Yes folks, moving day is complete.
If you would be so kind, please update your bookmarks or RSS feeds accordingly:
New blog: http://theridehome.wordpress.com
New feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheRideHome
I really do appreciate everyone who reads this blog—and comments on it!—and I apologize for any inconvenience this might cause anyone.
Ok, here’s the deal. I know I polled you kind folks a few weeks (months?) back about whether my blog needed a name. And most of you said that it already had one. And it did.
But I have been reflecting a lot (and I spend a lot of time in the car that ends up being prime reflecting time… more on this in a sec), and decided that while Megan Blogs was a name for my blog, it probably wasn’t the best name. It made sense when you came to my site and looked at the header, but all-in-all, I wasn’t really happy with it. And the fact that I work for someone who has a popular blog with his name and the word “blog” in it (I’m not linking because I think he might be embarrassed by all the F-bombs I drop around here, but if you’re smart you’ll figure it out) always made me worry I would be seen as a copy-cat.
So anyway, the one thing that kept coming back to me was that the majority of my blog posts come from thoughts I have while driving home from work every night. I live in Murfreesboro and commute to and from Nashville every day, and let me tell you: That leaves me with much time for thinking. I have often considered getting a digital voice recorder and recording my thoughts, as many times by the time I get home and sit down to blog I have forgotten several things.
I think it also works as a metaphor on other levels, maybe… driving home to a final destination, home can mean many things, etc. Though I hope reading my blog doesn’t result in death. Maybe I should adjust that metaphor to mean that home=enlightenment or something. Whatever. You decide what it means. For me, it means “the shit that comes out of my brain after I’ve been bitching and sometimes crying in traffic for an hour and a half.”
I really considered calling it “The Long Way Home,” but those damn Dixie Chicks stole my idea before I thought of it. And while I love their moxy and their stance on the war and our moronic president, I don’t necessarily love country, nor do I want to be accused of ripping off a song title for a blog title.
So I have registered a new blog with WordPress, http://theridehome.wordpress.com, but right now their site is all wonky and won’t let me log into its admin area, even though the blog shows up on my main wordpress area. (Apparently this is a large problem and there are several forums with people complaining. It seems the only way to fix it is to send them feedback, but feedback is closed on the weekends. Drats.)
Anyway, I hope Brittney at Nashville is Talking doesn’t blackball me now, since she just got me added to their aggregator and now i’m going and changing things. Luckily they haven’t blogrolled me yet, so Brittney, if you’re reading this: I’m so sorry, I should have things worked out as soon as WordPress gets their shit together (hopefully by Monday evening) and I really appreciate your work to get me added in the first place.
I hope this isn’t committing blog-suicide, either. I have been getting increasing levels of traffic and am loving it, and I hope that all you loyal reader-folks will continue to read me at my new home, once it’s up and running. See you soon on the other side!
p.s. Does anyone know why the text I added to the header is showing up all fuzzy? The image is from this template, and I added the text in Photoshop. When I view the jpg in Preview, the text looks crisp and clean, as it does when I first select the image to upload. But after WordPress crops it (just a few pixels on the left-hand side) and I view the site, the text looks fuzzy. Boo. 
Project365 | Jan. 1 - March 10
Originally uploaded by Megan_G.
So I’m not so great at taking a photo every day, and I’m definitely not so good at uploading them very often, but here’s a mosaic thing of all the photos I’ve done so far. (Thanks to Cole for pointing me in the right direction.)
Tags: Project365, mosaic
Project365 | March 10
Originally uploaded by Megan_G.
Alex makes a leaning tower of half and half. It’s harder than it looks, and took a mastering of physics to achieve.
Tags: Project365, IHOP
Project365 | March 7
Originally uploaded by Megan_G.
Out at BWW for some trivia and drinks. We were actually playing live trivia this night, not the one on the TV you see here.
Tags: Project365, BWW
Project365 | March 4
Originally uploaded by Megan_G.
