The Beltline Illuminated

We had planned and prepared for this lantern parade.  The first time we went, two years ago, we had no idea what we were doing, but we had a great time.  Last year we had a better idea what was going on.  We made better lanterns, and were astonished by the increase in the size of the crowd; it had been only a few thousand people a year before, but last year it was estimated that ten thousand people showed up.  We'd heard that there were Concerns about inadequate arrangements for a crowd that turned out to be that size, with only a couple of port-a-potties and two police officers there.  This year -- like us -- they were going to Be Prepared.

In August, Iain and I went to one of Chantelle Rytter's lantern-making classes.  We started with a large paper folding lantern, attached it to a bamboo pole, and decorated it with shapes cut from tissue paper and glued on with Elmer's glue thinned with water.  Add a battery-powered light and we had lanterns.  But we saw the materials there to make the large illuminated hats that we had seen at the parade last year, and Iain got what was needed to make one.

I'd been out of town for the week but got back mid-afternoon on Saturday.  Iain had spent the day working on his illuminated hat, which was almost done by the time I got home.  We'd invited our neighbors Carolina and Pawel to go with us to the parade, and we all went to Caramba for dinner.   Then Tom dropped us off near the start, where the crowd was huge.

This really large fish was in the parade last year, I think.  (Check my photos from last year.)  It hadn't been an angler fish last year.

This year, Iain was one of the people wearing a large illuminated hat.  I requested a group photo, and the illuminated-hat people dutifully posed. 

The Crewe of the Grateful Gluttons was there in force, with the giant illuminated puppets.

Once again my pictures on the trail didn't come out very well, but you can get a feel for how many people were there and the wonderful lanterns from these pictures while we were waiting for dark and for the parade to start.

Once the crowd started to move it still took a long time for us to get on to the trail; it takes a long time for that many people to move onto a 10-foot-wide path.  The route was congested with spectators and sometimes the parade just stopped moving altogether.  Iain and I were all trying to stay together with Pawel and Carolina and we mostly did.  So many people on a warm and humid night -- people everywhere.  Thousands of spectators, thousands of people walking.  By the time we got to Virginia Avenue, there still were lanterns coming heading toward us on the trail as far as we could see.

I've seen estimates of 15,000 and 20,000 people at the event -- I would believe twenty thousand.  There were people in the parade and along the route, watching from lawns and balconies and windows and rooftops, from trailside and from bridges.  And there were definitely more people walking than in years past.

Last year, at the start of parade, we did see an Atlanta Police Department officer on a bicycle, and a port-a-potty on Irwin Road.  This year, there may have been more of both, but we didn't see any at all.  Fortunately we didn't need either one.  I'm not sure how big a crowd they planned on this year.  

Next year?  I'm sure it will be even bigger, and we'll be there.

Under Construction on Wessyngton Road

We've been watching with a mixture of curiosity and foreboding the construction going on nearby.  First, they took out all the trees in the backyard.  They did this because the house they are building extends to completely fill what had been the backyard.

This picture (above) was taken last weekend, when they were framing in the basement.  Given that this is what the house looked like on Monday morning when I went to work, imagine my surprise when I came home from a short trip Wednesday afternoon to this:

One floor a day had been added to the house.  This was Thursday:

This has generated a lot of discussion among those of us who live at this end of the street.  We are no longer commenting on how quickly this happened (and it was very quick) but now the conversation is about how astonished we are that a house of this size is being put on a 50 foot wide lot on our street.  

Just to be completely clear, the word that is being used most frequently is "monstrosity."  Our neighbor Scott had the best characterization, that it was a Dunwoody mansion turned sideways.  We will have a clear view from our backyard of second story windows on the other side of Kathy and Steve's house.

Sometime before too long (probably not long at all, given the speed at which this is being built) the construction will be done and we will no longer have construction noise scaring the dogs, debris in the street flattening our tires, trucks blocking the street while people stand around looking at blueprints, and mud tracked from the construction site into the street.  

(In spite of the above "Notice to Comply," I don't think they ever did clean it up but it did eventually rain.  Too bad for the South Fork of Peachtree Creek.)

At some point we may stop being horrified by this behemoth of a house.  Maybe the exterior finishing will be so fabulous that we won't mind that it is at least 4 times as large as the adjacent houses.  Maybe they will plant some trees in front of it and in 30 years it won't be so visible.  Maybe the builder is planning on putting an invisibility cloak over the back three-quarters of the house and we won't even be able to see it.  Or maybe we'll just get used to it.

The thing I am really worried about is what kind of neighbors will end up living in a house like this.  It is not that I think that people who want 6000+  square foot houses are by definition bad neighbors; perhaps they need that much space for their extremely extensive toy soldier collection, or the 23 members of their extended family who live with them.  What troubles me is the thought that our future neighbors would probably prefer to be surrounded by other 6000+ square foot houses, not by the houses that are here, and that they will see the current residents of the street as recalcitrant people who need to get out as soon as possible so the street can be filled with giant houses like theirs, houses that don't have backyards and that are occupied by people like them, as opposed to those of us who actually live here.

