I’ve mentioned we’re about to move out of our current home, but our new home isn’t completed yet (will be probably December). We’ll be living with Cowgrit’s mother during the interim months.

One complication we hadn’t considered until a few days ago was: Can we keep our land-line telephone number and our Road Runner email addresses? Usually, when moving, you have the service turned off at one address and turned on at the next. But we don’t have a next address, yet. (Well, actually, we know what our next home address will be, it just doesn’t exist, yet.)

Setting up the phone transfer turns out to be simple. They can just put the phone service on hold for a few months until the new house is ready for it.

But the email service is more difficult. Not only do we want to keep our email addresses after we move, we need to be able to use our email in the interim. I called and talked with the cable company and I was surprised to find out they apparently have never had this situation come up before. Really? Out of the millions of customers they have, no one has had this scenario?

Since Cowgrit’s mom already has Road Runner service at her house, we can’t just transfer our service to her home. And if we cancel the service with RR, we loose the email addresses. (Our email addresses are our names, and as we were among the first in our area to sign on to RR, we didn’t have to take something like [our name]729.rr.com.)

I spent over 40 minutes on the phone with RR getting this figured out. Unfortunately, the customer service people had no idea how or if this could work. But fortunately, they transferred me to tech service, and the guy there was very helpful (though he didn’t know at first if this could work, either). Sean — thank you very much — checked into the options and figured out how to finagle a way to satisfy our need.

What we’ll do is transfer our email addresses to Cowgrit’s mom’s RR account. Then when we move into our new home, we’ll transfer our email out of her account and into our new account. This way we keep our email addresses and can continue to use the addresses while our own service is cancelled.

This site is not part of my RR account, so there should be no interruption at all to my posting here. Well, there should be no technical interruption to my posting. I’m still not sure how I’ll be working things while living with my mother-in-law. I won’t have a dedicated office, so sitting down to write something will be a little more complicated than how I currently can do it.

Bullgrit

I found Scrubs on Hulu! (I discovered Family Guy there a few months ago, but there’ve been no new episodes for weeks, now.) I got to catch up on the latest 5 Scrubs episodes this week. Oh my God, JD’s leaving the show!? What what? Holy crap! Oh no!

I love Turk and JD. I’ve always thought of myself as most like JD, but now that I sit here and think about the others in my life, I probably should be Turk, because I think of Cowgrit as like Carla. Not that JD and Turk are all that different, anyway.

I’ve never watched the show on its regular, first-aired, time. I just catch old episodes somewhere when channel surfing. At one point a while back, I found reruns on some channel at a regular time, but after catching it four or five times, I then missed it several times, and now I’ve forgotten when and what channel it was on.

So I’ve never been up-to-date with the overarching story line, or the current status of the various relationships. But then, I don’t watch the show for the relationships — I never found Friends at all interesting — I watch for the laugh-a-minute humor. I hope the show can keep up the laughs with a major component of the team gone.

Bullgrit

My regular hairstylist has gone missing from the last place I found her (after she went missing from the previous place I knew her), and I’ve been loathe to find a replacement. See this post for the important details regarding my plight.

But after going two weeks beyond my usual hair growth limit, my head was taking on the resemblance of a squirrel’s nest. I had to bite the bullet and just pick someone, somewhere to cut my hair. So this past Friday, I called a nearby Mitchell’s hair salon.

I should have known I’d get a less than pleasing result when the woman directed to attend to my messy top was essentially indecipherable. I don’t know how many times I said, “I’m sorry, what?” while sitting in her chair. But at least after a couple of failed attempts at the small talk, when it became clear that the language barrier between us was insurmountable, (there are apparently very few recognizable sounds between Hindi-English and Southern-English), she let me sit quietly and close my eyes to doze a bit.

When she was done, I wasn’t really satisfied with my look, but I couldn’t exactly describe what was wrong. And even if I had the necessary descriptive power, I doubt I could have conveyed the points to the woman. So I settled for saying the universal concept of “OK,” just to get out of the seat and out of the salon.

Later, at home, in the mirror with some time to truly examine my cropped locks, I was able to find the words to describe my new haircut: “crap.” Yep, I had a terrible haircut. Dammit.

Then this past weekend, for some strange reason, I decided to shave off my mustache and goatee. I used to shave and grow this thing every couple of weeks, but for the past two years I’ve maintained it constantly. There are people who know me now who have never seen me without my facial hair.

As soon as I finished wiping the residual shaving cream from my chin, I realized shaving was a mistake. I’ve always thought I have a boring face. Even when I was in my twenties, I experimented with beards, mustaches, and goatees. And now that I’ve grown so accustomed to the mustache and goatee, its absence is stark.

I never deluded myself to thinking that I looked all suave and debonair with my lip and chin hair, but without it I look fully dorkish. I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror for several minutes before walking out to the bedroom.

Cowgrit was never a fan of facial hair, and put up with mine only because she loved me. But even she had lately grown accustomed to it. This reversion back to my bare face had a little shock value.

At work, when someone commented, “Hey, you shaved your beard,” I replied, “Yeah, I just did it to draw attention away from my bad haircut.”

Fortunately, my hair (head and face) grows pretty fast. I’ll be searching for a new stylist in three weeks, and my mustache and goatee will be at least recognizable before this week is out. I’ll just have to avoid company photos and family reunions till then.

Bullgrit

I used to live in Wilmington, NC. Wrightsville Beach was just a three-minute drive from my apartment, and I spent a lot of time enjoying the beach environment.

WB is more of a residential beach than something like Myrtle Beach –- there are very few businesses on WB other than some hotels, a few restaurants, and single beach supply store. At night, when the sun goes down, it’s a pretty quiet area. If I were to move to live on a beach, WB is where I’d go.

To support this quiet, small town atmosphere, the WB police are on the ball -– they’re attentive. This is a good thing for WB residents, though maybe not so good a thing for rowdy college kids wanting to party.

One night, when I was in my mid 20s, well into the dark hours, I couldn’t sleep. I got up from bed, put on shorts and a t-shirt, and went to my car. I drove out of the quiet apartment complex in Wilmington to just ride around a bit. Soon I was driving to Wrightsville Beach.

There was nothing to do at WB at 1:00 in the morning, so I just drove around with the windows down, listening to the sound of the wind and surf. Within a minute or so of my pulling onto the main drive along the length of the small island upon which WB sits (just over two short bridges), a police car got behind me.

At first I just thought we were both going the same direction, so I didn’t think anything of it. There were no other cars on the road at that hour, so it soon became pretty clear that the cop was following me. When I pulled into a short side road that went through a small neighborhood of beach houses, the cop car followed me.

I realized what was going on immediately. Here was a lone car, driving slowly down the empty streets, possibly casing the area for some nefarious purpose. I made sure not to break any road rules, but I began making my way back to the exit of WB.

As soon as I crossed the second bridge off the island, the cop car slowed down, made a u-turn and returned to his patrol.

Now, would this cop have followed me and watched me like that if I was a white guy driving on the beach road? Oh, wait, I am a white guy.

A couple years before the above situation, I was accused of shoplifting. But again, I’m a white guy.

I can’t help but wonder, if I were black, would I or someone claim these events occurred because the cops and/or the clerk were profiling me based on my race?

Bullgrit