooms, den and hallway. also not pictured to the right of the image is the dining room, eat-in kitchen and screened in outdoor porch). this carpet issue is a matter of small dispute with the very sweet and lovely landlords, and will be cleared up once our copy of the lease arrives tomorrow morning with our stuff. in the end we may have to pay for these ourselves, but it will be worth it to ensure allergy issues for Eva and cosmetic ones for both Eva and myself. this is one UGLY carpet.

my parents are truly beside themselves. looking at them is like seeing double. they've taken us out for dinner once already, and will do so again shortly. they also brought us casseroles in the old fashioned tradition - a spinach pie, a baked ziti, and a bread pudding, all half-cooked and frozen to provide us with meals as we settle in. oh, and bagels from New York that were brought down by friends of theirs who had been visiting for the weekend. they were - and this is no exaggeration - a religious experience.

now all the stressy work kicks back in - no more packing now, but massive unpacking, me looking for work, Eva getting ready to start her fellowship. oh, and the HEAT. Baltimore's summer weather is VILE. right now, at 6 p.m., it's 88 degrees with something like 80% humidity. the air is more like soup than air, and i'm completely grumpy and drained simply from being out in it this afternoon. any chops i had in my prior Northeastern life are gone, leaving me purely as a weather wuss in a Mid-Atlantic city which sits mostly below sea level. mosquitoes and thick air. i actually got claustrophobic from being outside. i felt deprived of oxygen.

but do come visit! (i'm cracking myself up right now).

i will say, in defense of visiting, that the fall here is amazing, and the cold winter never gets cold like points North of here, so i don't mind it, and the spring we have just missed was also really lovely.

but the summer is going to suck.

gotta go take a very long shower and lie in front of an air conditioning vent.

An Unexpected Stop.

UPDATE: severe weather has stopped us in our tracks outside Cleveland. and when we say severe weather, we here in the I-90 travel plaza are NOT kidding around.

thanks to Eva's mom, we have a NOAA weather radio (see me holding said radio with a look that defines this whole experience above), and it's been going off like a needy puppy. first there were severe thunderstorm watches and warnings, and then the dreaded tornado warning some fifteen miles away from us. in a carefully controlled panic, we drove to the next travel plaza and got the hell out of the car.

this travel plaza i think may exist in an alternate universe where American highway stops have wi-fi, food-court like nasty dinner choices, live doppler weather maps on television screens, and free phones to call any hotel on a long list of places you might want to stay while avoiding your tornado.

needless to say, the place is packed to the rim with freaked out wet travellers. we were able to obtain gross food (for the second time today for me, which is a shame because we'd done a halfway decent job of eating better previously), call our hotel in Pittsburgh and cancel it (the storms were basically huge and running ahead of us - we would have been in this same weather for the next five hours if we hadn't decided to just stop moving and let it go on ahead), and call a nearby hotel and book it.

and now i've posted to this here blog as well.

tomorrow we will drive the 359 remaining miles to Baltimore, a slightly longer day than planned, but perfectly manageable in the absence of blinding rain and funnel clouds.

A Break in Chicago.

so now we're coming to the end of this part of things. we spent thursday driving down to Chicago, stopping at the Milwaukee Art Museum - a pretty crazy architectural structure - to see a show by London photomontage artists Gilbert and George. we had lunch in the museum, and then went to Oak Brook (outside of Chicago) to spend some time with Eva's grandmother.

the traffic here could kill a person, by the way. it took forever to get from Milwaukee to Oak Brook, and then forever to get from Oak Brook to our hotel.

we had dinner thursday with Eva's cousin Renee and her girlfriend Anne, and then spent Friday with my friend Rachel, her son Sam and her husband Tim. it was a really lovely day - we walked along Lake Michigan, had three really lovely meals, and played ball with Sam in Rachel's back yard. it was definitely a mini-vacation.

now, though, we're back in our road mode. and we are tired. and we are beginning to feel the stress of what's coming - getting to Baltimore and having no stuff, Eva's job starting, my job situation somewhat unclear, etc. we considered for a moment driving directly through to Baltimore today, but decided that getting there in the middle of the night, exhausted and bleary, served no real purpose at all. so we're heading for Pittsburgh, as the plan dictated.

first, though, some strong coffee. we're going out hunting for some. why is it that the hotels always try to pass of brown water as coffee?

Wisconsin in all its Glory.

Eva convinced me not to get the cheesehead. she was right, i think. mostly because i already have one. i did however get a shirt commemorating my stop at lambeau. the whole thing was pretty amazing - we were far from the only people taking pictures here, and the pro shop at the stadium was as big as a football field itself, and had two floors. it also contained this:

which is, as you can see, an old ford pickup with its bed full of cheeseheads. good stuff.

the town itself is amazing. everything is yellow and green - including things like the mcdonalds and the circuit city signs. streets are called Packerland Avenue and Holmgren Drive (i'm confident he won't get himself a street in Seattle when he retires next year).

we had dinner in the shadow of the Budweiser plant here in Manitowoc with Eva's mom and aunt. this town sits along Lake Michigan, which makes it feel like an ocean beach town a bit. Eva's mom's house looks out at the vastness of the lake. it's really quite lovely. apparently the maker of the world's most expensive yachts builds them here, and so the glitterati are occasionally glimpsed inspecting what their 10 million bucks has built them.

they also have the best ice cream here that i've had in a long time. I actually think Eva is out getting a pint of it to have for breakfast. she likes to escape in the mornings from the hotels.

Eva's mom put us up in a Holiday Inn because she felt bad about her house not being clean (we didn't give her much warning, since this stop was added when it became clear that parts of the Wisconsin roads we originally were taking are flooded out.) we tried to talk her out of it, we could have stayed with her, but she made the reservation while we were talking to her aunt and paid for it over the phone, so our protests went unheard.

today we go to Chicago, and tomorrow is our little holiday - no driving, just spending the day with my old friend Rachel who i haven't seen in five years. i think the pause will do us good. the car is starting to make me feel spacey and logey just looking at it.