I would be very happy to be wrong about this, I really would.  This is a great neighborhood.  There are families with children, there are retired people, and there are young single people, and even some students.  Kids ride their bikes in the street.  People walk their kids to school, chat in the street while walking the dogs, pick up each other's mail when someone's out of town, and really do help each other out when help is needed.  (I don't write about the best examples of helping out, because some things are private -- you'll just have to take my word for it.)  We'd love to have another good neighbor on the street, even if we weren't crazy about their house before we got to know them.  But just like no one asked us to approve the design of the house, we don't get to weigh in on who buys it, either.  So we'll have to take what we get, but we're hoping for the best.

In other news, the orange sign at the duplex has been replaced with a yellow sign, indicating that the tree removal plan has been approved by the city.  Another really big house to follow, I expect.  Stay tuned.

More House(s), Fewer Trees

On my street, there are trees behind the houses.  The green space on our side of the street is a ravine.  Although our lot extends part way up the far side, I've never been back there.  It's dense underbrush and not really passable, with towering oaks overhead.  During the summer, the houses on Lanier Place are completely hidden by vegetation.

With construction going on, we are losing more of the trees that make this greenbelt.  They took out the trees that were behind the house I still think of as Angela's house, and now the house will fill what used to be the back yard.  From Kathy and Steve's backyard, the view over the fence (I am sure the builders will add a fence) will not be of their neighbors' backyard, but of their house, going all the way back to the diminished treeline.

Friday afternoon when I was walking the dog, a man driving a City of Atlanta car posted this sign in front of the duplex:

I talked to him later, when he finished walking around the empty lots where the apartments used to be at Wessyngton and North Highland.  I asked if he was a city arborist, and he said he was. Did the orange sign mean more trees were coming down?  It meant that there was a proposal to remove trees; it had not yet been approved; if and when it was, the yellow sign would replace the orange one.  I gestured to the empty lots where the apartments were.  We're worried about losing more trees here too, I told him.  He said the trees weren't being adequately protected there.  

The next day I walked around and saw what he was talking about.  This tree had been left when the demolition was done, but has been badly damaged, presumably by the equipment that had been used.

Yesterday morning I woke up early and heard for the first time in a while one of the neighborhood barred owls.  It wasn't so close, but it sounded like it was somewhere in the trees behind our house.  A little later in the morning, when I was walking the dog, I heard an owl again, this time on the other side of North Morningside.  Yesterday afternoon, I was out with the dog at dusk and heard it again, but this time it was closer.  It kept calling and seemed to be staying in one place, and as we walked toward home, we were getting closer.  I think it was in the trees behind where Angela's house used to be.

I hate it that we are losing so many of the trees on our street.  At some point, surely it will matter.

More on the New Development at Piedmont & Cheshire Bridge

This is the artist's rendering of the development that Millcreek Residential has on their website now.   It would appear that name of the development (previously the somewhat deceptive Morningside Park) has been changed to Modera Morningside.  I am not sure what "Modera" means -- I think it's one of those words that marketing people make up that doesn't actually mean anything, but I'm not sure.  (Interestingly, the name of the GIF image is "Morningside Heights," which I actually liked -- sort of an amalgam of Morningside and Piedmont Heights, the neighborhood on the other side of Piedmont.)

Iain and I have been trying to figure out where the viewer of this imagined scene would have been standing.  I thought it would be from the gorilla car wash (I thought the woman on the far right, walking straight ahead with the Coke in her hand, had left her car there to be washed) but we went there this morning and walked around.  It clearly was not the future view from the gorilla car wash and maybe not even from Grind House (the only establishment on that block on that side of Piedmont that has any landscaping, I might add, but even there not the lush greenery in the foreground of this drawing).  Our guess was it was from the BP station.

Here's the view from the BP station (inexplicably devoid of cars on Piedmont).

And here's the BP station, which does not have vegetation between it and the street.

The other curious thing about the artist's drawing is the near absence of cars on Piedmont.  Now, as my photograph above shows, it is possible at just the right time to capture such a view.  But this photo, also taken this morning, is more typical:

A notice recently went out to the neighborhood, that the Millcreek construction team would be doing roadwork over the next several months that would impact Piedmont, Cheshire Bridge, and Piedmont Circle, resulting in "slight road closures" and detours.  I'm not sure what a "slight road closure" is but if it requires a detour it sounds to me like an "actual road closure."  At the community meeting that Iain and I attended back in March, there was mention of a traffic study, but it wasn't done yet.

Is it done now, and if so, what did it find?  

Just curious.