BK plays Morrowind on XBox
Tags: Project365, cats, Xbox, video games
Project365 | March 1
Originally uploaded by Megan_G.
He lost his legs in the war.
Tags: Project365, cats
Project365 | Feb. 28
Originally uploaded by Megan_G.
To celebrate Tabby’s new car (well, and that she got insurance so she can drive it now, haha), Ian, Scott, Tabby and I piled into her Mustang GT for a ride to La Siesta. I believe it’s becoming tradition to take the new car of the group out for Mexican food. Anyway, Scott sat up front (admittedly taking his own life into his hands because the seatbelt doesn’t work), so Ian and I–the two tallest of the four–squished our way into the tiny backseat. As you can see, it’s not made for someone who’s 6′3″.
Tags: Project365, cars
My old car!!
Originally uploaded by Megan_G.
This was funny. While waiting at the Honda dealership to take the pinstripes off my new CIvic, we wandered into the used lot and saw my old car! They were asking $7,000—even though they only gave me $2,000 for it! And the best part? I bought it for $10,000 five years ago! If anyone pays $7,000 for this car (it has almost 130,000 on it and some major things about to go wrong) they are stupid and deserve what they get out of it.
Also: Click the picture to go to the photo’s page on my Flickr account. There are a couple notes on it that don’t show up here in WordPress.
Tags: cars, Pontiac Grand Am
Ian and I are getting ready to head to IHOP for some of the internationally acclaimed pancakes.
Since I did a critical review of our Cracker Barrel breakfast experience last weekend, expect one of IHOP’s from today.
Stay tuned, I know you’re dying to hear how it goes…
Tags: breakfast, IHOP, Cracker Barrel
After not having been to my salon, Tangerine, in two hair cuts (which, for me, is like a year and a half), I went back tonight to get about five inches cut off and some layers put in.
I’d gone to one of those Hair-Five-0 types of places for the last two cuts, and while I was happy for the most part, I started thinking it wasn’t such a great value. I was trying to save money (my usual salon costs $40 for the hair cut, not counting tip), and figured I’d go where Ian goes and save about $30.
That never happened. The first time I went it was warm outside, so I just paid for a hair cut ($12) and a shampoo ($3, but sorry, you can’t cut curly hair like mine dry. It’s too hard to get it even). The second time I went back, which was a couple months ago, it was cold. So I paid $12 for the hair cut, $3 for the shampoo, and $3 for her to dry it. Yes, they were seriously going to let me walk out in the freezing weather with wet hair if I didn’t pony up.
So I started thinking… I’m paying $18 plus tip to get a mediocre haircut at a place with zero ambience or care for how my hair turns out.
Or I could pay $40 (I know, twice the price) to go to a good salon. On paper, it sounds crazy.
But tonight, as soon as I walked in the doors, I remembered why I go.
The smell of Aveda products is like none other. It’s relaxing. It’s refreshing. And yes, it’s expensive.
But what adds to the ambience of the place (besides the fact that the staff is always friendly and is actually qualified) is the following. This is what you get at Tangerine:
When you’re ready to go, someone meets you at the cash register and goes over everything the stylist used on you, and asks if you’d like to purchase any of the products. All it takes is a simple “no,” too. I’ve been to salons before where they seriously try to sneak products on you, adding them on to the bill before you even know what’s going on, so it’s nice to be able to say “no thanks” and not have to come up with an excuse (”Oh I totally just bought a bunch of that stuff last week.”)
Anyway, I know you can get this kind of experience at several salons, not just Tangerine. They just happen to be my fave because I’ve been going there for a little over seven years.
But there’s no way in hell you’re going to get that kind of experience at one of the cut-and-run places.
And since I only cut my hair every so often, when I can afford it I like to splurge and spend the extra money on myself. It’s kind of like therapy, I think. And I act girly so seldom, I think I deserve it once in a while.
