Mist therapy

[muckefuck]

Everything's just about ready for the trip. We have our seat reservations (no thanks to Asiana's terrible website), the new trousers my mother sent me should be hemmed and pressed by now, and monshu has been buying up tiny bottles and tubes of all the needfuls. So why do I sit here almost shaking with rage?

It's funny how, when you embark on something new an frightening like buying a property, the parts you think are going to be a problem often aren't and things you never worried about become the biggest headaches. Taking on a mortgage terrified me--never in my life before had a carried more than $1000 in debt and now I was being asked to carry more than $100,000 of it. But I set up automatic payments immediately and haven't had a single difficulty since; even the property taxes, which I was warned were a recurring source of woe, haven't been a problem.

On the other hand, I didn't give a second thought to condo insurance and that's been nothing but a hassle since day one. Every year at renewal time, there's some fresh crisis. They're no fun to resolve even when I don't have a looming deadline less than a week away. If not for leaving the country, I'd be shopping around for a new agency, but now I just need to get things settled to a point where I can vacate with a calm mind. In order to do this, I'm forced to deal with nothing but bucketheads doing their work to the most middling standards of mediocrity--and over the phone, which I hate.

So the upshot is that I need distraction and amusement. Shall I throw out an idea for responses?

Today the city is supposedly blanketed in dense fog. Up here, it's wispy at best, though it is cutting off all morning sunlight. So tell me: What are your associations with fog and mist? Is it pleasantly spooky or plain annoying? Do you miss it where you live now or have you only read about it in Victorian novels or what?

Comments

[jhvilas.livejournal.com]

I miss it where I live now: I was born in San Francisco, and can remember walking to school in fog so thick you couldn't see a telephone pole at 30 feet. Now I live in northern North Carolina. Every once in a while we get some wispy little crap I don't even notice, and people go "Wow, did you see the fog this morning!" Then I'm reminded.

I was visiting friends in SF a few years ago, and watched the fog boiling up from the ocean, struggling to get across the hills north of the Golden Gate, then disappearing as it rolled down toward the bay. It was so beautiful.

I miss San Francisco. Pity I can't afford to move back.

[alcippe.livejournal.com]

I love it when the fog rolls in. It's so mysterious.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Is that Bucktown? I think I can make out the dome of St Mary of the Angels.

[alcippe.livejournal.com]

No, but you're not too far off. It's one of the domed churches in East Ukrainian Village/Noble Square, over by Chicago and Ashland.

[alcippe.livejournal.com]

bigger photo of it here:
http://www.concentrick.com/LJ/church2.jpg

[keyne.livejournal.com]

I usually like fog, especially when it pools in the bottoms of the miniature valleys among the hills in my town.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

love radiation fog, especially from early-morning flights, curling like giant white carp in the valleys. Grew up with it, in Cornwall and Germany. Definitely portends something strange. Favourite moment ever, however: atop Corcovado, under the suvaco do Christo, Rio, being whipped by tiny, thick trails of cloud, which tasted salty, and which alternately wreathed and surreally backdrop'd the enormous concrete statue.

Fog is under-appreciated.

[princeofcairo.livejournal.com]

Growing up in Oklahoma, fog was for me an entirely literary and cinematic phenomenon, so when we get fog here in Chicago, I'm all like zombies and Sherlock Holmes and little cat feet and "All the Myriad Ways."

[bwillsouth.livejournal.com]

Not sure where in Oklahoma you grew up, but in the Tulsa area we sometimes do get fog that's quite heavy, although it's very seldom. On my drive to high school there were these tiny valleys off the sides of the road that would pool fog in the morning, for most mornings in the fall and spring.

[innerdoggie.livejournal.com]

Fog is like a security blanket. I almost always enjoy it -- except when in an airplane that gets diverted, or that time in Chicago that three weeks in May it stayed a constant 50 degrees while the suburbs were enjoying highs in the 70s. grrr.