July 2007

And The Flood Continues Unabated

Posted on July 7, 2007 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

Carol and I enter our second week of trying to clean out the junk. I wish we had never started. But now there’s no way out from under it. We can’t go back. We are like those people marching to the South Pole. Somehow in attempting to clean out the garage we also unleashed from inside the condo a deepening flood of junk. Sort of like trying to pop a pimple and opening an artery in the process.

As we went along I tried to devise some throwing out rules. Out it goes:

If you didn’t know you had it, till you saw it…
If you have not touched it in five years…
If you have not used or worn it in two years…
If you think it is possibly poisonous or toxic….

Exceptions being. You can keep it:

If the thought of throwing it out makes you want to cry
If it might be useful for some legal reason (old, decaying taxes for example)
If it might have some sort of significant resale value (so far we haven’t come across anything like that)
If you are not certain what it is and so cannot determine if it is useless or not (electronic stuff, most especially).

Carol has clothes from high school and unfortunately too she has a memory and remembers when she bought the items or the special occasions on which she wore them. She was having such a terrible time throwing stuff out that I volunteered to take pictures of the items and then she could put them in some sort of memory book. When she said she was going to keep her prom dresses, I said sure and if you want we can dip them in plastic so they will last forever.

I don’t have any memory so I don’t have many sentimental attachments except to pieces of paper upon which things are written. While throwing out old pieces of paper, do not pause to read letters written by old advisors, bosses, editors, friends (that you no longer speak to), friends (period), parents or lovers. Instead, go to Home Depot, buy some big plastic storage box, and stuff all the letters and old essays and short stories into those, and shove it all into a corner and do your best to forget it. On the outside, stick a tag reading: To Be Disposed of On the Occasion of My Death.

This picture of my toolbox serves to illustrate my idea of organizing junk. A) I have no idea what’s in this box and B) I don’t know the function of half of the stuff.

Continue reading And The Flood Continues Unabated→

The Old Volvo

Posted on July 7, 2007 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

Brother Dan is mending. He drove out my way to get out of the house I expect. He is somewhat at loose ends, knocking around the house for the next month, before he can try to go back to work. The cut from the operation is pretty visible along his neck but not so bad. Also I think he is a bit worried. He remembers as he woke from the anesthetic fog the doctor saying, “We did all we could for you.” Well, he was too out of it to ask for clarification of that ambiguous phrase. Did the guy mean we did everything that it is possible for a human to do or we did everything that we could humanly do for you as a person?

Anyhow that “could” is bugging him. It would bug me because it makes me wonder how much they were able to clean out that artery. Maybe not that much, maybe only all they could. But he will have another scan of some kind in a few days and that should tell the tale. Not that he wouldn’t have had to have had it done in any case. But one would hope of course for the artery to be now 90% clear rather than 50% clear.

We talked a bit and drove around in the old Volvo that I will give to his son, my nephew, Dylan, if the kid wants it. It’s hard to know what the kid wants these days though because he appears to be in a pretty severe I-don’t-want-to-do-a-damn-thing teenage, high school slump. Maybe the idea of getting his license will get him unstuck a bit.

Dan started laughing when he got in the Volvo because it is really a mess inside. The previous owner left the sun roof open; it rained and the interior roof sort of rotted out leaving little pieces of fabric hanging down here and there. Also the exterior is not so hot. But I got the car for 800 dollars from a professor. I told him my Honda was giving out and he said he had this Volvo sitting in his driveway that he wanted to unload. The damn Honda was actually pouring out black smoke. Actually it only poured out for a couple of minutes, but that was enough for people to yell at me or give me the finger. I would yell, it’s going away but they didn’t care.

I have had that Volvo for six years I guess and it has been a faithful car. It’s an 86 with 175 thousand miles on it. I wanted to get it up to 200 thousand. I took it in faithfully for its 3000 mile check up and oil. And, aside from having the front brakes redone, it hasn’t cost much to maintain these past three years. I figure the car has another 50 thousand miles on it at least. The engine and transmission are still in wonderful shape. The battery gave out some years back and I had to look all over for the replacement. Finally I found a place that sold them for 95 dollars a pop. That’s a lot for a battery but the guy said those Volvo engines need plenty to turn them over since they are really redesigned tractor engines.

