driving to buladean

Twelve in12

The Challenge: Read 12 books of 200 pages or more in 12 months. That’s one book per month.

The Timeframe: October 1, 2007 to October 1, 2008

The Reason: Studies have shown that reading helps keep your mind healthy and active. The mind you save may be your own.

Books I’ve Read So Far: 1 – Digging to America – Anne Tyler

That’s what I did today – drive to Buladean. What’s in Buladean, you ask? Why, there is truly not much of anything whatsoever in Buladean! It’s way out in the middle of absolutely nowhere – I think it’s in Mitchell County, but I’m not real sure. I’m not even all that sure whether it’s in NC or Tennessee. I’m trying to pull it up on Google, but… guess who’s on dial-up? Me, that’s who!

Oh, okay. It IS in Mitchell County, and it IS in North Carolina. Duh. I even bought a map for the occasion – you’d think at least that much would have sunk in while I was driving around trying not to run off the road while peering at the map. There still isn’t anything there, though. It IS awfully pretty. It’s not far from Roan Mountain, which is in both Tennessee AND North Carolina. Roan Mountain is huge. And it’s always raining on Roan Mountain. Today was a gorgeous clear blue sky kind of day, yet when I got to the top of Roan Mountain it looked like a tornado was about to hit. Roan Mountain isn’t all that far from us, yet we never go up there. Probably because it’s too close to Tennessee. You don’t ever want to get too close to Tennessee. At least our side of Tennessee. Really. You don’t. Trust me on that.

Why did I want to go to Buladean? Well, Captain Airhead, my former boss, was from there. And I just got it in my head that I wanted to go see it. I tried to go to Buladean a couple of times when I was driving between here and Asheville, because if you really try hard you can kind of imagine it being sort of between Asheville and here. Kind of. In the sense that it’s about eleventy twelve bazillion miles from anywhere but on a map it’s vaguely between here and there. Last weekend I decided to attempt it, even though I was driving the Outback and all the maps were, of course, in the Civic. And I didn’t manage to find Buladean, but I DID find Loafer’s Glory and Toecane. Which are also smack dab in the middle of absolutely nowhere, but my parents had friends who lived in Toecane, right outside Loafer’s Glory, when I was very young, and we used to visit them.

You know, I can actually post some Toecane pictures, even though I’m home on dial up. Not ones from today, but I took a few last weekend.

This is about it. There’s a church (I’ve never seen so many churches in my life as I did today, except on trips through West Virginia. Where there are three churches and four liquor stores on every single corner). And there are a couple of houses – one was my parent’s friend’s house. (Not the one in the next picture – I took one today of it, but not last weekend.) And a couple of other abandoned stores and a set of train tracks. And a great big river.  

And there’s Loafer’s Glory:

It was a fun drive. I love just going out and driving around aimlessly, and I don’t do it that much these days. The leaves are still pretty too, and it’s NOT RAINING, which is amazing. It rained for five days straight, so I’m very glad that it’s stopped raining. I know, I know – we needed rain. But seriously, I don’t think we need rain any more. Yesterday we had flood watches. I believe that when you have flood watches the drought is officially over.

In other news, we’re on the verge of getting a kitten. There is a pet store beside the coffee shop where Baker B gets a latte every day of his life, and they usually just have ferrets and bunnies and huge talkative kind of frightening parrots, but for several days now they’ve had two kittens in the window. They are SO CUTE – one is a teeny little black kitten with white paws, and the other is a little larger and is brown and black with a white face and white paws. Did I mention how adorable they are?? They curl up together and wash each other and are just unbearably cute. And we need another kitten. Stella needs a pet. She’s social and lonely when we’re not here.  

BUT. We need one kitten. Not two kittens. And I could never ever ever separate these kittens. I just can’t  imagine taking one and leaving the other one all alone in its cage. And we do NOT NEED TWO MORE CATS. Also, they are $75 each. They are Humane Society kittens, though, and have their first round of shots and are also already fixed, so that’s a very good deal. Still, it’s a chunk o’money.

Tonight Baker B was mooning over the kittens – he wants the teeny little black one with white paws – and decided that if we got both of them we could name the boy Edgar and the girl (the teeny black one) Cayce. 

Dude. We’ve NAMED THE KITTENS. Once you name the kittens, you’re pretty much doomed.

We’ve decided to try and exercise a little common sense. We’re going to keep an eye on them, and if someone adopts one of the kittens, we will immediately adopt the other one. Since Baker B practically lives at the coffee shop beside the pet store, keeping an eye on them will be no problem. I don’t know how anyone could separate them, but I suppose it’s possible. And if nobody takes either of them…

We can’t have three cats. We CAN’T HAVE THREE CATS.

Of course, if my mother hadn’t taken Simon and Maddy years ago when we rescued them from Baker B’s parent’s insane neighbors, we would have had FOUR cats. Still. We need to stick with two cats. Not three cats.

We’ll see what happens. I’m afraid if those kittens are in the pet store much longer, there’s no hope. They’re sleeping inthe litterbox. They NEED a HOME. And they need to be together! And Stella needs a pet! Okay, two pets!!

Oh, check out my box up there, which I hope will work when I post it – this is a VERY cool thing. A book a month for a year – I used to read about TEN books a month, but in recent years haven’t been doing so much reading. This is incentive to read. And to write about what you read, even better! 

Also, if you like really really really strange animation – and/or you like Adult Swim – check out the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie. Which we rented tonight. Which has been out for ages, apparently, but we had no idea. And we LOVE Aqua Teen Hunger Force. The movie got very mixed reviews – people either loved it or thought it was just awful. I don’t think you’d care for it unless you were already a fan of the cartoon. It was very very VERY surreal – kind of an animated soulmate of Inland Empire, actually. We laughed till we were in tears.