The Land

It's time for another update on the state of The Land, using Google Earth imagery from August 2012. Previous posts are here (2012) and here (2011).

Click for a much larger image.

This time we get the entire ten (actually fifteen) acres. The lower third is a long "shotgun" five-acre lot that Southern Man (and his ex) purchased about fifteen years ago. The upper-left portion is the five-acre "common lot" owned by the homeowner's association but seldom used so it's really part of Southern Man's back yard. The upper-right is a roughly square five-acre lot that doesn't go all the way back to the water so it remained unsold until Southern Man snapped it up a year after the first purchase. So The Land is ten acres in a backwards L shape, wrapping around the common lot, and with quite a bit of shoreline on the little watershed lake to the west. Both lots were pretty hilly and the west end of the lower lot wasn't even accessible by vehicle without trespassing to the south so an early investment was about 5K worth of dirt work to level the west part of both lots, drop in a tinhorn and fill in a deep gully, and put in the driveway.

Southern Man looked at the big washouts and gullies in the back of the lot and thought "Garden Pond and Fishing Ponds!" He's accumulated quite a bit of rock and stone and brick (stacked above the Garden Pond label) and hopes to build a really attractive water feature there, with several levels of pond and a cascading creek that goes through those trees down to the lake. The Future Ponds (North and South) will take quite a bit of dirt work and those won't happen for several years. North of the garden pond are several redbud trees so that's called the Redbud Grove. It's a very peaceful area and will probably gain a little gazebo or arbor one day that overlooks the water features. Moving northwest into The Point we see the firepit that RCJ and Southern Man built a few summers ago and the dock that is currently under construction. All of the scrap piles around The Woodshop are slowly being reduced to firewood and stacked up near The Point. The Trailer currently serves as Casa Southern Man. The Barn is stacked floor to ceiling with boxes and boxes and boxes (mostly of books) but there's a little spot in the loft where Southern Man has a few computers running for single-player games. South of the driveway is a stubborn lone tree that Southern Man hasn't yet identified that sits just inside his property line.

As mentioned above much of The Land is fairly flat thanks to that summer of dirt work but it's worn-out farmland that barely grows Johnson grass. In this photo it's clear that the Brush-Hog Guy has just finished the last mowing of the season; he gets the west half and mows all the way back to the water south of The Barn. Southern Man hand-mows the rest and the various mowed trails up into The Point are clearly visible in the photo. Once Southern Man finishes the projects in the back of The Land he's going to put up another structure: a two-story garage and professional office (he figures in ten years or so he'll mostly be working from home) with a greenhouse on the south end and an RV shed behind. The spot marked "Garden" is a bit lower than the surrounding terrain and that's where row crops like blackberries and corn will go, with raised-bed vegetable gardens north of there. Southern Man has wanted to get gardens going for a while but there's no water source up there so gardening must wait until he gets a ground-water well down. He'll run a north-south driveway on the east side of the garage and then try to put in a proper lawn of Burmuda grass in the front (that is, east) part of The Land. That'll take considerable work to finish leveling that area and will probably require many truckloads of topsoil to boot, so that's a distant-future project.

Those hackberry trees grew up along an old fenceline and separates the flat west end of The Land from a little area that Southern Man hasn't been able to work with yet but which has been tentatively named The Dell, as it's fairly secluded from the rest of the neighborhood by the treeline. Southern Man has taken probably forty hackberries out of that treeline (they were really overcrowded) but he left the good ones and may plant a few more to complete the north-south treeline and plant some evergreens along the road to the north to shelter that area even further. Most of the trees back there are just hackberries but there is an isolated horse-apple tree and another that Southern Man hasn't yet identified.

