For the first time since I've been back from Taiwan, I went to Athens to see Alan yesterday. Usually during the summer Alan and I take turns visiting each other in our hometowns, but this summer, since he's working in Atlanta two days a week, he'll usually just drive to Alpharetta to visit me after he gets off work at 4 or 5 p.m. So it was nice to be able to spend an entire day with him, for a change.
When I arrived at his house at just past 11, his mom came out to greet me, apologizing for the mess -- they're repainting and recarpeting Alan's room, so all his furniture had been moved out in the living room. One of the reasons for my visit was to help Alan paint, so I laughed and said that my house always looks like that and proceeded to Alan's room, where he and his dad were already taping off the baseboard and starting on the trim. We painted for a couple hours, and with a lunch break in between, we finished at about 3 in the afternoon. Despite all the home improvement shows I watch, I've never actually painted a room before, so it was exciting for me to use a roller for the first time, though there are a few spots where the paint appears uneven if you look closely. So Alan's room is orangeish-coral now, and I look forward to seeing how it will look with new carpet, new paint AND the furniture in place again. Also, unsurprisingly, I now have a strong desire to paint my own room (I was thinking a dark green might look nice), but since it's considerably bigger and funnier-shaped than his room and since I won't be living in it in another month or so, I don't think that'll be happening anytime soon.
After painting, we sat around his house for a while; we were both kind of tired (Alan had donated blood earlier in the morning and I had woken up early to make the drive from Alpharetta to Athens). At one point in the afternoon, I was tired enough that I napped on the couch in their living room while Alan and his parents watched TV in the other room.
At another point in the afternoon, Alan and I ventured outside in the heat for a little while to look at a place in his neighborhood where the heavy rains from two weeks ago washed out a culvert and the road above it. I was wearing sandals, so I mostly took pictures while Alan, who was wearing sneakers, clambered down the muddy embankment to inspect the damage. While trying to get back up to the street, Alan stepped into some mud that pretty much ate his entire left foot. I, standing 20 feet away and a good seven feet above him, could only watch helplessly and laugh as he pulled his now-brown sneaker out of the mud and then subsequently splash around in the creek trying to wash it all off. After that we decided it was time to head back to his house.
Later that evening we saw a movie, and Alan was nice enough to agree to see March of the Penguins, which was very good. I felt a little guilty paying $7.50 for a documentary that was only an hour and fifteen minutes long and not all that different from the nature shows I watch on the Discovery Channel. But it was an extraordinarily well-made documentary, and it's amazing to think what a labor of love it must have been for the filmmakers, to spend months and months at the South Pole filming these animals. Especially during the scenes that show a long line of penguins marching across the ice, dwarfed by the wide, white antarctic expanse, my heart would swell with the thought of just how unbelievably awe-inspiring nature is sometimes. I would have probably shed a tear or two except that we were only, um, like five minutes into the movie.
Afterward, back at Alan's house, Alan had the idea of getting his old telescope out. While he got it out of the garage and re-familiarized himself with its assembly, I did the jumble in the living section of Saturday's AJC. Then we set out for Whit Davis Elementary -- just a short drive from his house and in the middle of a not-so-heavily-forested area -- and set up the telescope in the parking lot to see what we could see. It was still early, so the moon hadn't risen yet, but we did find a planet, low in the sky, and Alan trained the telescope on it while I settled on a half-folded Georgia Tech blanket on the asphalt and gazed up at the summer stars above me. After a while Alan called me over to look at what had identified as Venus, and I obediently looked into the lens to see a yellow dot that only looked slightly bigger than it did without the telescope. I nodded my acknowledgement, only somewhat impressed, and went back to my blanket and the stars, letting Alan resume his post at the telescope again. Several minutes later Alan said excitedly, "Oh wait, I was wrong! This is Jupiter. You know how I know? I see the same thing Galileo saw."
"Moons?" I ventured, pushing myself off the ground and coming over to the telescope.
"Exactly," Alan said as he moved out of the way of the lens, "Take a look."
I squinted. "Can you see them? They're those tiny little specks. Four of them, all in a straight line with Jupiter."
And the amazing thing was, for all my crappy eyesight and ineptness with telescopes, I could see them. They really were just specks in comparison to the dot of jupiter, but I could see them. And it was, in a way, pretty thrilling.
About half an hour later, after being unable to find anything more interesting to look at than the stars and the "Whit Davis Rd." street sign 100 yards away from us, we packed up the telescope and headed back to Alan's house. By then it was almost 11, time for me to start heading back to Alpharetta. "Next time, we'll see the moon," Alan said, smiling, noting that at this hour, the moon was probably at about five degrees above the horizon, still being hidden by the trees.
It may be a measure of my dorkiness that one of my high school friends was having a party at his apartment in Athens that same night. I debated about stopping by, but in the end I decided not to go. I was in a quiet, mellow mood that day, and for the same reason I wanted to see March of the Penguins rather than Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I opted for telescopes and stars rather than having to force myself to be outgoing and social.
Also -- though it's kind of a lame excuse -- I was too tired for a party. Though I didn't have to struggle to stay awake while driving home, I could feel myself zoning out a little. When I finally turned into my subdivision about half past midnight, I was looking forward to my bed, though not so much so that I didn't notice that the barely gibbous waning moon, big and bright, had risen well in the sky.