This Old Blog

Monday didn't start quite as early as Friday did, but it was early enough at 4am. My brother shuttled me down to the Forsyth Grayhound terminal so I could catch the 6:30am bus south to Miami and points in between, including Orlando. Getting into the Atlanta Greyhound terminal was as simple as walking in, getting a tag for my one piece of luggage, and then queueing up at door #6. Loaded into the bus starting at 6am, and then on the road back to Orlando by 6:30am. Buses don't just make a beeline trip between destinations. They make numerous stops a long the way. The first stop was in Macon about an hour after we started. Most of the stops were fairly fast, with passengers getting off and new passengers getting on. Two of the stops were 30-minute layovers where the passengers could get a bite to eat. The first was in Tifton, the next stop after Macon, and the second was in Ocala, right before the final leg (for me) to Orlando. The Greyhound buses are undergoing something ...

The Milstead 104 "Dinky" Steam Locomotive is a 0-6-0 1905 Rogers Steam Locomotive from Patterson, NJ weighing 94 tons with an overall length of 50 feet. It is one of three left in the world. Originally owned by West Point Railroad as a switch train, the Dinky was sold to Callaway Mills in 1948 and operated along the 3.3 miles of the Milstead Railroad from the textile mill to the main line in Conyers, Ga. The Milstead 104 hauled bales of cotton to the mill and returned to the main line in Conyers with the finished woven fabric ducking. In 1960 Callaway Mill closed and relocated its operation to LaGrange, Ga. The Dinky remained in Milstead until 1973 when it was bought by the State of Georgia and located at Georgia Agrirama in Tifton, Ga. A community fundraising effort spearheaded by the Rockdale County Historical Society in 1983 returned the beloved engine to the Conyers area for its final stop. (Transcribed from a sign located at the site of the engine). I have an ...

My dad is not a retired CIA counterintelligence officer (Delta, aeronautical engineer, 44 years), doesn't give lie detector tests (doesn't need to, after raising four kids he knows when you're lying), and is actually a pretty nice guy in spite of having raised four kids. My mom is equally nice, but is the classic southern steel magnolia, the center of the family that binds and the power that keeps us on the (reasonably) straight and narrow. Although I tower over my mom and I'm twice her weight, I wouldn't dare to harm a sacred hair on her head. And neither would anyone else in the family. They will both turn 80 later this year, which makes each of these trips up to Atlanta more and more important. While I expect to see them both for quite a few more years, life, if anything, is unpredictable. So I take the time to travel and visit and tell them I still love them very much. Technical Both were taken with the E-P2 and M.Zuiko 45mm. I took my dad's while ...

Or not to the home you remembered from 30 years ago. This former movie theater is close to my parents place. It's the theater I first saw "TRON" in 1982. Watching movies back then was a lot more low key than now. It was out several weeks before I even knew it was there, and it played for several more months before it moved on. It was inexpensive and fun, usually costing no more than one or two dollars to view any movie (depending on its release). It's shut down now. Right next to that theater was a small electronic arcade. I don't remember the name of it anymore, but I do remember it having the first TRON arcade game I ever played the same year the movie was released. Since I went to see movies there on a semi-regular basis (I lived in a small apartment off of Peachtree Industrial at the time, as I also worked for DCA when it was located on Peachtree Industrial), I tended stop off at the arcade after the movie to drop in a few quarters and play the games. No...

First comfort stop, Ocala, Florida My mostly-annual January trip to see my family in Atlanta started around 1:15 am this morning at the Orlando Greyhound terminal at John Young Parkway. I got to the terminal around 11pm so I wouldn't be late and to be able to queue up early enough to get a decent chance at picking my seat on the bus. Normally I fly up, but this year the prices out of Orlando to Atlanta were trending towards the outrageous (Delta flights had hit $500 round trip and were going higher each day). So I booked a round trip bus trip between Orlando and Atlanta on Greyhound for a rather inexpensive $90. It's been a while (years, really) since the last time I traveled Greyhound anywhere; the last trip was up to Tallahassee so I could ride back to Orlando with number 2 daughter in the Volvo (which we still own). Traveling by bus was simple back then; walk in, purchase the ticket, wait for the bus, board the bus, and then get off at your destination. This time I h...

I don't know how I managed to screw this up, but I've lost the cost of a round trip ticket from Orlando to Atlanta. And that cost is $219. Three days ago (5 January) I tried to book this trip with Cheap Tickets, and I thought I had booked the flight correctly. In all the years I've flown around the country, first via phone, and later via the web, I've never had the kind of screw-up I ran into with Cheap Tickets. As I've stated already, I wanted to travel, round trip, from Orlando to Atlanta and back. I went to Cheap Tickets, thought I had set up the departing and arriving cities correctly , then clicked through rather hurriedly to finish the transaction. I got, via email, confirmation, and then forwarded that to my mother. My mother sent me a response this evening saying that she was confused, as the flights had me traveling in reverse, from Atlanta to Orlando and back on the correct dates. Sure enough, she was right. I then tried to contact Cheap Tickets and see ...

I was born and raised in Atlanta, or more specifically, Atlanta suburbs located in DeKalb county. My time in elementary and high schools were average, bordering on boring. Except in one area: high school football. I suffered from the same high school jock envy that a lot of other males suffered from. After all, who didn't want to belong to a group (the football team) held in the highest regard, and whose members seemed to have the pick of just about any girl on campus? It was the ultimate young male testosterone trap, and I fell into it like a ton of bricks. Or at least I wanted to. My eyesight was pretty bad in high school, and the eye doctor kept waiving the specter of detached retinas and early blindness in front of my parents. I thought at the time the doctor was just full of it. Maybe in retrospect he wasn't. The upshot of the diagnosis was I merely stood on the sidelines, looking with longing at a sport my parents wouldn't allow me to participate in. It's been nea...

I traveled up to see my parents and family in Atlanta (north-east in Lilburn, actually) over the weekend. Sunday I went out to lunch with them at a Longhorn Steakhouse on Killian Hill Rd. On the way to the restaurant I noticed closed stores just like I'd noticed in Orlando. My family told me that there were empty stores all over the Atlanta area just like the Orlando area. After lunch we stopped off by a Barnes and Nobel on Pleasant Hill Road (we're a family of readers), and when we'd finished we went across the street to Gwinnett Station Shopping Center. Starting from there and moving south-east towards I-85 I saw darkened store after store, as well as a number that were in the process of going out of business. Stores that ranged from Office Max, Kroger, and Circuit City to smaller businesses such as Sam Goodys and Hobby Lobby now stand closed and dark over empty parking lots. Only one former business, a CompUSA store, found new life as a Salvation Army. Main entrance into...