Tags: Tangerine, hair salon
Ian and I just got tickets to see our favorite minor league baseball team, the Montgomery Biscuits!! We’ll be headed to Chattanooga to see them play the Lookouts April 14.
The best part?
First row, behind home plate. FOR EIGHT DOLLARS!!!
Today I have owned my new Honda Civic for one month. I finally took off the piece of plastic protecting the inside pocket of my driver’s side door. I have almost 2,100 miles on it. It still smells new, but luckily it’s starting to smell like me (I hate the new car smell.) Happy day.
Ok, I didn’t realize that by saying I had a shitty breakfast experience at Cracker Barrel and pointing out that IHOP has better pancakes (they are the fucking international house of, for Christ’s sake), I would be committing an act equal to insulting your collective mamas.
So as I received such an outcry in response to my previous pancake post, please let me say this in clarification:
[/sarc]
p.s. While we’re on the topic of food, Ian and I embarked on a new tradition today: Taco Night. Hells yeah, dinner was ¡muy delicioso!
catpocolypse
Originally uploaded by Megan_G.
I found this on some Web site, though I can’t remember its URL because it was way too long and completely nonsensical. Anyway… I bring you: CATPOCOLYPSE!!!
Ok, here’s the deal.
Ian and I want to go to Memphis in May’s music festival, the Beale Street Music Festival, May 4-6. They aren’t even announcing the lineup until March 8, and already ALL OF THE HOTELS ON BEALE STREET ARE BOOKED.
Well, I take that back. The Memphis Peabody hotel is open, but it’s like $350 a night, non-refundable.
So here’s my question: there are a few hotels about 10-15 miles away from Beale Street (east of the river, not across it in Arkansas) that do have rooms, and are about $90-$150 a night. Is it even worth staying there and trying to get a cab to the festival?
I used to go to Memphis pretty often (dated an asshat in pharmacy school there), but I never spent much time downtown so I don’t know how ghetto it gets the farther east you go. I don’t want to leave my car at some hotel for three days while I’m getting wasted listening to awesome music, just to come back and find it jacked.
Anyone got any ideas?
This morning Ian and I decided, as we do many mornings, that we were hungry as hell and wanted some IHOP.
So after convincing me I didn’t need to shower to go out of the house, we head over there. I dreamt of pancakes the whole 10-minute ride, just remember their awesomeness from the last time I had them, which was on free pancake day.
We pull in the parking lot, and are met with our worst nightmare:
Churchies.
What appeared to be hundreds of folks fresh out of church services lined up outside the door waiting for their turn to stuff their face with my pancakes. Isn’t gluttony a sin? Apparently not on Sundays after church.
Shit, we muttered. We don’t want to wait AN HOUR for freaking pancakes. It’s already noon as it is.
Maybe we can hit Santa Fe instead? Nah, their lot is full, too, and we really, really want some pancakes. Well, Ian wants french toast.
So we decide to try Cracker Barrel* over by our house. It’s a gamble, since the Barrel is quite popular with the Churchies (probably moreso, I’d surmise, since it doesn’t have the air of “I was totally wasted like 3 hours ago and now I’m here at this 24-hour diner to get me some pancakes to sober up” like IHOP does), but by this time we had to have us some breakfast food.
We get to the Barrel, and the parking lot is full, but there are a few spaces near the front. We decide to give it a try, and when told the wait is 20-25 minutes we give in. Hell, we’ve made it this far in our quest for the cakes. Might as well wait another 20.
Finally our name is called, and we are seated. Fuck yes! Pancake time!! I am so excited.
Then it all starts to go downhill.
They don’t have regular french toast for Ian, only sourdough. I’m sorry, but who the hell wants to eat sourdough french toast? Last I heard sourdough made its name in San Francisco.
I order my coveted pancakes, but when they show up, they’re undercooked. And my bacon is fatty and probably not cooked all the way, either.
Blech.