So I will give Dylan the car if he wants it, though as I said, it is hard to know what he wants these days. But I have to get rid of it in a couple of weeks because each family in the condo complex is allowed only two cars. We have three, now that Carol’s mom gave her a Toyota, so the Volvo has got to go.

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That’s the old Volvo.

Fireworks

Posted on July 5, 2007 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

Was it last week some time? But I was at the club exercising and listening to the radio, and as I did so a commercial comes on saying: basically, buy our beer for the 4th of July because it’s the middle of a long hot summer. And I go, what the hell. How can it be the middle of the summer already? So I had to look it up and in the USA at least summer begins on June 21^st or 22^nd, depending. So how can it be the middle of the damn summer when it’s not even the 4^th of July yet. Maybe they were just trying to freak people out, like, Oh! My God. The summer is half over already and I have missed most of it, so I should get really drunk and drown my grief.

At the beginning of every summer, too, I look out the window think damn, but it’s still light outside and it’s like 830 pm or something. But every summer I miss the solstice, the longest day of the year. I will think, pay attention to the solstice. That’s a special day. But I miss it every time. Usually, the day I look out the window and think, damn but it’s a long day, is the solstice, but I am unaware of the fact that it is the solstice.

Maybe that’s because the whole solstice thing confuses me. It seems to me that the solstice shouldn’t be at the first of the summer, but right in the middle of it. But it’s not the middle and so I miss it every time. It just doesn’t seem right that from the solstice on it’s all down hill into darkness.

Last night they set off fireworks at the nearby park. They are so close by we don’t have to leave our place. We go outside and set up folding chairs on the sidewalk around the main parking lot of the condo development. Usually, I don’t go out to watch because it upsets my routine. But last night I did. Carol and I sat in our folding chairs with our neighbors, Joy and Bill, both in their seventies I think, and long retired. Bill plays golf all the time and Joy does lots of volunteer work of different kinds.

Another neigbhor came up and stood right next to me, and Joy and Bill were right there too, so I had to pay attention not to fart since I had pretty bad gas, and was sort of torn between getting up and going off somewhere to fart in private or just sitting there and watching the fireworks. I decided to watch and after a bit the urge to fart went away. Looking at the fireworks, I wondered what the big deal was and remembered they had been more of a big deal back when I would get stoned and watch them. But I don’t do that anymore. So I started feeling sort of sad and nostalgic looking at the fireworks.

This year they had pet friendly fireworks with not as many big bangers mixed in. Those fireworks just drive the pets crazy. Our neighbors a while back had a dog named Teddy. One time when the fireworks went off, he shat and pissed himself all over the condo. So every year when the fireworks came, they had to pack the dog up and move him out of the area. That was one unhappy dog.

I have added a couple more sections to Tingle Territory:

Early Tingles

William Berner Tingle, 1892-1946

Eggs Across America

Posted on July 3, 2007 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

Went to Costco yesterday because we needed some food items. Costco is probably not so familiar to east coast people. It’s a kind of food warehouse. It looks like a warehouse and businesses come in before regular people hours and buy wholesale. Everything comes in huge quantities—I think here of the food stuff. Once I forgot to buy that little box of salt with the umbrella lady and rather than go back to the regular store I bought five pounds of salt at Costco for a few cents more than the umbrella lady salt. I had salt up the wazoo; it put it in bottles and stuck it in the pantry.

So I bought some eggs for around three dollars and was informed at the counter that it was a two pack, not 18 eggs for three dollars, but 36 eggs. They asked did I want the other pack of 18. I said skip it. I had plenty of eggs, but they acted like I was breaking store policy or something, so the lady went back and got me 18 more eggs. On Sunday I went to the farmer’s market in the Costco shopping center and got 12 eggs for about three dollars. These were brown eggs though.

