This is just an update to let you know I will update tomorrow.  Seriously.  I told mom i would update tongiht, but then I sat down in my bed and started doing my homework and I realized how tired I really am.  So I will give you a tale about my Post-Thanksgiving Retail Experience tomorrow.  Now I goeth to bedeth.  Nighty-nighteth.

There isn’t too much to update.  I’m home for Thanksgiving, but I have work Friday.  That’s gonna be fun.  Today I found my fancy journal thats got wood covers and I updated that since I hadn’t written in it since 2002.  It took hours and I just tried to hit the highlights.  It got me thinking about it though.  So then I went online and found my very first blog, and copied and pasted all of those entries into a word document.  Then I went to my second blog and started copying those.  Argh, its so painstaking and long.  I hadn’t realized that I had written this much in four years.  I’m still in 2006 and I already have 155 pages.  I’ll keep working on it tomorrow.  Alright its really late and I’m kind of tired so goodnight!

I stand outside of Peterson camera hanging from my neck, hand shading my eyes from the early afternoon sun. I’m so excited/nervous that I can’t stand still. I left my phone in Haley’s car (whoops) so I have no way to know what time it is now. My meeting is 1:30, and I know I’m a few minutes early. I walk around taking pictures of the outside, feeling a small thrill every time I glanced through a window knowing that soon I would be on the other side.

This is a picture through a small hole on the porch.

This is the hole.

Finally I’ve taken most of the pictures that I can and I go to sit on the front porch to wait. A car pulls up and a man gets out, seeming to be looking for someone. My heart thumps in my chest, and I stand up, smiling widely, like I could have done anything else, I was so excited! I meet him at the front door.

“How do you do?”

“You’re Suzanne, right?”

“Yes, that me. Suzanne Flynn.”

“Sorry for being late.” He pulls out a ring of keys and starts fumbling with the door.

“That’s absolutely no problem! I walked around and took pictures of the outside.” My smile is permanently etched on my face, this is the moment. I’ve been wishing for this moment since I first arrived in Montevallo. The door opens.

“I probably should have made you wear a hard hat.”

“I don’t mind if you want me too.” At this point I would do whatever it took to get into the building. The door was open and I could see a tantalizing glimpse of the hall beyond. Nothing could keep me from getting into that hallway. He stepped inside and I followed.

The floor is littered with bits of wall. Plaster and paint just flake from the walls revealing the boards beneath. On the right wall there is the old fashion fuse box, complete with lever and copper. I couldn’t even take a picture I just step and look around in wonder. I crane my neck and look at the high ceiling. It has a tin pattern ceiling, in some places, in others the tin is gone. Moulding runs along the top edge of the wall, dirty and molded, it too has fallen done in some places. I’m in! Mr. Pritchett walks me around to one of the big rooms on the right. Debris is scattered in every room, in this one the walls are spary painted with graffiti from various college night participants.

In the next room he takes me too, a bathroom, the plaster has fallen off the wall in large chunks revealing the brick work underneath.

Room by room we wander, he points out various features. A dumb waiter is in on room, you can read the manufacturers name still printed on the wood. Mr. Pritchett shows me where the elevator is going to be put in and explains what each of the rooms are going to be used for. Then he takes me onto the back porch.

I’ve admired the porch from the outside countless times. When I had come over to take pictures the first time in 2004 I never would have thought that I would be able to see the porch from the inside. There is a marked difference in the wood on the porch than in the rest of the house. In 2003 when they had started some basic restoration they had apparently done some extensive work on the porch. Even though I had walked around here many times, I knew the view around Peterson pretty well, but standing on the porch and looking out the landscape seemed totally different. Looking at the glass you could see which panes were the orginals and which ones were new. They tried to save and reuse the orginial panes but sometimes that just wasn’t possible. Mr. Pritchett tells me those lucky bastards in the art department are going to get a lounge out there, with all of those windows. I curse the art department.

We walk back inside. I peer longingly at the staircase that leads upwards. “I don’t suppose it would be possible to go upstairs?” I mean if he thought I should wear a hard hat then the second floor probably wasn’t stable enough to support a student.

