more charleston photos!

Since I’ve just spent an entire hour  fighting with a typewriter, I think it’s time for a break.  Why, you may ask, are we still using TYPEWRITERS, here in the midst of the 21st century????? Yeah, I’m asking that one too. People send us forms from other states to fill out and verify that they got a degree here, so I use them for that. And for labels, although if I can’t get a student to do my labels, I just handwrite them. Because I HATE THE TYPEWRITER. K has a typewriter that’s about 100 years old, and it’s great. Okay, I exaggerate its age, but it probably is at least thirty years old. It types well, you can see what you’re doing, and it never has issues. I had one just like it, and it broke a few years ago. We took it to a repair place, and when they said it would cost $150 to fix, I just got a new one. Now I rue the day I did that. Of course, I thought I hated THAT typewriter. Until I got the new one.

The new one is nothing less than a spawn of Satan. You can’t see what the hell you’re typing because the type is way below the ribbon thingy. It has a word-processing window but that’s even worse because then you can only see like one short word at a time. It beeps incessantly, and since the book is an incomprehensible mess that seems to have been written for some completely different appliance, like, say, a  microwave, we can’t figure out how to make it quit. And god forbid the ribbon or correction tape need changing. That was what I was trying to do for an hour – change the correction tape. There’s only ONE way it can go, and of course it would not go that way, but would twist and turn and wind itself into a frenzy and come undone every time I thought I finally had it, and then spin itself all over the room. K finally took pity on me (after having hysterics) at seeing me winding ten feet of correction tape back UP onto the spool, and having it explode across the room for the fifth time. So she came to fix it for me, and couldn’t do it either. Which made me feel a little better since she’s of the Typewriter Generation and usually has no trouble getting them to cooperate. Okay, I’m of the Typewriter Generation too, but I’ve moved on to computers. K hates computers like I hate typewriters. We’d go back to an IBM Selectric and carbon paper if she had her way.

But anyhow, she fought with it for like half an hour, and finally got it to both type AND correct, and… now it’s typing 6’s for 9’s and upsidedown !’s for 6’s. FINE. I’m going to Staples at lunch and getting a new one. I realize it’s just something that’s gotten set wrong on the Daisy Wheel, but, guess what! I don’t care!!!!  The Dean’s Assistant has been going around for days trying to get us to order stuff so she can spend the leftover money in her budget (it’s that time of the year again – "We’re broke, we’re broke, we’re broke, we’re broke… we have too much money and we have to spend it on stupid stuff we don’t need RIGHT NOW!!!!) so I marched over to her office and announced that I’m buying a new typewriter because this one is straight from the bowels of Hell and I just can’t take it anymore. Naturally, being a control freak, she didn’t like that and thought I should just keep fighting with it since it’s not really broken, but is just out of its little mechanical mind, but I insisted. (It doesn’t help that I told her it was broken last month and she fixed the ribbon in about five seconds so it was fine again. Now she just thinks I’m an idiot.)  It’s way too much stress that I don’t need to keep struggling with that thing. And if they’re needing to get rid of money, this is as good a way to do it as buying $300 worth of post it notes.

ANYHOW. Now my head hurts. So I’m going to post the rest of my Charleston pictures. I’ve been tagged for three different things now, and need to get these pictures out of the way so I can do that.

These first pictures are from a graveyard just a little north of downtown. This may be the coolest graveyard I’ve ever seen in my LIFE. Oddly enough, we’d never been. Even odder, I wasn’t in the one I thought I was in. I saw something about Magnolia Cemetery in the AAA book, and realized it was really close by, so decided to go. I’ve seen the name before, but for some reason we’ve never gone. I think I thought it was further out but it was only a mile from downtown. So I set off for Magnolia Cemetery one afternoon. Since I could turn getting lost into an art form, I got lost immediately. And drove about 15 miles to get to that one mile out of town cemetery. Since all I had to do was get on Bay Street and go north, and Bay Street is like the easiest street in town to find, I’m not sure how I managed that, but whatever. I finally found signs to Magnolia, and then found this big gate and drive into a HUGE cemetery. And drove on in – it’s one with roads all through it, and is enormous. I finally just parked on the side of the road and started walking. And walked and walked and walked and took pictures and was thoroughly impressed with how neat it was. I noticed a little red car zipping through once, and thought, "what the hell are they doing, driving like that in a cemetery??. And kept walking around. A little later, as I’m nearer the main drive, the red car comes back. And stops. It’s the gatekeeper, who informs me that they close at 6:00 and now it’s 6:30 and could I PLEASE get out of the graveyard??? Of course I apologize profusely – I had no idea, generally they just close at dark – and she was actually very gracious. As I was leaving, she says, "And don’t go to Magnolia – I’m closing it too!"

So I don’t know WHERE I was. But I did notice a bunch more graves nearby but seemingly too far to be the same cemetery, unless it was even huger than it seemed. So I guess THAT was Magnolia. Whatever the case, I can’t wait to go back.

There were a lot of these weird, bed-like graves around:

A weird headless angel:

This was neat – you can see the new bridge that they’re building over the Cooper River behind the graves. Actually, you can see the old ones too. They’re kind of overlapping until they tear the old ones down. The new one is the high pointy one.

This is a little hard to see, but this mausoleum has a HUGE GAPING HOLE IN THE FLOOR. The casket has apparently been removed. I crept up and took a picture of the hole, but it didn’t come out well enough to see what it was. It was very deep, full of water, and very Dark Shadows. I was expecting Barnabas to appear at any moment – "What are you doing here?????"

A pyramid. Yes, a pyramid.

A look at the stained glass window in the pyramid. Doesn’t get any weirder than this!

Okay, now I’ve got to go to Staples and pick out a typewriter that won’t drive me mad. Still have Lomos – maybe I can do those when I get back.