As you can see from the pictures, the white Costco eggs look almost identical. Indeed, all 36 eggs look as if they were perhaps deposited by the same chicken. Or maybe by clones of the same chicken. The brown eggs though are various. One is bigger than the other and browner too. There was even a bigger egg than that one but I ate it. So the brown eggs are much more irregular and appear to come from different chickens or maybe the same chicken on a good day or a bad day.

When I was teaching a research paper class on what I called “Eating in America,” I began to realize how distant and detached we are from the sources of our food. Take hamburger for example. It comes all neatly packaged in a square box. What the hell is the relation of that to a cow? Or let’s say, that neat package makes it easy to forget that it came from a cow. The irregular brown eggs tend to remind one of chickens. The regular white ones could have been produced in some programmed egg factory.

Many of my students—I have polled them over the years—have never seen a live chicken, except maybe in a zoo, and they are not sure if that was a chicken or not. But they remember having seen something chicken like. I have seen chickens in the flesh. I have stepped with bare feet in warm chicken poop that lets off quite a stick as it oozes between the toes. I have taken eggs out of the nest still warm from the chicken sitting on them.

It’s odd to think how we have become so distant from our food. Indeed sometimes we are very distant from it. Some experts say the average piece of food travels about 1500 miles to get to your mouth. These figures are probably a little distorted since Americans are eating more and more food from all around the world. Take coffee, as an instance. Experts are concerned about such things because of all the energy required to transport the stuff and in most cases to refrigerate it while in transit.

There’s a little Utube graphics show about this at.

The Mystery of Tingle Road

Posted on July 3, 2007 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

Tingle Road is making me nuts. I mean so what? The Tingles have a road named after them. No big deal. After all it was named for them since it went right through their property. The road was called Tingle because they owned it. I found a Tingle Bridge on the web. Probably that’s because the Bridge is located on Tingle property. It’s not like Tingle Road was named after a famous Tingle like all those Lincoln Roads all over the country are named after a famous Lincoln. And hell, take a look at Tingle Road…It’s barely a road anymore.

Still, for all that, I was upset to note, as I have previously said, that according to Google maps, Tingle Road is slowly disappearing. It used to run from clear down around Blout up into Butts County. I have a Monroe County map from 1988 that clearly shows that to be the case. Now on Google maps at the south end only a little tiny bit of Tingle Road remains. The big piece going north is now called Graham, maybe because some interloper named Graham now owns the property through which the road runs. So be it.

But to the north, I have pictures taken in the 90’s that show actual road signs with the name Tingle on them. One at the corner of Brownlee and Tingle Road and the other at the intersection of Tingle Road and High Falls. Actual pictures. BUT Google maps now say that end of Tingle Road is Teagle Road. I got the feeling strange people were trying to wipe out any remnant or memory of Tingle Road maybe because there are no Tingles in the area that I know of to defend the memory of Tingle Road.

Yes, memories must be defended to.

Now I have concluded that Google is screwed up. For while they call it Teagle Road at the north end, if you type in Tingle Road in Google maps, up comes a Tingle Road in Jackson that is pointing—you guessed it—to what they call Teagle Road. From this I conclude somebody collecting the data wrote Teagle for Tingle and so it no longer appears on Google maps.

This makes me wonder about history in a general way. How the hell accurate can people be? People forget stuff all the time. I can’t remember yesterday. How could a person in his or her 80’s say such and such occurred on such and such a day with anything like accuracy?

Anyhow Tingle Road is driving me nuts.

So now I have four google picture sites:

Tingle Road
Cemeteries and Churches
Grandma Tingle’s Place
Pappy Tingle’s House

All can be located at. So take a jaunt through Tingle Territory.

Oh, I have tried to make a google map of Tingle Territory, but I am not so hot at maps yet. When you get to the google map page click on the tab for My Maps (those being my maps) and when that page comes up click on Tingle Territory.