Pritchett shrugged, “Sure. I don’t see why not.”

My huge smile returned and up the stair we went. They were also covered in debris and the steps themselves creaked alarmingly in some places, but the banister held firm. The banister didn’t wobble even a millimeter as the two of us climbed the stairs. Whatever craftsman had built that banister could be proud. The second floor landing was covered in wall debris just like much of the downstairs but with an new addition. Business cards for the Health and Counseling services. It served as a gentle reminder about what this building had been used for. There were some places on the second floor that I wasn’t allowed to traverse, understandably since in some places you could see through the ceiling to the attic above.

Tin ceilings hung down touch the floor like willow branches.  Some of the tin was black and brown, while some were barely spotted. Peterson originally had eight fireplaces, four on each floor, with four chimneys. Two of the chimney’s had been removed by the restoration team in 2003, and most of the fireplaces had been boarded up. One fireplace had been exposed, however, and you could see what they all must have looked like if you added a brick front to each. The walls were kind of pale sea foam green in the halls and some of the rooms and the big rooms were yellow creamy white. In all the rooms the paint was flaking off.

We returned to the staircase. “Would you like to see the attic?”

“Would I? Yes!” We climbed to the attic. Once again I was gratefully to the sturdy rail that guided the way.

“Now up here you are going to have to be very careful where you step.” He stepped gingerly from the steps, through the door, into the attic. The only light came from a dormer, and two small windows across from each other on opposite ends of the house. New wood filled the space and contrasted sharply with the older wood.

Sorry it’s so blurry there wasn’t a lot of light up there and I hadn’t brought my tripod with me.

I took a picture of the mechanism that powered the dumbwaiter. On the ground was an old 1950’s Emergency splint made of what looked like cardboard and shoestrings. There were a couple of places where the floorboards had broken downwards, I didn’t step there. The reason he had told me to watch my step wasn’t because of those odd boards, it was because of the inch thick black steel cables that stretched from oneside of the building to the other about seven inches from the ground.

Those cables weren’t just there because someone thought it would be funny to create a trip hazard for the unwary. Those cables were what held the building together. The walls had started to fall away in opposite directions and those cables where what prevented them from doing that and the causing the whole building to fall apart. The curious thing to me at least was the fact that the attic wasn’t oppressively hot. The day outside is very moderate, not to hot or cold, but the sun was shining and beating down on the roof of a building that had no central air conditioning. The rest of the house had been pleasantly cool and the attic was merely warm. William Warren had done an excellent job designing a building for a central Alabama college that stayed temperate.

We exited and went back downstairs. Mr. Pritchett gave me a sideways glance when we were on the ground floor, “Would you like to see the basement?”

“Sure!” We headed outside to the small staircase that led down underneath the house. “You might not actually want to see this, its just a water heater and some pumps.”

“As much as I’ve studied this building I want to make sure I see the whole building including the basement.”

“I thought you’d want to, as excited as you were about the rest of the house.”

It is very dark in the basement. Pipes crisscrossed the ceiling. The old door was propped up against the wall, creating a very surreal setting.

We exited and I thanked Mr. Pritchett for taking the time from his busy schedule to show me around personally. He asked for a copy of my pictures and my paper, which I promised to give him. My camera told me I had 94 pictures, some are probably too blurry to use, but still they document the interiors. I wish I had taken more.

 Sorry it took so long to get these up.  My computer broke down, and then once I had it back I had papers to write so that is why this is so late.  Mom has been nagging reminding me to post so here it is.  Jeff and I are leaving after this goes up to go home.  Then tomorrow we are going to Granny’s to interview her for a class project.

I had some extra time this morning so I started reading through the stories I could find on my hard drive.  Some of them I was like, “Whoa, this is bad, I understand why I stopped writing it.”  The few that I’ve finished I’m like, “Hey, that’s not bad.”  Other’s I’m like “why didn’t I finish this?  I need too!”  And there are a few that just leave me scratching my head, with no clue where I was going with it.  For instance:

Wind whipped Zeb’s hair around his head as he fell at an alarming rate.  Olin’s beard!  This would teach him to chase ‘keets blindly through thick brush.  If he survived.  He couldn’t swim, so even if he managed to miss the large pointy rocks at the bottom he’d drown.

