I reject your reality and substitute my own. SHE WAS JUST BORN OR IS SURELY ONLY JUST A TODDLER. NOT FIVE.

For true. These babies should just barely be walking, and really only said their first words, like, last week.

Dude, I have a thirteen and twelve year old and I have no idea how that happened.

You haven't lived here since they finished the interstate and upped the speed limits, dude!

I graduated in 1988 -- right about the time I-40 opened to Durham. So, yes, a lot of development ago.

During the summer of '88, I lived in Royal Park Apartments and had a boyfriend in Greensboro. Taking 54 and 85 (with a stop in Graham for a Coke -- it was a very hot summer) was about an hour or so.

Back in the day, it used to be the top-of-the-line women's school in the system,

My grandmother graduated from there! Trufax. And she's 94, so that was in the 1930s or early 1940s.

Not any more, they're not. The whole "getting rid of desegregation" thing is really hurting them reputation-wise, and (maybe more to the point) nobody has any idea what's going to be going on next year in any given school zone.

Well, I thought it sucked from the inside when it was respected, so yeah.

smonster, I was just poking around supernaturalwiki.com (don't ask--I was trying to avoid a certain Excel spreadsheet of doom), and I just saw that you're mentioned in it. PADDYWHACK.

Okay, now I gotta go look at the XLS instead.

We'll just not talk about the ages of my chldren, 'kay? I can't believe E and Tickybox are eleven and five. Nope.

Amy, if you move to NC I may cry at fate. Nobody has mentioned Winston-Salem, which is a very strange sort of culture. It's a half-hour from Greensboro, and one day they probably will merge along the I-40 corridor. We did as much shopping and cultural stuff in GSO as we did in WS, and found the city more open, friendly, and accessible in ways that WS was not.

But Winston has five colleges and universities: Wake Forest, including the Medical and Law Schools, Winston-Salem State, begun as an all-black college and now approaching equal numbers in enrollment and a growing reputation for quality education, NC School of the Arts, part of the NC University system, Forsyth Techincal, part of the community college system, and Salem College, which began as a school for girls, and has been in operation since the late 1700s as part of the original Salem settlement.

H graduated from WFU, I studied at NCSA, we both worked at WFU and FTC, and I took classes at Salem and my writing groups formed through the Center for Women Writers there. My office at my old job worked with WSSU for several events, and I love the dynamic feel of the campus. All the schools are physically appealing. The surrounding landscape is rolling, still fairly thickly wooded, which appeals to me. The area is closer to the mountains than RDU or Greenville, but farther from the beaches. I personally dislike flat terrain, so I like the countryside better.

Winston offers old money southern charm juxtaposed with high powered imported industry. Pockets of both abound. The arts are highly promoted and somewhat self-consciously celebrated. The city has a complicated history and there are deep pockets of white entitlement and prejudice, along with aggressively progressive areas, programs, and people. The last twenty years have seen an enormous emigration from latin countries, and civic and business accomodation to that influx. It adds its own flavor to the historic and commercial influences.

Culturally, RDU is more open and less closely bound to historical southern roots, and probably a lot more comfortable place to live and work.

Things accomplished today:

Major cleaning and dejunking of bedroom including condensing two and a half dressers of clothing into less than one. Mostly accomplished by packing some things, but mostly culling out another two black yard garbage bags of clothes.

Laundry which is still in process.

Packed three largish boxes of clothes, shoes, and scarves.

Joe packed up 80% of Monstro and cleaned out the Nerd Hole of a couple of large bags of trash.

We are taking a break until 3:00 and then regrouping in either the front room or the basement or both for a two hour push.

I might do an impromptu yard sale Friday and see if I can get rid of stuff.

About halfway done with disability transcriptions. Which is good, because as much as they add structure to my day, they kind of bum me out. There's not a lot of Win in local disability history, to put it mildly.I knew that, you know, duh, but I hit a stretch today that is so fuckin' bleak, David Simon could probably read over my shoulder and say "C'mon, now, it can't be that bad." About the only distance I have is that this crap is like twenty-five years old and that same summer I probably spent watching "Press Your Luck" and trying to keep my brother out of my diary(Which he had to read cause I hated it...objectively there's no buzz in such a document when your only friend is a CP junior socialist on soda restriction.) It's like in "Smoke Signals" where the dad wishes everybody "Happy White People's Independence Day" My experience with the ADA is *absolutely* like that. Well, public accomodations are better here now, because, as in the Wire, red turns to black with green.(It seems nasty socialist government greenbacks work too, whatever Glenn Beck thinks.)

Hey, Barb, did you ever get a chance to read what I sent you?

::shamefaced:: Erm, not quite. I have the file open on the computer, but have been derailed mildly. I do have a plane trip tomorrow will I will be trapped with nobody saying, "MOM, I need help with math/English/geography/skin issues/whatever!!!" so I'm hoping to read then.

::iz terrible friend::

I was wondering about that, since I thought I was just coming up on 5 years myself.

This is totally true.

Except you've just crossed over to five without a doubt because I moved in late Feb / early March (okay, I don't know the dates but I know we did an early birthday dinner for my sister before I left so it was before March 8) I think. Fuck math. We used to be friends, man. Now? I don't know *what* we are.

If I don't move, buy a new car or know people having a baby, I can't remember what year anything happened.