The Falling Wallendas

I would like to introduce you to a group of very special people in our lives -- our upstairs neighbors, The Falling Wallendas. Many of you may have heard of The Flying Wallendas, the famous high-wire circus family. Living in the apartment above us we are "fortunate" to have their less-talented cousins. At least, that seems to be the most logical explanation for all of the thumps and bumps we hear coming through our ceiling at all hours of the day and night -- they are hard at work, practicing something, but not succeeding. Or at least that is what we tell ourselves because we can't think of any other reason for that much sustained activity and noise.

Their daily activities include: a lot of running from one end of the apartment to another (pummel horse or parallel bar gymnastics?), some yelling and crying (trainer instructions followed by a gymnist's disappointment at a failed routine?), some stomping around in high heels on the linoleum in the kitchen (the circus ringmistress, directing the acts?), rhythmic pounding on the floor (some sort of percussion section?), and a daily cheesy theme song which is usually played around 2:30 in the afternoon at varying volumes (loud, then soft, then really loud, then normal, all before the end of the song). There is just no way that any group of people could create this much ruckus during the course of their normal lives.

The noise usually begins around 6:00 a.m. (even on weekends) with a loud thump directly above our bed. We assume this is an eager gymnist, hopping out of bed to begin his or her morning practice. The practice sessions seem to continue throughout the day, with a few breaks around lunch time or in the late afternoon. Activity resumes in earnest around dinnertime, and often lasts well into the early hours of the morning. Because the schedule seems too exhausting for one person, we are assuming that the Wallendas practice in shifts, allowing everyone an opportunity to hone their skills on the various gymnastic equipment they must have installed upstairs.

Visitors to our apartment have added their own perspectives to our neighbors' activities, including:

"It sounds like they just dropped their machine-gun and it is spraying bullets around their apartment."

"I think they've added a couple of ponies to their act."

"They must have very high ceilings up there because it sounds like someone is doing a free-fall and their parachute didn't open."

"I believe a 500-pound man just fell off the top bunk."

Next Wallendas post: Gifts the Wallendas have left for us on our balcony.

Ann Arbor Blogs I'm Enjoying

Hello to all my Ann Arbor friends! This post is for you! I don't know how it happened, but I stumbled upon a couple of Ann Arbor blogs last weekend and I have been enjoying them ever since. I thought I would post them here so that you could (possibly) enjoy them as well. Or really, really hate them.

The first blog is called I Arbored Ann. It is very limited in scope, focusing on the real estate development of Main Street and State Street, yet I found it interesting to see what's leaving town, what's coming to town, and what's moving to another part of town, since I know the Ann Arbor area so well. The blogger is anti-chain store, so the posts are "slanted" in that direction, but his/her comments are very funny and anyone with a biting sense of humor should enjoy reading through this blog, even if they're 100% in love with Ann Arbor. While the blogger seems to be taking a "neighborhood watch for the anti-establishment" approach to this blog, I found it entertaining and enlightening. If nothing else, it's a great place to find out what's coming to town restaurant-wise.

Suds and Soliloquies seems to tread a nice line between local news and national news, seriousness and humor (not always a given in a politically-aware Ann Arborite!). I felt like Dave (the author) represents Ann Arbor residents well, and reading his blog is the next closest thing to having lunch with an Ann Arborite in the flesh.

Lastly, if you're at all disenchanted with Ann Arbor, please check out Ann Arbor is Overrated. It's not all negativity and it's frequently updated with well-written posts. This blog also includes links to lots of other Michigan blogs in case you're interested in pursuing this futher.

Happy blog reading. But don't forget to come back and see me once in a while, too!

Who has an accent? Not me!

A woman at work told me that I have a Michigan accent ("You sound just like my relatives from Michigan!"). She seemed very surprised at my crestfallen reaction to that statement ("No, that's a good thing!" she assured me). After 12 years of making fun of the way Michiganders talk ("Would you like a paper or plastic beg?"), I guess it finally has rubbed off on me! That's what I get for marrying a Michigan boy and then living in Michigan for 12 years!

I wonder how long I will live here in Nashville before I have a tint of a Southern accent to other people I meet outside of Nashville? I don't think it will ever turn into a full-blown accent because it would sound too fakey to me. If I even say "Y'all" now, all sorts of alarm bells go off in my head -- "You're not a Southerner! You can't say that word!" On the other hand, it is a little odd to keep seeing people's surprised faces when they ask us where we are from and we answer, "We live here in Nashville." It makes me want to develop a little twang just to blend in. Makes me think that I need to take the accent lessons Garrison Keillor talked about on his show the other weekend. To listen to the accents sketch yourself, click here, and then listen to Segment 2 (if you're not a big GK fan, this segment is right at the beginning of the recording, so you don't have to listen to anything else to get to it).

