High Holy Mass of Contradictions

Well, it figures. It's a day off from work, and I'm recovering from yesterday's recovery from my New Year's Eve hangover (yowch), so I didn't bother at all with my hair or makeup. Washed my face, pulled my hair up, and called it done.

Naturally I got interviewed for TV news.

We were riding bikes downtown near the site of the proposed Westin hotel, and rode by a cameraman and anchor dude looking to get man-on-the-street interviews. (Update: It took some digging around on various TV news web sites to figure it out, but it must have been Marc Stewart from WSMV.) The news guy asked us as we rode by if we were from Nashville, and we said we were. He asked if we had any thoughts about the Westin, and I said that, yes, I thought it would be great to add to the tourism downtown but not at the expense of historical structures. He looked relieved and asked if I would be interviewed because I was the first articulate person he'd found.

Yikes.

Well, yeah, I suppose you'd be hard-pressed to find any Nashville residents hanging out on Lower Broad most of the time, unless you were looking for the homeless/busker angle, and it's a chilly day so the odds are even lower. And not to stereotype, but the 2nd Avenue / Lower Broad attractions aren't exactly fine culture. So yeah, as awful as I looked, I don't think they cared about how my hair would look on camera. I cared, of course, but I also realized that it would be a chance to get the issue of historic preservation in front of the news viewing audience, and decided it would be worth my hair humiliation.

Anyway, he asked me the same question on camera with a few follow-up questions, and I tried to make statements supporting both downtown tourism and historical preservation. I worked in a mention of our historic near-downtown neighborhood, but they may edit that out, who knows.

Honestly, I hope in some miniscule way it helps further the dialogue about historic preservation and even the possibility of a downtown overlay, even if it is just evening filler on a slow news day.

Anyway. Nashvillians, look for me: I'm the articulate one with bad hair. :)

Just got email from the Nashville blogger known as Chez Bez, who was reminded by my last post that he thought he caught a picture of me and Karsten riding our bikes downtown during the jazz festival a few weeks ago. Sure enough, there we were (fourth picture down).

I had mentioned riding bikes downtown that weekend in a comment on Metroblogging but forgot to write about it here. (ETA: Actually now that I re-read my comment, I guess I was talking about running downtown with Karsten riding his bike beside me. But the next day, we both rode our bikes back down there, so that's when Chez Bez's pic was taken.) That's some pretty cool serendipity.

We love riding along the riverfront to downtown. There's a great little ice cream parlor on Broadway called Mike's and they have an awesome chocolate peanut butter flavor. It's a real treat to ride through the downtown greenway to Riverfront Park, go up Broad a block or two to Mike's, get a cone, and then carefully (so as not to drip melting ice cream!) ride back over to the riverfront to sit on one of the benches near Fort Nashborough and look out over the river. And it's only going to get better.

I'm so happy to be in Nashville.

This is the moment Karsten and I have been waiting for: the daylilies have started to bloom!



Thought I'd show a picture or two of the stars, as well as a few pics of some of the other sections of the yard garden, like the herb garden:



Also a pic of our new bikes!