Cracker Barrel might be good for downhome southern food, but they don’t know shit about breakfast. Even when fully cooked, their pancakes don’t hold a candle to IHOP’s. And the price? It was almost $20 for Ian and I to eat there. If we’d gone to IHOP, a similar order would’ve been about $12.
I still enjoy their beef stew and grilled cheese sandwiches, but as far as breakfast goes, IHOP totally pwns Cracker Barrel.
*Sorry to my friend Tabby, who serves at Cracker Barrel, for this post.
Tags: IHOP, Cracker Barrel, breakfast
I don’t know how many of you subscribe to my RSS feed, but I just changed it. I was using FeedBurner, but then I realized that WordPress lets me create a feed through them, too, and track details about it. Since I never log on to Feedburner anymore, I thought this was a good way to consolidate trips around the tubes/pipes/whatever we’re snarkily calling the Internet now.
So please make note: http://meganblogs.wordpress.com/feed/
If you think this was a bad move, please let me know. I don’t really know too much about the ways of RSS except I subscribe to an assload of feeds.
Nevermind. Lynnster had a really good point. 
Tags: RSS, feeds, Feedburner vs. WordPress
As anyone who’s been following Nashville news lately knows, the topic of [illegal] immigration has been a hot one. As I’ve said before, I believe when a lot of people around here say “immigrants,” they really mean “hispanics.” Legal or illegal, it doesn’t matter to them. Nashville is full of rednecks, and these rednecks don’t want no dang mexicans around these here parts. (Except to build their houses, landscape their lawns, and feed them burritos. But as long as they don’t speak, ask to receive services—legally or illegally, it doesn’t matter—or send their kids to school, it’s cool.)
The best way to get an idea of just how racist and scared they are is to read some of the comments on the immigration stories in The Tennessean. I don’t believe everyone in Nashville feels this way, but it sure does stereotype us.
Here are some remarks from our city’s finest:
MominTn: “If you see them disobeying the traffic laws, write down the tag number (chances are it’s stolen).”
rebeltodd: “If any AMERICAN finds an immigrant who is not able to prove their “legality”, that AMERICAN has not the just the right, but the responsiblity … to KILL that illegal. I still say if the INS did it’s JOB, arrested illegal scum, and then EXECUTED them, we would not have this problem.”
jatowry: “If they are not illegal’s, why does Bank of America have to have SPANISH SPEAKING TELLERS FOR THEM TO DO BUSINESS WITH BANK OF MEXICO, I MEAN AMERICA?”
(uhh, right… because the minute you become legalized you magically are able to speak English, right?)
dave615c: “Its hard to compete against people that live 10 + people in a house.”
(Umm, how so?)
wendyw (who is very grammatically challenged): “we moved up here to get a way from them so my husband to get a construction job and when we go on the sites there is nothing but hispanics. WHY DID WE FIGHT THE ALAMO??????? ONLY TO HAVE THEM SHUVED DOWN OUR THROATS……. “
MominTN (I hope she’s not teaching her children to follow her logic, because this is some messed up shit): “At one time, there were over a dozen Mexicans in my neighbor’s tiny yard, painting the trim on the house… You have to know that they were illegal, because I have never seen anyone in my neighborhood with over 4 men painting their exterior trim. Usually it is just two men. Then another time, there were about 50 Mexicans standing in the parking area … learning how to use weedeaters. These also had to be illegal because what grown man in the US doesn’t knwo how to use a weed eater?“
(So by this logic, any of my male adult friends/family members who don’t use weedeaters are illegal. And if I get three of my friends to help me paint some trim, that means we’re illegal as well.)
Vel6377: “If we sit and do nothing this entire state will one day look like Antioch.”
(Oh god no!! No more unfilled apartment complexes and crappy malls!!!)
Wu an: “I thought English was an international language. It’s pretty much spoken all over where as spanish is not or Islamic.”
(Islamic is a language now??)
alabama_wild_man: “But do NOT sneak into the U.S. and DEMAND that we translate everything into 15 different languages simply because they do not want to learn English… Doing that was one of the main reasons that the Roman Empire fell.”
