posted 2008/10/16 at 23:39
In addition to being sick, and just plain busy with a hundred things, it's been hard for me to come here to write because most of my spare time has been spent following the election, and I just don't have that much to say about the election. I've got the worst case of election burnout I can ever remember having, and instead of doing the smart thing and taking a break, I'm just going to tough it out for the next nineteen days. It's not that long, and even though there's a growing perception that the presidential election is over and done with (I agree that McCain's chances of victory are diminishing but it's not over until the fourth of next month), the growing possibility of the Democrats gaining a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate is providing a bit of intrigue. As much as I have mixed feelings about Al Franken, I'm really pulling for him to win that Senate seat in Minnesota because it's the old Paul Wellstone seat and I really don't want that in Republican hands any longer.
I guess I got a bit of a break these past few days when I got to watch the Canadian elections. The difference in campaign commercials (I'm glad Hockey Night in Canada is back on, although the new format and new song do nothing for me) was refreshing, and watching CBC's approach to the returns was refreshing from the usual political coverage I'm used to here in America. Of course, I still found plenty to get ticked off about because the Green Party got shafted up there as well, although at least the media and party leaders up there take the Greens a lot more seriously than they do here. I wasn't that happy about the Conservatives gaining seats, but even with as little as I follow Canadian politics I knew that Stephane Dion was not about to lead the Liberals to retake government. Perhaps the unhappiest part is that because Canadian elections only run for five weeks, it didn't provide that much material for Rick Mercer, especially since he was off for the first couple of weeks after Parliament was dissolved.
Of course, all of this Joe the Plumber business now has Toledo back in the spotlight for another completely insignificant episode. I know Holland well because that's where the family lived after the fire while the house was being rebuilt; in the eighties a big strip mall called Spring Meadows was built down there, at the intersection between I-475 and the main road that leads out to Toledo Express Airport. Out hotel was on the other side of I-475. I still go down there sometimes -- the smaller of our two Best Buys moved into Spring Meadows lately (the bigger is in a nasty part of town I try to avoid), and there's also a Target there -- but the mall as a whole is dying because of the office park a couple of miles south of there, and then further south are our two lifestyle malls, the Shops at Fallen Timbers and Levis Commons. I'm surprised that Obama spent so much time in the Toledo area this week, given that the votes he needs to get are in the southern, more conservative part of the state, but the economic crisis is probably enough to shift enough cultural conservatives over to Obama's column to let him carry the state easily. Again, though, this isn't Election Day, and a lot can change in the next nineteen days, so I don't feel comfortable making any solid predictions. (Except that Nader won't win, I know, but I'm voting for him anyway dammit.)
Labels: canada, greenparty, politics, toledo
posted 2008/07/09 at 23:50
This past weekend I picked up a CD/DVD rack from Best Buy. Mind you, I haven't exactly been buying that many CDs or DVDs (or even video games) lately, but I have bought so many books that I needed to repurpose one of my DVD towers for books. I put the storage rack together over the weekend, and it was a huge hassle because the directions weren't all that clear; I had to put several of the supports on three different times before I got them assembled in the correct order. It was only after I got the storage rack put together that the real fun began, though, because I had to move my big heavy bookcase about six feet to make room for the new storage rack. This required unloading the whole bookcase first, moving all the books into my sister and brother-in-law's old bedroom, and then moving the bookcase and loading it right back up. After that, I was finally able to move the new rack in here and get it fully loaded up, something I didn't manage to finish until late this afternoon. I had some more rearranging to do after that, and I still have a large pile on unsorted papers and other items in front of my television, but for now I finally have all my media organized the way I want it, and I have room for it to grow once more.
My big bookcase, which had been behind me at my workstation here, is now just off to my right, and I literally had less than an inch of space to fit it in between the wall and the windowsill, but it's here now. The shelves, particularly the top ones, are starting to sag, and I know that I've probably got twice as much weight on those shelves than what they're rated for, but I still want to keep this bookcase if I possibly can. Not only is it a good fit, but it's made by Sauder, and Sauder is one of the few local companies that produces stuff that I like. (I don't know if Sauder products are marketed outside of the Toledo area, but they make good-quality, inexpensive furniture and storage solutions.) I'm starting to have so many "big" books, though, that I may eventually need to buy a second big bookcase to house them, and I don't have the space for a second bookcase in this room. I could always put an extra bookcase in the loft or the vacant bedroom, but I don't feel comfortable having my books and other stuff in another room like that.
The other big development that came from this most recent rearrangement of my stuff is that I've finally given up on finding spare plastic cases for my old Nintendo games, and I'm just shelving the cartridges by themselves. (I have a small "library" of manuals in the new storage unit.) I had tried forever to find those old clear plastic cases like they used to put the games in at video rental places, because I thought they looked good and did a better job of protecting games than the sleeves Nintendo packaged the games in. Let's face facts, though; what kind of luck was I going to have trying to find standard-issue plastic cases for NES games in 2008? Finding these empty cases was hardly my life's work for the past few years, but it was something I kept trying every so often for the past several years. Rather than continuing to fight that battle, I just took the games out of the plastic cases, and now they're by themselves on my new storage rack (and taking up a lot less space, too). I guess now I just need to find someone else desperate for these old plastic cases and see how much money I can get for them.
Labels: books, dvds, personal, toledo, videogames
posted 2008/07/07 at 16:35
Two of Dad's loves were architecture and cars. One of the ways he put himself through college was to buy old cars that were being sold for a pittance, then fix them up and sell them for a big profit. You don't want to know how many times I had to hear his speech about how the car companies are evil for making their cars impossible to fix on your own. (It's not that I don't agree with him, but after hearing the same speech umpteen times you get kind of sick of it, you know?) Although Dad's delineation work didn't require him to have strong knowledge of architecture, it surely helped, and Dad did redesign the house after the fire. His ability to identify makes and models of old cars was awe-inspiring, and his knowledge of architecture was expansive to say the least. (I wish I'd had the opportunity to take him on a drive to and from MCCC's main campus, because he would have gotten a huge kick out of all the old barns I pass along the way.)