National Night Out, with Ice Cream

Yesterday, August 5, was National Night Out, and we observed it on Wessyngton Road like we have for the last couple of years with ice cream on the grounds at Morningside Presbyterian Church.  At this point it is a nearly self-organizing event.  A query via Facebook, does anyone have any other ideas?  None proposed.  Is 8 p.m. too late?  Yes, given that school will have started the day before, 7 is better.  A sign up sheet gets essentials first -- bowls, spoons, and napkins -- and after that anyone else who asks gets told to bring ice cream.

Lynsley got us on the church calendar, and I filled out the on line registration for our event with the National Association of Town Watch.  I emailed Major Hobbes to invite someone from Zone 2 of the Atlanta Police Department to come by.  Later I saw a different contact for APD, and I emailed her too.  After that, there wasn't much else to do until yesterday afternoon.  Since the picnic tables aren't there any more, just south of the playground, I put a folding table in the car along with a table cloth and a couple of trash bags.

Late in the afternoon I took the dog for a walk.  He's doing better every day on a leash; I don't know if it's the harness (we got the one that is the correct size on Monday) or the fluoxetine or both, but he's definitely doing better.  But I didn't take my cell phone with me, and it wasn't until I was about to drive over to the church that I saw that I had several missed calls from the same unrecognized number.  So I called back, and after I identified myself, the man who answered asked if I'd called for a fire truck.

My initial response was "no," thinking that he meant a 911-call-that-the-house-was-on-fire kind of calling for a fire truck.  I certainly hadn't done that.  But after initially saying no, I realized that this might be a National Night Out-kind of request for a fire truck, so I told him that we were having a National Night Out event at Morningside Presbyterian at 7 p.m., and we'd be delighted if the guys could come with the truck, and if they could, we'd feed them ice cream.  It turned out there had been a major miscommunication (I'm not sure on who's part, since they only part of city government I'd contacted was APD) and they had sent the truck out to our event at 5 p.m.  I reiterated that our event was at 7 p.m. and he said something about the church being on Piedmont, across from Fat Matt's.  I told him no, that we were at Morningside Presbyterian, and that the church on Piedmont was Morningside Baptist (that's what I said but the church across the street from Fat Matt's might actually be Rock Springs Presbyterian.  Either way, it wasn't Morningside Presbyterian.)  After we got that straightened out, he said he wasn't sure they could come, that they'd had to respond to a house fire earlier, and I said I certainly understood but if they could come they'd be welcome.

So we didn't get a fire truck but we had plenty of ice cream, our neighbor Linda's homemade cookies, and a good number of neighbors over the course of the evening.

Scott's parents, visiting from Florida, came as did one of our new neighbors who had just moved in.

The Atlanta Police Department was well-represented, and even without the fire truck we had plenty of guests.  Major Hobbes was there, along with several other police officers.  Anna Crist from the Mayor's Office of Constituent Services came too, and so did Assistant District Attorney Tiffany Harlow of the Fulton County District Attorney's office. 

So it was another successful National Night Out on Wessyngton Road.  But one of the best parts of the evening was watching the three small boys on bicycles going up and down the street.  One of the boys was from the family that just moved in; he was riding his bike with the boys who live next door.

That's my street.

Scared of Everything

Right now Leonard, our new dog, is lying on the floor at my feet.  At this moment (unlike when I took this picture a few minutes ago) he is asleep, lying on his side, and using my left foot as a pillow.  He finally started eating a normal amount of dog food about four days ago.  Before that, it was just a few bites at a time, and not very much over the course of the day.  I think he was too scared to eat.  But now he's eating, and that's good.

But it was still nearly impossible to walk him during the daytime, when there were more people out and about and lawn mowers and chain saws being used and air conditioners running.  He would get scared, and pull so hard first in one direction and then in another that we were afraid he would hurt himself.  We were still using the red Atlanta Lab Rescue choke collar that had been on him when we got him two weeks ago.  I took him on longer walks early in the morning and in the evening when it was quieter but still a jogger or a dog walker or a bus going by or loud music from a passing car could send him into a panic.  I had never noticed, until trying to walk Leonard, that we obviously are under a flight path for the airport.  Planes fly overhead every minute or two, and I had not ever noticed it, but the sound scared the dog and made him want to run away.  Everything scared him, including children, bags of yard clippings, squirrels in trees overhead, and our neighbors and their leashed dogs.  

