I started writing this entry in Clemson, SC, on Sunday — but didn’t finish before heading to Atlanta, GA, to visit some cousins and my aunt Nancy. I spent another few minutes on this entry in a Pittsburgh airport, waiting to fly to St. Louis, which is where I am now . . . spending another happy Thanksgiving weekend with Justin, Tiffany and their kids.

My sister called me last Saturday morning (about five minutes before my alarm clock went off, conicidentally) and told me that a few of my relatives were having a pre-Thanksgiving get-together in Atlanta . . . so I decided to play hooky from work on Monday and head down for the weekend. Clemson, which is where my sister and her family live, is about an hour and a half from Atlanta.

I couldn’t leave right away, since I was scheduled to record Common Sense at Paul’s apartment for what should have been the last time, if all goes well. We started the Common Sense stuff around 11:00, and finished around 5:00. Then I went to Home Depot to buy some hacksaw blades.

You see, when my sister & her family first moved to Clemson, they left most of their furniture behind in Utah, and needed to pick up new things for their stay in South Carolina. Since I was planning to drive down to visit anyway, they asked me to stop by the DC-area Ikea and pick up a Tromso bunkbed for them. Ikea happens to be right by Paul Jacob’s house, and is on the way from my place to Clemson, so I was happy to do so.

I wasn’t aware, though, that there are two types of Tromso beds at Ikea — the bunk bed and the loft bed. Inadvertently, I picked up the loft bed, which ended up being much taller than they could realistically fit in their new apartment, and which only had one bed frame when they needed two.

So I took it back to DC, and for my next visit to Clemson I went back to Ikea to pick up the bunk bed. The only trouble was, it wouldn’t fit in my car. More to the point, I spent 30 minutes successfully figuring out a way to get it into my car (after unpacking all the constituent elements of the bed), only to find that there was no way for me to fit into the car at the same time as the bed. Wracking my brain for alternate strategies, I decided to call Paul Jacob. He saved the day by showing up in his van, carting off the overlarge pieces of bed frame and storing them in his garage.

Before my next trip to Clemson, in October, I bought a hacksaw at a hardware store in downtown DC, and stopped by Paul’s garage to chop the bed frame pieces in half, so they’d fit in my car. My brother-in-law is a metal sculptor who welds stuff in the course of an ordinary day at school, so putting the pieces back together wouldn’t be a big deal for him at all. But two minutes or so into my first attempt at hacking through one of the steel tubes of the frame, the blade snapped. And the nearby Home Depot had closed about 10 minutes earlier. So I went to Clemson without the frame yet again.

So last weekend, after buying several new hacksaw blades, I managed to hack through the bed frames in four places in about 20 minutes, and with a feeling of pride from my first successful hacksaw experience, I loaded them up and managed to get to Clemson by 2:00 a.m. Dan had welded the pieces back together before I even got out of bed Sunday morning. (Afternoon?)

Had a great time in Atlanta with my cousins, cousins’ spouses, cousins’ kids & my mom’s sister, Nancy . . . and my cousin Jake was nice enough to send me off with the season three DVDs of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, which I’ve made good use of so far — both in Clemson and here in St. Louis. I found out that one of Jake’s coworkers has gotten him into Donald Barthelme, a nice fit with the sort of institutional absurdity Adult Swim has built into its identity. I myself was lucky enough to see Barthelme lecture in Portland while I was in high school, the year before he died.

The more I think about it, the more I think Atlanta might be a good move. Close to my sister & her family, close to other relatives, an eight-hour drive from Justin’s place here in St. Louis, and a seven-hour drive from my pals in Orlando. Hmmm . . .