And since Southern Man doesn't really need a 2800 square foot home just for him (that's the minimum required by the HOA) he plans to add on to the south and west ends of the barn - living area, kitchen, mud room, utility room - with a big Siberian heater rather than an English fireplace. The west end of The Barn already has pipe under the slab for a bathroom and the upstairs will make a lovely bedroom. The HOA might not be overjoyed with that but it's a step up from living in the FEMA trailer. And to tell the truth as long as he keeps the front area mowed they don't fuss too much. And Southern Man will be quite content to live back there until the end of his days, or until he's just too feeble to maintain ten acres. And hopefully that won't be for a long, long time. Southern Father is still going strong at eighty-one...

Walden

For some time now Southern Man has known that he'd have an empty nest between teen daughter moving out and youngest daughter (possibly) moving in so he has long considered relocating out to the peace and quiet of The Land for a couple of years. This is even more primitive than it sounds; electric service is in place but nothing else - in particular, no water or septic system or cable tv or internet. But especially no water. Nonetheless Southern Man has been RV shopping for a while now and stumbled across this one on Craigslist last week:

32 ft Gulfstream Camper For Sale - $4800

---

Date: 2011-08-08, 12:54PM CDT

32 ft Camper for sale
Make: Gulfstream
Model: Cavalier
Yr Model: 2006

This is a nice camper, very simple but in good condition. It has a
bedroom with a full sized bed and it also has bunk beds on the opposite
end of the camper, nice sized shower, couch, kitchen table, stove,
microwave & full size refrigerator. Everything is spread out so it
is pretty spacious and roomy.


Please e-mail with any questions for more info.

---

So Southern Man went out to take a look last Tuesday. It's a FEMA trailer from the Hurricane Katrina days that wasn't used at that time, bought by a dealer, sold to a fellow southeast of the city who intended to resell it to one of his workers who lived in for one week and then quit, and never titled - for less than half the price of used FEMA trailers at the local RV dealers. As claimed, the floor plan is unusually open for that size trailer and even has a decent-sized shower and full-sized toilet and a full-size fridge and a nice tile floor instead of cheap carpet. So Southern Man said he'd take it but could the seller wait until Monday?

So today Southern Man and the owner met at the credit union where money changed hands, then at the tag agency where paperwork was processed (kind of complicated but Southern Man ends up as the original owner, at least on paper), then out to the seller's place to slap on the tag and hook it up and tow it to The Land.

And there she is, in much higher resolution than the CL ad. Of course the camera died after this shot.

After getting her hitched up to the Titan Southern Man cautiously (having never pulled anything quite that large before) embarked on the fifty-mile journey, keeping to side roads and lesser-traveled state highways as much as possible, and arrived without incident at The Land...

The RV in her new perch behind The Barn, which suffered even more damage in a storm last week. The yellow stuff leaning against the wall is scaffolding retrieved from Southern Father's place last night; roof and siding repairs are high on Southern Man's to-do list.

So Southern Man spent the rest of the afternoon running trailer-related errands: removing the door lockset and taking it to town to have it re-keyed (the RV came without keys) and buying a few odds and ends at the home store (such as 50 feet of 10/2 and an RV-30 outlet and such) and charging the camera and then headed back out to The Land to re-install the lockset and run the aforementioned wire from the service box in the front of The Barn to the newly-installed outlet at the back and almost got it all done before dark.

And in the middle of all this Mike the Brush-Hog Guy appeared...

Hogging the Grassy Knoll

...and performed his monthly service, except that it's been over two months due to the drought and most of the lot didn't really need to be mowed even then but Southern Man doesn't mind staying on his good side. Good Brush-Hog Guys are hard to find.

So if all goes according to plan Southern Man will soon give notice to his apartment and Casa Southern Man will at last be at The Land. And for the first time in five years Southern Man will live in a place that is truly his own.