Still Tossing More Junk

Posted on July 2, 2007 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

Most of another day in the garage cleanup. For Carol at least. I am stuck and can’t do much more till the shredding gets done, and I upset her by bring out yet more paper junk from the condo. She started feeling overwhelmed. So I stopped doing that.

She finds it hard—and me too—going through all that crap. The crap makes you think about your life and where you have been and what you have done and what you haven’t done over the years. That’s probably one reason people don’t throw out stuff; they really don’t want to remember anything.

Take that bike there in the picture. I don’t know how many years back I decided I would be eco conscious and get exercise by riding a bike. It’s only a couple of miles to the university, so on top of that I would ride to the club or just out on a bike path that runs from the university to downtown so that I was averaging like 13 miles a day or better over about a three year period.

But then my neck gave out and I started having pains in the neck and pains going all down my shoulders to my hands. The bad office chair I had then and the bike were both responsible. I got a new chair but I had to stop riding the bike. I had bags on it for my books and stuff, and a lights for at night in the front and the back and a speedometer so I could torture myself with how slowly I was going when all the younger people just whizzed by me. It told me the number of miles I had gone too. I would get pissed when it would lose the connection and not work because I wanted to keep track of how many miles I had gone.

So I had to park the bike. But it still seemed like a good bike to me and I would take it out occasionally and ride over to this park on the ocean, but then the pedals started slipping, so I took it in for a tune up, and the guy took a look at it and said “no way.” He said I had biked it to death. The bike as far as I could calculate had about 10,000 miles on it. Damn I thought a bike would last more than 10,000 miles.

So now I am throwing it out. Once on a hill, I got going about 40 mph on that thing.

I worked on Tingle Territory a bit more. I moved all the collection over to the Google site. It’s pretty cool. You can click on the slideshow and the captions come up too if you want or you can turn them off, and down on the lower left of the page is a Google map so you can mark where the pictures were taken. So if you have Google earth on your computer you can click on the map, log on to Google earth, and look at the pot via satellite. The only problem is I don’t think I have done a very accurate job of pin pointing things.

Though I do believe I have located the ARP in Ora and Grandma’s house a little down from that.

Junk Disposal

Posted on July 1, 2007 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

Carol and I spent most of yesterday working on our half garage. We share our garage with our next door neighbor in the condo. Our half of the garage has always looked worse than the other half, though most of the time we have been here the other half belonged to the nuns who lived next door and they were like ultra neat people. Still I would look at their half and then at our half and the half that was ours looked even more like a mess compared to theirs. Now a young couple lives next door. They have more stuff than we do, but it still looks neater.

Anyway we getting rid of years and years of carelessly disposed and stored junk.

Books, books, books, tapes of all kinds and paper—those are the dominant disposables. Six filing cabinets of paper, plus several boxes of paper.

We went out and bought Carol a mega-shredder to shred the paper. She is proud of her new shredder and says she feels like a man with his chain saw. We have a basic philosophical difference about paper disposal. She is worried about identify theft and wants to shred every piece of paper. I think this identity theft thing is grossly exaggerated and so don’t understand why she needs to shred every piece of paper. Or maybe I don’t care if somebody steals my identity. I mean, here, take it. I could use another one.

I took bags of dead batteries and ink cartridges and old cans of paint and paint thinner over to the toxic disposal site at the university. The guy there said they get 10,000 pounds of toxic junk every weekend. We didn’t want to use up all of the space in the trash containers everybody in our three units use so later we drove over to trash dump place nearby and unloaded paper. Then we went to Osh and bought some shelves to go next to the shelves we already have.

I believe people all over the USA are now overflowing with junk. I saw a truck with “1-800-Got Junk?” on it, and I looked them up on the web. They will pick up every thing practically but a corpse and dispose of it for you. They say they are the nation’s foremost junk disposal company and have grown 500% over the last three years.

In the late afternoon I spent a little time working on Tingle Territory and put together some pictures of Cemeteries and Churches. Rather than try to move these from the google site to my site on yahoo, I decided to use the google photo site instead and it looks pretty good. You can check it out at: