Sleep, and the various aspects of it. All my posts seem to start this way, discussing it, that is. Sleep seduced me and spent the night with me last night. It rocked! Better than finding out that cute chick at uni I can't remember the name of had the hots for me. What was her name? I dunno ... and she didn't ... but it would have been cool if she had! All off the point though, the point is that I slept! Properly too. I held out sleeping until about ten pm, and managed to rest properly until one thirty in the morning, when I was damned worried I'd not get back to sleep, and in the middle of worrying I discovered it was nine in the morning and the birds were singing and ... well, yeah, it was great.
Today has been either an excellent day, or a total failure, depending on one perceives it. Glass half full or half empty person? Take your pick. No, don't. This is my story. Glass half full. It was a nice day.
We walked down the street to find a laundromat. It was a fair way down Peachtree St, maybe three ks. It was fairly similar to ours, which is to say run down and shabby. Adam proceeded to break all the machinery in the place doing absolutely nothing wrong. He tried to get washing powder from a dispenser, and the coin insertion mechanism stuck when he tried to push through the quarters. We asked at the desk, and the Asian lady (of whom there aren't many in Atlanta, lady or otherwise) with a really debilitating lisp (I'm not joking, I felt really sorry for her) gave us little boxes of washing powder, which the machine must have been meant to give out.
Then when Adam tried to put notes through the change machine it ate his money and didn't give anything out, so we had to exchange money directly with the lady, who changed it with us from a bucket of quarters.
I'd forgotten what it's like to be a poor uni student, hanging around with strange people who might try to kill you if they could only stop the shaking ...
We went off to an expensive "southern" restaurant instead, because we're soft rich IT guys. Mary Mac's Tea House. Adam quite liked it, but it was too southern and kind of "nice" for me. They did offer grits, which I'll have to taste before we leave (see My Cousin Vinny if you don't know or care about what grits are), but it was all a bit uncomfortable "fake" nice for me.
We went back, had to wait a bit longer, read a magazine on things to do in Atlanta (like going to see Henry Rollins ... or Kylie Minogue, which I really don't want to do while I'm in the states. Really. Come to think of it, you'd have to pay me a lot to see Kylie Minogue anywhere), and then packed our clothes into our packs and set off. For where, you ask? For Target, of course! I had a Kindle to hunt down. It was a long walk, but there was lots of Atlanta to see, and we really enjoyed it. Adam started getting a bit worn out from the hike. We made it, and disappointingly Target only stocked the small Kindle. Oh well.
Yet another fable trashed though (well, this is something I was told and believed) ... at Target they had jeans that were size 28". True, not in all ranges, but they only have 30" and above in Melbourne, and I can't buy any of them there. I found a nice pair of bootleg jeans, size 28, and bought them, I thought they were $30, and paid $32, because I can't get used to tax being added at check out. Oh well, they're still nice, and I won't say how much I spent on French Connection jeans three years ago.
We decided to go to the Botanical Gardens on the way back. Okay, it wasn't really on the return, but it was in the same general area as Target. So we walked off there, with Adam fading, and enjoyed Piedmont Park, which was a sort of entrance to the Gardens. It was a massive open park area with baseball diamonds, a funny building in the middle of the park with a roof that was more decoration than roof, and beach volley ball arenas. It was somewhat awesome (in the traditional sense of awesome, and not the modern American form of awesome meaning somewhat good).
Sadly, the Botanical Gardens were shut, so we peered over the car parking fence and I discovered I didn't have a clue what the hell was garden and what was just bits of Atlanta. I thought it was an important distinction, because if we had been able to enter the gardens, it would have cost twenty dollars, so I'd want the place we were going to to be damn good. Filled with half naked women ... or, even better, maybe a series of parallel connected computers I could program a* search algorithms on. But enough of my perverse brain, pretend I wanted nubile women more.
Oh, and that makes me think of the cars here. Aside from being disappointingly not revolting, they don't have number plates on the front, only the back. You can tell the vehicles that were either made in, or for, America, by the fact there's no empty place on the nose for the front plate. I didn't even notice until Adam pointed it out today.
Then back home and I went to the gym (Adam stayed to sleep. He let himself nod off during the day yesterday, and his body clock is suffering worse than mine right now) and discovered I can do just about as much as I could five years ago before my body went insane on me and turned into a series of inverted razer blades eating me. It's not anymore, and it was cool. I felt invigorated and strong and important. I'm none of those things, but it's good for us to feel we are occasionally. The girl that gave us our passes ... Joyce or something, offered to take us to a recommended bar (name forgotten). She didn't finish until something like eleven thirty, and I don't think I'll survive past ten again, so I declined, but will ask her for other places to go tomorrow).
Tomorrow we see baseball. That's all that's set for now.
Evening all.
Some pics I took today.
Here is a link to Adam's America photos so far:
Adam's photos
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