So yesterday morning I showed up at Intown Animal Hospital without an appointment.  I got there a few minutes before the time they were scheduled to open because I wanted to increase the chance that we could be seen and hopefully get there before too many other dogs showed up.  He wouldn't get on the scale; I had to pick him up and set him on it.  Thankfully he didn't growl at anyone or at any of the dogs that were there.  Dr. Fiorillo was able to see us, and she prescribed him something to help him calm down.  She was easing into the recommendation that our dog needed something for anxiety, and I interrrupted her.  I'm a doctor, I told her, and I think he needs doggie Valium.  She didn't prescribe Valium but she did prescribe fluoxetine (that's generic for Prozac).  She told us not to use the pinch collar we'd gotten last weekend (we'd already decided that would probably make things worse) and recommended a harness or a head collar.  She recommended that we get some help from a dog trainer, and gave us a phone number for one she says is good.  And she said it was just going to take a while.

As soon as I got Leonard home from his doctor visit, I got his prescription filled at Kroger and gave him his first dose of fluoxetine.  Then I took the pinch collar back to Pet Supplies Plus and exchanged it for a PetSafe Easy Walk Harness.  They didn't have a medium-large so I bought the medium, but when I got home and measured Leonard was afraid it would be too small.  So I took it back and exchanged it for the large which probably is too big even at the smallest setting.  But even not fitting quite right, it's like he's a different dog.  He doesn't pull, and even though he sometimes growls at joggers or other dogs, he often doesn't and sometimes doesn't even pay much attention.  He doesn't panic and try to take off, and he calms down more quickly.  Walking him is now mostly uneventful, although I do still have to tell him that the airplane overhead is not going to hurt him and we can just keep going.  I've ordered the medium-large from Amazon (the pet store recommended I order it on line, because it was hard for them to get the in-between sizes).  But until it comes, I think he'll do okay with this one.

I think the pressure on the choke collar must have scared him, and then when he was startled by anything else it just made it worse.  Without the extra fear from the collar, he's doing much better - I really do think it's that and not one dose of generic Prozac that has made him so much calmer.

So if you see us walking and I take him across the street to avoid a too-close encounter, don't take it personally, and if he growls at you or your dog, don't take that personally either.  It's one thing at a time, and I think now he's no longer afraid of his collar.  Hopefully joggers, other dogs, bags of yard waste, lawnmowers, air conditioners, and planes flying overhead will follow.  

A Dog in the House, Again

Weekend before last, we decided we were ready to get another dog.  We followed up with a couple of Lab rescue groups and before we heard back from the second one, Atlanta Lab Rescue had already lined up a volunteer who was fostering a dog to bring him by our house.  He had spent months in a shelter, but someone there thought he was adoptable and he ended up with Atlanta Lab Rescue.  He'd just been neutered and the person who was fostering him had only had him about 24 hours.  So there were lots of unknowns about this dog.  We'd asked for a lab mix -- Tom thought that without knowing anything about ancestry, we were better off not getting a purebred lab -- and that's probably why ALR thought this dog would be a good match for us.

We said yes.

He's a good-looking dog, who appears to me to be mostly but not exclusively Labrador retriever.  His ears are covered with longer fur, not the short velvety coat that was on Bullwinkle's ears.  He has a white patch on his chest, that doesn't really show on this photo.  His tail -- which also doesn't show -- is muscular and seems to wag uncontrollably most of the time.  When he wakes up and before he exits his crate in the morning it makes a really loud thump-thump-thump.  At the tip of it is a tuft of long, stiff white hair; it looks like a paint brush.

Given his recent history, it's not surprising that it's taking a little while for him to settle in.  He still seems to be afraid of Tom, although less so than when we got him.  He is not afraid of Caroline or me, but still is scared when we walk in carrying things.  He doesn't do too badly on the leash but gets very upset when we lead him by his collar.  He's not really comfortable yet in the back yard.  But he's good at retrieving a ball and unlike either Bullwinkle or Lorenzo will usually drop it at my feet and wait for me to throw it again, his tail wagging wildly.  I think someone taught him to do that, at some time.

Saturday night Mark invited us to go to Steve's Live Music.  Yoshi's band was playing Crosby, Stills and Nash covers, and they were great.  As I told Caroline, the place was packed full of people who were Tom's and my age, who all knew all words to all the songs.  It was really fun.  But I'd started the dishwasher just before we left, and it was making an Unusual Sound.  I'd thought about stopping it and letting it finish up after we got home, but I didn't.  We have a history with dishwashers at our house which is not a happy one.  I am thinking about Thanksgiving 2009, when our old dishwasher tried to burn the house down.  So even though the music was great and we got to catch up with Mark, who no longer lives on the street and we haven't seen in a while, I had this image in my head of the house burning down.  I didn't really think this was going to happen, and I didn't call Kathy to check on it, which I could have.  Would the firefighters would know to get Leonard out of his crate?  Would he bark and get their attention?  Would he be too afraid to move?  I was not worried about the house, in this particular mental loop; I was just worried about the dog.

We came home to an intact house (well, it was as intact as it was when we'd left), clean dishes, and a happy dog with a tail that wouldn't stop wagging.  But I left my sweater at Steve's.  I guess we'll just have to go back.