These past couple of days I've had a couple of experiences that kind of tied in to those things. Yesterday I finally went out to see The Shops at Fallen Timbers, a new "Lifestyle Centre" development along the same lines of Levis Commons. Back when I first went to Levis Commons I thought it was a unique new development; it's only been in the past month or so when I've gotten into researching mall history (spurred on by the recent closing of Southwyck I blogged about earlier) that I've come to realize that these developments are more common than I believed them to be, and that they're being built at a fairly high rate these days. At first Fallen Timbers struck me as a larger version of Levis Commons (I wanted to check out the Barnes and Noble at Fallen Timbers since it's about three times the size of the one I normally go to), but the buildings at Fallen Timbers look, well, kind of bland. The main buildings at Levis Commons are built with Victorian architecture in mind -- something I just happened to pick up from Dad, who only went to Levis Commons once and declared it was "too good for Toledo" -- and I think that's one of the main reasons I go down there as often as I do, even though I don't care much for the shops there. Fallen Timbers has shops that are more useful for me, but it's not the kind of place where I could just walk around looking at the buildings for a while. I suppose I'll go back to Fallen Timbers once there's a good special at Barnes and Noble, and maybe then I'll look around a bit more.
On the car front, as I was driving home from teaching this afternoon, I noticed a very rundown car idling next to me at a stoplight. Rundown cars in this part of town are a fairly common sight, but then I noticed that the car in question was a Dodge Neon. It really struck me at that point that, even though I couldn't care less about cars (as long as mine get me to where I need to be and then back home), I was looking at a car that couldn't have been more than fourteen years old, and I thought to myself, "Wow, that car looks really old." (Keep in mind that I drove a 1985 Toyota Camry through college.) Honestly, I don't see how I could have known that the Neon was an old car -- perhaps the dings and dents on the side were throwing me off -- but it's hard for me to accept that a car made in 1994 was old because, damn it, that's the year I turned eighteen, and I can't be that old. Yes, I am that old, I know, but I still don't get how I could think of that car as being old. If you asked me to name the differences in design between a car that was made fifteen years ago and a car that was made last year, I wouldn't be able to come up with a single thing to say. (At least with my Camry it had that boxy first-cars-from-Japan look to it.) Still, I don't need more reminders of just how old I am, and I guess now I can't escape them even when I'm driving.
posted 2008/05/25 at 20:09
Southwyck mall to close June 30 (toledoblade.com)
It's amazing how every little detail of something like Dad's death seemed to add just that much more pain to the ordeal. When I was young, Dad always took me out to a bunch of places on Saturday morning and afternoon, as soon as my morning cartoons ended. He called it "Adventures," and in retrospect he was probably doing Mom a favour by getting me out of the house for a while, but I probably did more bonding with Dad during Adventures than I did with anything else we did together. We'd get lunch together, go to the arcade together, and see a lot of stores at the mall. When I say mall here, though, I'm not referring to Southwyck; I'm referring to Franklin Park Mall, the mall closest to our house, and the only major mall still left in Toledo. (Mind you, it's now called "Westfield Shoppingtowne Franklin Park Mall" and barely bares any resemblance to the mall I remember as a kid. To me, that mall died a long time ago.)
My first memory of going to a mall, though, is going to Southwyck. There are a few things I remember about going to Southwyck as a child. First of all, they had a lot of small water fountains throughout the mall, all of which had different coloured lights in the fall that projected up and made all the water these soft, translucent colours that I thought were some of the prettiest things I'd ever seen. Secondly, in the middle of the mall -- it was one of those malls with several "spokes" full of stores around a central location -- they had the only full-size merry-go-round I've ever ridden on (the miniature merry-go-round they used to have in front of K-Mart doesn't count), and a kind of small pit that sloped gently and seemed, to my young mind, like a natural performing venue, a theatre-in-the-round sort of thing. Third, Southwyck had the first "arcade" I ever went to, a place called Old Towne that had the kind of machines that you used to associate with arcades before the Pac-Man era.
I can only remember going there a few times when I was young, but I went there a lot when I was a teenager. The mall's a fairly short walk from the private school I went to for fourth through twelfth grades, and since I usually stayed after school to use the computer lab (the only computers we had at home at that point were old TRS-80s), if I had some extra time before my parents got off of work to come pick me up, I'd walk over to Southwyck. Old Towne was long gone by that point, but our local arcade chain, Red Baron, had set up shop there, and I was in the middle of my Street Fighter II phase around this time, so I played that an awful lot. My first post-high school crush worked at the Waldenbooks over there as well, so that just gave me more reason to go over.
Southwyck has been ailing for a long, long time, and there had been a lot of talk about doing something new with the property for a long time. A few years ago a developer opened a new shopping complex down in Perrysburg called Levis Commons that, surprisingly, is a pretty awesome place. (Aside from the Books-A-Million and East of Chicago over there, the stores are painfully upscale, though.) The thing is, Southwyck is not in a very good part of town, and even if they raze Southwyck down to the ground and construct something truly grand in its place, that's not going to change that it's surrounded by a lot of low-end businesses in crumbling buildings on moldering streets. I'm fairly certain that someone will try to do something to "fix up" that part of town -- we're in about the tenth attempt to "revitalize" downtown Toledo in my lifetime -- but Southwyck shuttering feels to me like the one true note of confirmation that this part of Toledo is now dead.
Labels: personal, toledo, videogames
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