So Long Ola

If my landlady were on MySpace, this would be her photo there. However, she is not. She does have a new gmail account and satellite radio in her car. I helped set her up with both of those. She left today on a big driving adventure, down to Tennessee to see family over Thanksgiving and then off to California with her dog to visit four of her five kids on the west coast. If all things go well, she'll be entering the Peace Corps in March 2007 and heading off to the South Pacific. If that happens, I'lll be minding the place here. If it doesn't, she'll come back sometime in the winter and we'll move on to Plan B.

There was a big going-away party at the neighbor's place down the street and this picture is from that. It was mostly the local area Democrats (Ola's license plate reads DMOCRAT) who were happy for a change, and very happy to have a party to see Ola off. There was a lot of great food that people made, and our two local elected officials -- the local rep and the local senator -- were there. I bent the ear of one of them talking about my blah blah digital divide stuff and offered to come by her place any time and fix her computer. Free tech support is the coke vial on a chain equivalent here in rural noplace; I'm sure I'll be able to make inroads with her.

Overheard from the local senator "It's too bad that we overused and wore out the word 'facist' in the sixties when it just meant anything we didn't like, because it's really apropos now"

Then Ola and I hopped into her car with part of a bottle of Jim Beam and were happy to find that the satellite radio had finally populated itself with all the stations. We got home and I programmed in the 40s channel, CNN, CSPAN, the old time radio channel and whatever passes for NPR on XM radio. She went to bed early, like she always does, and we said goodbye since I knew she'd be leaving in the morning well before I got up, before the sun got up. We had been getting to the point where she was getting up almost when I was going to bed, each of us having a different manifestation of our restless minds.

I woke up this morning to a quiet and empty house, a clean kitchen and a to do list forming in my mind (get rid of extraneous hutches in kitchen, install programmeable thermostat, feed birds, INSULATE) and I've been picking away at it for a while now. I'll probably still be picking away at it when she comes back.