Movie Review - Grindhouse

The double-feature Grindhouse is not so much a movie as it is an event; it's not as much about reproducing the look and feel of the exploitation movies of the past as it is to recall the experience of viewing them. Like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the audience is just as important as what's happening on the screen; this is a movie designed to be seen with friends late at night in a crowded theater. Directors Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino accomplish this with not only the B-movie double feature - first, a wonderously overblown zombie thriller in Planet Terror, then a chicks-in-peril car chase in Death Proof - but with the manner in which they are presented. The films are interspliced with 70s-era screencaps and ads (including a couple of barely-remembered "restricted movie" warnings), faux preview trailers (a couple for movies that should actually be made) and are treated to show as though they were old strips on their last legs: washed-out color, jerky pictures and dropped sound (complete with the chattering of the projector sprockets), burn-thrus, bad splices, and missing reels. And the movies are not just accidentally cheesy, but are deliberately cheesy. Just add an armload of sodas and a bucket of popcorn and it's just like you're back in high school sneaking a carload of friends into the late show at the local drive-in. Heck, Southern Man has got last night's leftover movie popcorn at his side right now just to stay with that old drive-in feeling.

Well, with the news that Grindhouse wasn't doing so well at the box office and that the distributors were thinking of splitting the three-and-a-half-hour double feature into two separate films (which is apparently the way the rest of the world will get it anyway), Southern Man decided that he'd better go sooner rather than later - thus, after work last night he swung by the local megaplex for a late-night showing. Armed with a couple of water bottles and the aforementioned large popcorn with extra butter, he took his place in the theatre, looked around, and noticed that he was...alone.

Now, this particular megaplex has thirty-odd theatres of varying sizes, from cozy to huge. This was one of the larger ones. And, other than Southern Man, it was completely empty.

Well, so much for the "see this one with a large crowd" part of the experience; it appeared that Southern Man would instead be treated to his own private screening. Maybe. For a while it looked like it wasn't going to show at all but finally, fifteen minutes later than the scheduled time (and after a dozen repeats of the same ninety-second set of entertainment slides), Grindhouse finally began.

Southern Man doesn't go to many R-rated movies and saw only a few during his high-school days so the experience was a bit of a shock. First off, he hadn't seen any of the real previews. Southern Man is a long-time Steven King fan and the upcoming Room 1408 looks like a winner. He isn't quite as excited about the Halloween remake or yet another entry in the Die Hard franchise. The trailer for the fake movie Machete was just as fun as could be, and that's a B movie he would see if it is actually made, if only to see the motorcycle-mounted rotary minigun in action. Then we got right into the Rodriguez film.

If you like zombie movies, you'll love Planet Terror. The horror starts early - the doctor and his wife (played by Josh Brolin and Marley Shelton, who briefly plays the same role in Death Proof) are particularly creepy - and before long both human and zombie flesh fly all over the screen. How Planet Terror earned an R rating, Southern Man will never know - it's about as close to NC-17 as anything he's seen. And not for sexual content - heck, there was more boobage in the Machete trailer than in all of the rest of Grindhouse, and the two potential sex scenes in the actual features are lost to tongue-in-cheek "Missing Reel" placards - but for nonstop graphic, bloody, gory violence. This is not a movie for children, or even young adults. It may not be suitable for humans in general. Victims are torn limb from limb, zombie brains spill to the floor and spout legs, established characters are gruesomely dispached with heartless regularity, and in nearly every outdoor scene vehicles explode for no apparent reason. And of course about two-thirds of the way in, the lovely Rose McGowan (as the stripper Cherry) gets her first machine-gun replacement for the leg lost to an earlier zombie attack. And it's that maximum-firepower leg - at one point she even appears to do a rocket jump with it - that sets the tone for Planet Terror: a ridiculously absurb package of terror and sex and violence and explosions and gunfire and revving motors and just plain excessive zombie-bashing. The result is about as much fun as one can have at the movies. Oh, and you get to see an uncredited Bruce Willis as one of the shambling undead, too.

Another handful of period ads and trailers - Werewolf Women of the SS, Thanksgiving, and Don't - didn't produce anything that looked nearly as interesting as Machete unless you like leather-clad Nazis, slasher movies with lots and lots and lots of beheadings, or just plain craziness.