(Ok. So people from 15 different countries are sneaking in the U.S. And the Roman empire fell because of the U.S.’ translation efforts??)
tpatterson: “Some of these people don’t want to just “stick” to their communities.”
(Yes, God forbid immigrants want to leave their neighborhood!!!)
EvilJ (this post was in sarcasm, but it does a great job of summing up the overall feeling of the commenters): Everybody knows Jesus was a white dude with a beard. And he is from Heaven. And he spoke only English, and there were no homosexuals or Mexicans. And guns…there were lots and lots of guns…because that is what God wants.”
Sigh.
Tags: Nashville, immigration
I have a quicktime movie that i took with my camera that is about 80 MB. I’d like to make it a little smaller so I can upload it to MySpace, but I don’t know how. Does anyone know of some free software I can use to do this? (I have iMovie, but have never used it so I don’t know if it works.)
Gracias!
Tags: quicktime, editing movies
Then go to Harrison Glen, a subdivision in Murfreesboro (well, it might be out of the city limits, it was pretty BFE when we found it.)
Ian and I had a lot to do this weekend, so of course we procrastinated the best we could. We went to get Whitt’s BBQ to ease our hangovers this morning (and by morning I mean 1 p.m.), and when we finished we decided a great way to waste time would be drive around the most country parts of Murfreesboro we hadn’t ever been around.
So we took off (I’m not going to get into specifics of where we were because 1. I don’t really remember the street names and 2. most people that read this blog probably won’t know where the hell I am referring to) and drove around randomly down some back roads, just to see where they’d take us.
We were on the Cason Lane side of town after leaving Whitt’s so we decided to see what new stores they were putting in around that area. That led us to some backroads, and eventually down some road where we kept seeing signs for Harrison Glen. We’d heard the name of that subdivision before, so after a conversation about how when Ian moved to Murfreesboro in 1992 there were only about 3 subdivisions and now there’s about 333, we decided to see what was so awesome about Harrison Glen that they deserved signs every 5 feet.
After driving for what seemed like an hour (but really was about 10 minutes) we found it—waaay out in BFE. OH. MY. GOD. It had the UGLIEST houses imaginable. Seriously. The first house we saw from the road was this beaut:
Oh yes, a lovely blue siding will do the trick to make your house look expensive. Oh, and that wasn’t the only eyesore nicety. Peach must be the new beige in house building, because this wasn’t the only one in the neighborhood of the hue:
Anyway, after we left Harrison Glen we found ourselves out on Barfield Church Road, near our house. We kept on trucking down 231 with no plan in mind. We went by Blackberry Ridge Golf Course to look at all the million dollar houses (and noticed one that we always look at when we pass—you really can’t help it, it’s so large—is for sale), and then decided to head out to Fosterville, since neither of us had even been there and it was on our way back to the house.
Well, Fosterville as about as exciting as a BFE community between Shelbyville and Murfreesboro could be, but we did see a front yard filled with rooster shelters. Ian said they were fighting roosters, but I don’t know how he could tell. Maybe it’s a guy thing. He also admonished me when I didn’t wave at a passing truck. Apparently, in the country you have to wave at people who pass you. But only people who pass you going the other direction. We were passed by several people from behind, but god damn we were seeing the sights in Fosterville! You can’t do that at 70 mph down a curvy country road.
So after seeing the fighting roosters and an old country store, we made our way back to 231 and headed home.
Now, it’s a couple hours later, and how much work have we accomplished?
Big. Fat. Zero.
Unless you count me working on my MTSU Undergrad music playlist on iTunes, blogging, and uploading a shit ton of old photos. Now that’s productive!
Tags: wasting time, Murfreesboro, BFE, fighting roosters
Next door to the Fosterville (Rutherford Co., Tenn.) Volunteer Fire Dept.
Tags: Project365
Risk last night/early this morning. I came in second place.
Tags: Project365
Keep up!
