bunrab | A quiet evening

We have been hunting a couple of times for this Indian restaurant I have a coupon for, but it is NOT where Mapquest says it is, nor where it should be based on the street numbers of places we do know. I am going to have to go that way on the bike, not in a car, so I can see more clearly and can take little side trips into strip shopping centers on much shorter notice than in a car. Mapquest peeves me sometimes. (I know, that's a whole subject for a journal by itself - weird things Mapquest tells people...)

First evening of "knitting camp" - a small but congenial group of people. We start a new project each evening. Here's the yarn store: http://www.allaboutyarn.com/. An odd location in an industrial park, not easy to spot but lots of parking and lots of space. As opposed to a shop I've driven by a couple of times in Ellicott City, which is better known I suspect, but it's on a street that is narrow and has very little store-front parking to begin with, and that side of the street is under construction and has NO parking for a couple of blocks on top of its natural condition. So I don't see myself getting there any time soon. I'll stick to the odd industrial park in Columbia.

Some of you have noticed that my mail address is in "Elkridge." As best I can tell, that was an arbitrary dice roll of the post office for "who gets stuck with the blocks near the interstate?" because everything around us is Columbia or Ellicott City, and the rest of Elkridge is the other side of the interstate and a mile further north. If I were just giving directions to someone driving, I'd tell them we're in Columbia. Columbia's a nice enough town, but I really am looking forward to moving to a more urban area!! This is waaaay suburban. I mean, it's nice seeing cottontails hopping around the apartment complex lawn, and it's a little scary having deer dart across the road, but I want to be someplace where it's not quite so damn dark at night!!

The area we'll be moving to is called Windsor Mill, and you probably wouldn't see it on a map. It's an arbitrary name for the main road that runs through that particular ZIP code. If you look at a map of Baltimore, you'll notice that Baltimore County west of Baltimore City has only a few officially labelled towns - Catonsville due west, and then Randallstown a bit north of Catonsville. The area in between the north edge of Catonsville and the south edge of Randallstown may, on your map, have lots of little neighborhood names, or not be labelled as anything but county, but that is the area that, for postal purposes, is called Windsor Mill. Once we get a land line, we'll find out what the phone company thinks it is. Certainly around Austin, when we lived in an area called Shady Hollow, we were Austin to the post office, Manchaca to the phone company and the fire department, Hays COUNTY!!! for electric service even though we were in Travis County, and "unincorporated Travis County" for police/sheriff. Windsor Mill is much less confusing than that.

There, that was certainly enough blather for a nothing day!