"home" again

Thoughts on completing my first yoga class in close to three weeks, and my fourth in the last six weeks:

1) Ow.
2) Damn I needed that.
3) Ow.

It's fall weather here. It snowed a couple of times last week up north, which seems a bit uncouth for "not even the fall equinox yet", but I'm okay with September acting like actual fall.

---

Results of various unpleasant tasks this morning:

1) Emailed Chris the accountant regarding what looks like an audit letter from CRA (Canadian for "IRS"). He got back to me quickly with "yeah, they send that to everyone who claims foreign taxes, send me the letter and any docs you've got and i'll take care of it." So I get to do that tonight.
2) Called the remediation contractor. They're still waiting on the strata management company to call them and tell them to start work, despite me having called strata management mid-last week to tell them to call the contractor. They kindly said they'd call strata management themselves and bug them about it.
3) Called the actual IRS about my %&$ tax return, which should have been deposited in mid-May, then by early September. Apparently there have been additional processing difficulties but it's actually through the system now, so I should have my money within four to six weeks, just in time for me to not travel to the US.
4) Have not yet emailed Emily with my last proposal for buying out the condo, but I am not convinced it matters much since I don't think she'll take me up on it anyway.

Regarding #4, even if she were to take me up on it, that would just shuffle the difficulty from "moving" to "finding a roommate," and it almost certainly makes more financial sense to sell the place anyway, and hey, if I'm not going back east in October I can use the time I've already booked to be off work to pack and find a place to live.

everybody's broke but bobby's got a buck

I listened to a lot of country music in junior high circa 1990, because I had a radio and I lived in Fayetteville NC and as far as I knew my choices were that or rap. I stopped listening to it during my first year or two of high school, for complicated reasons that mostly boiled down to "fuck the South" and also "Achy Breaky Heart is godawful." My understanding is that this means I got out right before Garth Brooks ruined country music for everyone.

It's only since moving the hell away that I've re-evaluated my Sherman-esque approach to the South, and refined it down to the more defensible "fuck the Confederacy[1]." And it's only since I started dating Erin that I've revisited the dozen or so country songs that I remember and remember liking. Most of them hold up pretty well, which is nice. For instance, I'll defend Patty Loveless's "On Down the Line" and Alabama's "Song of the South" against all comers.

[1] I take an inordinate amount of joy in the fact that whenever Erik Loomis writes up an "Erik Visits An American Grave" in Arlington, he closes it with "X is buried on the confiscated lands of the traitor Lee, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia."

Last week in the grocery store I heard John "Cougar" Mellencamp's "Jack and Diane" for the first time in ages. All I could think was that it was a whitewashed take on a subject that Hal Ketchum handled far better in "Small Town Saturday Night".

Goin ninety miles an hour down a dead-end road
What's the hurry son, where you gonna go

A perfect encapsulation of desperation and pointlessness.

It's the third verse that stuck with me for twenty-five-plus years, though:

Bobby told Lucy the world ain't round
It drops off sharp at the edge of town
Lucy you know the world must be flat
'Cos when people leave town they never come back