Bricks and Stones

The plane landed in Huntsville with the usual "The local time is..." speech. Unexpectedly, the drone of the normal landing announcement ended in "...and if this is home, welcome home." The Southern hospitality was a nice touch. It also got me to thinking. I suppose this is home now. That particular thought hadn't really occurred to me, even though I spent my last visit to Huntsville helping my parents move three decades of beloved nicknacks into their expansive house.

Home was not my destination immediately. The 'rents picked me up from the airport and we proceeded directly to dinner. I had dressed appropriately, flying in my Thanksgiving best. The house at which we were attending dinner was owned by a guy (Lancelot) who knew some new friends of my parents. None of us had actually met Lancelot yet, but we were sure hoping that the only people we did know would be there by the time we arrived. I took over navigating duties, as was tradition, and noticed that the printed directions depicted our destination as a castle. How droll, I thought, the man's house is a castle.

Then we pulled up to a portcullis, peeking from below a gatehouse that indeed stood in front of a castle, with a high rampart running around its roof, a three-story tower with a flag on top, and two enormous wooden doors at the front of the keep. It turns out that Lancelot had spent the last twenty years or so building his castle, himself, utilizing his (evidently) extensive knowledge of architectural design, carpentry, stone-working, electrical wiring and plumbing.

We arrived to find that we were the very first guests to arrive, so we knew absolutely no one. NoHips and I were quick to crack some beers. I quickly found myself chatting with various and sundry people whose names I have quite forgotten, but there was PaulBunyan the forester, Sevvie who I'd met in August, Switalench who was happy to talk about nerdly science things, Napoli the professor who was just slightly my senior, TheTwoSara(h)s who seemed related to some people at the party in ways I've also quite forgotten, and a handful of other people for whom I can not now invent clever nicknames.

The dinner was fantastic (and the first in a while where Ma didn't have to prepare anything) and the wine was flowing freely all evening. There was an interesting mix of people my parents' age and people closer to my age. Everyone seemed to be getting along swimmingly. As the evening wound down, we found the night was still young. Those of us of a similar age to the night all exchanged phone numbers, vowing to meet up later when we managed to make it back to Huntsville.

The 'rents decided to invite a group over to the house, so we piled back into the car and headed for home. The house was much as I remembered it, minus roughly 500 boxes. There were also more carpets. It didn't take long for the party wagon to arrive and we continued to have a blast in the old homestead. I was on the piano, cranking out the regular hits while NoHips lead the guests in rousing renditions of "Piano Man" and the like.

By the time we said goodnight to everyone, it was already well past parental bed time. I was even nodding off, since I was still on pesky Eastern time. We all slept like logs that night.

The following day, we sat around as much as humanly possible. Some drinks were had some football was watched, some food was consumed, some conversation was conversated. But most of our effort was put into not exerting much effort.

Saturday, we tried to be a little more productive. The 'rents got into the Christmas card list and started printing address labels. I took their copy of OS X 10.5 and installed it on my laptop. It was then that my problems started. All was going fine until the system rebooted after the install. Nothing. Not a thing. Blank, unresponsive screen. Hmm. Manual reboot. Ugly disgusting screen imploring me to restart my machine in five languages. Scary code running down the left side proclaiming kernel exceptions and other dire issues. Re-reboot. Blue screen. With functional cursor. Crap.

The good news: she seems to boot in Transfer Mode and from a CD, so the machine is not completely monkey-fucked. If all else fails (seriously, what else can fail?) I can always salvage the files from the machine and put them onto a new one. I'd rather not do that, though. DF seems to indicate that this problem might stem from unauthorized system mods that the previous owner of this machine *ahem* may have installed. The command-key reboot one comes to mind. I need to get it to a Genius soon or else this machine has just become a very expensive brick.

Flying today sans laptop was strange. Thankfully, I had Bukowski and the Touch (mental note: possible excellent band name) to keep me occupied. That and about 130 tests that I started grading. Actually, thanks to the grading I managed to strike up a nice conversation with my exit row seatmate on the way to LaGuardia, who happened to be a first-year teacher on her way back from her family in Florida to her sixth graders in the Bronx. We traded war stories.

Tomorrow, bright and early, it's back to the front lines. My shore leave seems to be shorter and shorter these days, but it's just twenty instructional days until I'm back in 'Bama again. Before that even happens, I'll be having a surprise visitor from out of town. And maybe he can explain what he did to this computer.