When I first moved here, it sounded like everyone had a Southern accent to me, but now I only notice the most obvious of accents. My submersion has begun!

Fall is (not) in the air

My Michigan biological clock is deceiving me. It's late September, so I wake up thinking, "Today I'll wear long sleeves, maybe even a sweater." As I'm getting ready in the morning, I check the weather channel to find that it's going to be 91 degrees. What a surprise!

Although it does get cooler in the evenings now than it did during the full heat of the summer (there have been a couple of evenings when we actually wore jackets), it is still nearly just as hot during the day as it was during official "summer."

This is taking some getting used to on my part and I wonder how long it will be before my biological clock adjusts (will it ever)? Thank goodness I don't live somewhere where it never gets cold (like Florida or LA). I would be in a continual state of season-change anticipation.

Blogging Distractions

If someone had told me five months ago that my blogging would come to a screeching halt during the fall/winter months because of sports, I would have told them that they were on crack.

Yet, here we are, a couple of weeks into the football season and a week into the hockey pre-season, and that is exactly what has happened. I'm watching multiple football games on Sunday, attending multiple hockey games and fan events weekly, and updating my fantasy rosters daily. How can I get anything else done, I ask you?

We went to our first hockey game last night and are convinced that our seats are some of the best in the rink. We could see everything, but didn't feel like we were miles from the ice. We gave ourselves congratulatory handshakes for sitting in nearly every available seat during select-a-seat and picking the best location. We also sit by a lot of season ticket holders so we have long-time hockey fans around us which proves helpful when you didn't happen to see what the penalty call was or didn't catch the name of a player as he skated by.

So, for those of you who are wondering where I have been over the last month, wonder no more. I'm watching a game!

Fantasy Football Update

People, this is the face of a girl who just added a third QB to her fantasy football line-up. As you can see, I'm excited and kind of nervous, wondering if cutting my extra kicker to add a third QB was a good idea. It seemed a little over the top, but when your two other QBs are injured (McNabb & Roethlisberger), a girl's gotta make a Plan B.

I know we're only starting Week 2 right now, but I am totally hooked! I have made nearly daily changes to my line-up and have even had dreams about editing my roster online. I lost Week 1, but I'm feeling good about Week 2. Here goes nothing!

Is this what moving feels like?

I asked Les the other day if he felt like it had sunk in for him yet that we have actually moved -- our old house belongs to another person, we live 8 hours away from where we used to live, a couple states separate us from all of our Michigan family and friends, we are the people who have accents to the locals, etc. He and I both agreed that our brains hadn't fully absorbed the information yet.

We had been talking about one of our favorite little movie theatres in the Detroit area, the Redford Theatre (Please go check it out sometime if you are in Detroit; it's fabulous! If nothing else, at least attend the Three Stooges Festival!). In our minds, we just hadn't been to the Reford for a while, but we could still go at any time. There was no "grieving" feeling that we had left this wonderful place behind forever and would probably never go there again. It just seems like we haven't gotten around to going there recently.

And I wondered if this was what moving feels like forever -- you just haven't seen someone in a while, or you haven't been to that restaurant for a few months, or the weather has been so oddly sunny lately. Or is there a period of time a year down the road where you finally realize that a certain experience has come to an end and life will never be that way again, and you feel sad or relieved or stressed?

I'm sure that it is different for everyone. I have known people who were really torn up about leaving a house or a town, and agonized about their decision for months before making a move. I have never felt that way myself. Partly because I am always excited about the possibilities that lay ahead, and partly because I know that, if I really wanted to, I could always go back to what I have left behind. So far, however, I've always chosen moving forward to moving back.

Gee, Your Sweat Smells Terrific!

We spent a lot of time at various state and metro parks over Labor Day weekend, in part because it was too expensive to drive around seeing things through the windows of our air conditioned car (which is what we were doing when it was 95+ on the weekends and we were sick of spending time in yet another mall). We did have to drive to the parks, which kind of defeated our "save gas!" plan for the long weekend; however, we used only a little more than a quarter tank of gas over the past four days, so I'm pretty pleased overall. Thanks to Nashville's sprawl-free "lots to do in a little area" planning for this! Remember, we moved here from Detroit -- Land of the Free (Sprawl).

This weekend ended up being a little bit hotter than the meteorologists were predicting, and I found myself breaking into a very unladylike sweat on more than one instance during our hikes around the park (especially those "strenuous" trails at Radnor Lake!). Although I did not officially check, I am sure that I smelled more like sweat and less like my Glacier Fresh deodorant as the day progressed.

During the course of our hike, we passed nine or ten people headed the opposite direction. Although I am not known for my heightened sense of smell and am not the type of person who sniffs at other people as they walk by, I couldn't help but noticed that at least five or six of them smelled fantastic (a few smelled neutral and one smelled kind of sweaty) as they walked by, tricking my nose into believing that we had just wandered into a field of wildflowers or that we were walking among freshly laundered sheets, drying in the sunshine-infused summer breeze.