That’s it.  That is the whole document.  Olin’s beard?  What the heck are ‘keets supposed to be?  If I threw him off a cliff into an ocean with sharp pointy rocks at the bottom and an inability to swim what the heck was I going to do to save him?  I have no idea where that story was going.  Odd. 

There were a couple of others that I had completely forgotten writing and were pretty awesome so I \’m going to try to work on them again.  Like this one:

Resias sat stonily at the table, staring resolutely into his glass of drael.  The amber liquid rippled lazily as the whole building shook imperceptibly with the launch of a ship from the spaceyard nearby.  The naked woman he was so determinedly ignoring pouted prettily where she lay across the table.

“Resias, you’re not even looking at me.”  She rolled form her side to her stomach, “Resias, you going to make me cry.”

Resias sipped from his drael and still kept his eyes averted.

At this the beautiful naked woman stood up on the table and began dancing, a slow seductive dance, which would have been erotic even if she’d been wearing clothes, as it was she was not and any man who saw her would keel over from sheer lust.  No one was watching her, however.  She couldn’t care less about the rest of the bar, it was the man in front of her she wanted.  At his continued refusal to play her game she stamped her dainty foot angrily and vanished in a puff of pink smoke.  Resias’ shoulder unknotted themselves and he could breathe again.  He brought his eyes up and looked around the bar.  No one was even glancing his way, much less staring at where the beautiful naked woman had been and the dissipating pink smoke. 

He sighed.  He wished that they would just leave him alone.  He’d seen them for as far back as he could remember and had learned over the years to not interact with them in public, as he was the only one who could see them, and if caught conversing with apparently thin air they’d send him back to Harnek where he’d spend the next three months being psycho-analyzed and another three with some sort of medical treatment.  Again.  His nightmares of the hospital were just beginning to fade he didn’t not want to be sent back.  Besides he really wanted to keep this job.  They people left him alone, nothing was expected of him but his job, and all his job required of him was to fix the machines around the ship.  He liked machines, they didn’t expect small talk, and they didn’t care if he started talking to the person next to him that no one else could see.  He had one real friend in the entire galaxy, her name was Lexa and she was currently on the other side of it from him working with a public relations firm on Gamos. 

At first when I read it I had no clue what why going on, why no one could see the vanishing woman, or why this guy was crazy.  Then I found the note file I had written to go with it.  HANDY!  I think I’m going to make it a new rule that I have to do that for every story I start so that I can pick up later with going eh?

Today I got to take pictures of the inside of Peterson!  Glee!  I’ll share later.

My presentation today was a hoot… or perhaps howl would be a better word.  I don’t want ot describe to much about my presentation before I see the video and decided whether its usable or not. Everyone else’s presentation were really fascinating.  Things I learned today:

I really want to see the Apotheosis of Washington in the Captiol Building.

Rose Greenhow was a confederate spy in Washington D.C. during the war, and is teh only woman killed during the war on official buisness.

Teddy Roosevelt could be the inspiration for Batman.

Commodore Perry’s expedition ships to Japan were call the Black Ships.

There was appearently a deaf guy on The Grassy Knoll that saw the second shooter but was unable to alert anyone.

When Japanese-Americans were sent to internement camps in WWII they were only allowed one bag, and were forced to live in horse stalls that had been mucked out and had one light installed.

There are two diffrent styles of gameplay in soccer.  The fast paced version seen in most of europe, and a slower more strategic one played in the US, Italy, and Spain.

I enjoyed the day, and having Mom come down to visit.  The da Vinci exhibit this afternoon was fascinating as well.  Even though it was only 11 sketches I enjoyed being in the same room as some of the masters drawings.  Leonardo da Vinci really was an amazing artist/scientist.  I bought a magnet for my fridge of one of his sketches, to accompany my August Macke magnet that I bought in Germany.  I think this is going to be my new thing.  Collecting magnets from various museums.