So it was hot

After throwing together that short little update yesterday, I decided to do things.

Specifically, I decided to go to the Kennesaw Mountain battlefield, which is about 20 miles from my house, and see if there was anything there worth photographing.  It turned out to be more of an adventure (I use the term loosely) than I’d anticipated.

I was originally planning to go to the main visitors’ center and climb to the top of the mountain and look at things and yada yada yada; but – I don’t know why I do things like this to myself – I decided to try getting there by just driving west from the house until I recognized something. 

Needless to say, I got completely lost and spent about 2 hours just driving around and wondering where the hell I was.  Found a tiny little cemetery and stopped to take a few pictures.  It didn’t really yield anything impressive, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to find it again, but it was something to break up the monotony of being totally clueless about my whereabouts.

Shortly after that, I pulled into a strip mall’s parking lot and got out the iPhone, figuring that I’d go ahead and use the maps app to actually get to the battlefield.  Unfortunately, I’ve recently “upgraded” the software on my phone, and (thanks, Apple), performance has been so degraded that the mapping ability is pretty much crippled.  Normally, I’d have just used my TomTom (GPS) at that point.  That piece of equipment, however, died about a month ago. 

Which reminds me that I need to get a new one before I head to Canada at the end of August.

So I continued driving and finally found US 41, which led me to an outlying part of the battlefield – the Dead Angle – about 4 miles from the actual visitors’ center.

History lesson time.  On June 27th, 1864, during a campaign in which Sherman’s troops were slowly but surely moving from Chattanooga to Atlanta (after the fall of which, Sherman began his famous “March to the Sea”) a large number of Illinois troops attempted to move a similarly large number of troops in the Army of the Tennessee off of Cheatham Hill, which is part of the Kennesaw Mountain area.  The confederates had erected earthworks on the hill for a couple of days before the union army arrived; and, after charging up the hill and being decimated, the Illinois troops found themselves in the unenviable position of being unable to advance and similarly unable to retreat.  So they hunkered down at a little swell in the hill about 20 yards below the confederate lines, dug what trenches they could (using bowls, forks, spoons and anything else they could find), and basically hung out there, sending and receiving fire, until the rebels evacuated (still concerned with the defense of Atlanta) on July 2.  It is difficult to imagine what it must have been like to hide between two-foot-high earthworks – while being shot at – for a week.  Particularly in late June in Georgia.  The heat (and the smell of decomposing bodies) must’ve been unreal.

I can speak to the heat a bit, because – God knows why – I decided yesterday to walk the path from Cheatham Hill to the visitor center, which is a distance of about 4 hilly miles.  Not being incredibly smart at times, I honestly didn’t think about the fact that I’d have to walk those same 4 hilly miles BACK to my car….

So, after marching 8 miles in 97-degree heat and high humidity (I’m told that the heat index was 105), I was pretty much dead.

Being dead, I thought it appropriate to drive to the Marietta National Cemetery, where, appropriately enough, a great many of those Yankee troops who died during the Kennesaw Mountain campaign are buried.  I’ve been told that the citizens of Marietta sort of freaked out at the thought of having union soldiers buried in their cemetery and moved their own dead to another cemetery a few miles away.  At any rate, the Marietta National Cemetery is dedicated to the union troops who died there, which is sort of bizarre.

It’s a beautiful place, though, and the turf is amazing.  I wish I could make the grass in my own lawn grow like it does at the cemetery.

After wasting all morning and half of the afternoon with the above-told story, I did some grocery shopping and also picked up a cassette tape recorder that will allow me to convert all of my tapes to .mp3 files, which is totally cool.

I also discovered that I’ve got three kittens, the offspring of one of the numerous feral cats that have been living in my backyard since I bought the house 11 years ago, living on my deck.  They (the kittens) are all completely adorable, but quite skittish.  I left them some water and food last night, which they seemed to appreciate.

Yeah, I know.  I shouldn’t encourage it, right?  Well, they’re not hurting me and they’re hopefully controlling the rodent population in the yard.  I’ve got no problem with kitties in the backyard.

This morning I networked a couple of my computers (I’ve been rebuilding laptops and desktops like a maniac over the last month) and started copying photos and converted cassettes to my main storage drive.  Haven’t decided what I’ll do later, but I do need to clean those dirty dishes that I mentioned yesterday – and do some more grocery shopping for stuff that I forgot in my heat-induced delirium yesterday.

Or maybe I’ll go to a baseball game.

TWD