I will be the first to admit that I am not really "up" on the latest perfume brands or body sprays. Although I have smelled a few that I've liked over the years, in general I feel that many of them are too heady for everyday enjoyment, and make you smell as if you're going to the clubs to get lucky rather than out for a summer stroll through the woods. What I smelled on these woodsy paths, however, seemed as natural as a flower or a moss or a wind off the lake. It was remarkable.

I don't know their secret. Is it something they spray on before heading out, something they wash their hair with, something infused into their clothes in some way? I have to find out what it is, and plan to take a poll of the good-smellees the next time I'm hiking through the woods. Scent-challenged People of the World, I am on the case.

A Tale of Two Restaurants: Intro

One of our biggest struggles since coming to Nashville has been finding good ethnic food. I think that Detroit and Ann Arbor have much greater diversity of both population and restaurant types and, as a result, we got accustomed to having so many great ethnic restaurants to choose from that eating out became an exercise in intellectual debate as we each presented the compelling reasons why the other person should agree to visit our favorite eating establishment.

Being vegetarians here in Nashville makes things even more complicated, it seems. I never even heard of "Meat & 3" as a restaurant category before I moved here, and there's quite a number of options within that genre represented in our fair city. Granted, a vegetarian can eat something (grilled cheese, salad, side veggies, baked potato, etc.) almost anywhere, but when you have a choice of where you go out (rather than tagging along with a group of carnivores), you prefer to go to a restaurant where you have a wide range of choices rather than a feeling of desperation as you scan the menu. Instead of going to 25 different restaurants to try their one vegetarian item, we'd rather have a handful of restaurants to visit where we aim to taste the variety of vegetarian options the menu.

Since I think there may be some people in the same boat that we're in, I thought I would post my reviews of various restaurants we've visited in case anyone else finds our research useful. For the sake of comparison, we'll go to two restaurants of similar genre and do a contrast between the two.

If, after reading these posts, you really want to tell me about some great ethnic (or straight-up vegetarian) restaurants you love in Nashville, please post a comment.

Sudoku Hurts My Brain

A few weeks ago, Les brought home a book of puzzles called "sudoku." "Sudoku" is a shortened version of a Japanese phrase meaning "only single numbers allowed," and the puzzles are basically about trying to figure out how to place numbers on a grid. It's hard to explain it in writing, but if you click the link above you can see what the puzzles look like and understand the basic principles. The easy versions are simple enough for almost anyone to do, and if you like math or numbers (even though there is no addition or subtraction involved), you'll especially enjoy these puzzles, I think. I personally have found working on sudoku appealing as a stress-reliever at the end of the day since I have to spend so much time focusing on the numbers that I can't think about my supposed "problems."

Apparently, The Times of London has been printing these puzzles since late 2004, so I feel like I am coming late to the party, but if Les didn't bring this book home, I don't think I would have heard of sudoku even yet, so I think it's still fairly underground outside of major metropolitan areas.

So, for those of you who don't live in Tokyo, London, or New York City, and who want to be on the cutting edge of the latest puzzle fads (Anyone? I realize this has a pretty niche appeal...), start carrying around sudoku books and solve the puzzles during your breaks. If you really want to go crazy, use a pen instead of a pencil.

I Just Learned...

I just did some googling and learned what a "Circassian Beauty" is. A fixture in side/freak shows in the 19th century (and probably first shown in PT Barnum's "American Museum"), a Circassian Beauty was advertised as a woman of purest Caucasian stock, a woman of intense beauty and pale skin, traded in slave markets of Constantinople (or is it Istanbul?) and prized by Turkish harem-holding sultans. Incidentally, they also had very large, teased-out hair. You can see a photo of one here, and read more details as well. It is often interesting to see what used to be considered "beautiful" and "titillating" to people of a bygone era. In fact, that is one of the reasons I am most drawn to reading historical fiction -- being able to learn more about what life used to be like in a different time.

I read about Circassian Beauties in Mark Graham's book The Black Maria, a mystery of Old Philadelphia. Although I am not that enthusiastic about the novel overall (there were about four or five severe plot twists at the end of the book, so the story seemed ridiculous by the time I got to the last page), Graham did paint a very vivid and enthralling picture of the Centennial Exhibition (like a World's Fair) in Philadelphia in 1876, and certainly made me want to see some photos of the grandeur he depicts in the book. There is actually quite a bit of information on the Centennial Exhibition here, for those who are interested.

The other thing I had to look up online after reading this book was a "prismoidal railroad." Although I couldn't find a photo of it, the prismoidal railroad is apparently a wooden precursor to our modern monorail.