Now, Southern Man has of course heard of Tarantino (and had already seen him, as he had a cameo in a few scenes of Planet Terror) but hasn't seen much of his work so he didn't know quite what to expect in Death Proof (nor did he catch many of the references to other Tarantino films that are no doubt scattered throughout the film). Well, apparently Tarantino movies feature long, long scenes in cars and bars and such in which women talk, and talk, and talk. Southern Man was fearful that the Grindhouse folks had played some kind of bait-and-switch on him for a good long while there. Then about half an hour in the Kurt Russell character went from sweetly eccentric to downright evil with no warning at all and not two minutes later the body count went from zero to five, just like that. With the first batch of girls dispatched and no further sign of the murderous Kurt, we then got a fresh set of slightly more interesting chicks and had to endure their twenty minutes of slightly more interesting girl talk before, again without warning, Kurt shows up again for a heart-pounding muscle-car duel with simply amazing driving and stunt work that plays more than a little homage to the great car movies of the past. In fact, Southern Man just went to amazon.com and put Vanishing Point on his wish list. Another observation about Tarantino is that he apparently puts a good deal of thought into his soundtracks, and the musical selections for Death Proof are perfect for that film.

In short: while Rodriguez set out to make a deliberately over-the-top horror film (which is just the way to honor the great zombie movies of the past) Tarantino apparently made a sincere effort to reproduce an authentic grindhouse movie.

And after all that, Southern Man heads out the door at mumble-mumble AM to find that his is the only vehicle in the mall parking lot. Given what he'd just seen, it was a long and somewhat scary walk - the perfect end to an evening of scary movies.

So, if you want to relive the glory days of the exploitation films of yesteryear, aren't offended by unrelenting violence and gore (Planet Terror) or endless profanity (Death Proof), realize that this is adults-only fare, and can find a showing where there's actually a crowd, see Grindhouse while you can. And don't forget the popcorn.

Reflections On Relationships

The teacher of Southern Man's Sunday School Class often confesses how back in her younger and wilder days she was a relationship junkie who traded "affection" (we'll put it that way) for a man's love and commitment.

It occurs to Southern Man that this is really what everyone wants. Most men would gladly provide commitment and love and "all their worldly goods" for genuine respect and, ahem, "affection." Indeed, the dream of most men is to build a world and put their woman and children in the center of that world and come home after a long day of dragon-slaying to enjoy the fruits of their labor and their love. Southern Man is convinced that the happiest women are those who are loved by a man they respect. Read Eggerichs' Love and Respect; he lays it all out there and Southern Man dearly wishes he'd understood these truths twenty-five years ago. But the balance of power works one way when dating and quite another after marriage.

When dating the woman gives her respect and affection in return for love and commitment. The man can bask in the pleasure of her "affection" for a time but is free to withdraw his love and commitment and end the relationship without suffering much in the way of consequences, leaving the woman devastated and alone. When dating, men have the upper hand.

After marriage and children the woman can enjoy the security of a man's love and commitment and possessions but can withdraw her respect and affection without suffering much in the way of consequences, leaving the man trapped in an unhappy marriage that he dares not leave, for if he ends the relationship (or have it severed against his will, which is usually the case) the world he's built is shattered and he's also bankrupt and alone and usually without much access to his children. When married, women can, if they desire, parcel out respect and affection to control the relationship.

Many of Southern Man's male acquaintances have trod this broken road: a marriage in which the wife withdrew her respect and affection, then wondered why she didn't "feel loved" (Eggerich calls this death spiral the "crazy cycle") and ended the marriage, cashed in on half (or more!) of the family assets and court-ordered alimony and child support, took the children, and moved on to another man. Southern Man himself is slowly edging away from the pit of bankruptcy - no, he didn't fall in but it was a closer call than anyone realizes - and faces four or five more years with only occasional weekends with his youngest and the frustrating inability to provide much in the way of assistance to his college-bound daughter (he had to move money around to send her a mere $20 last week!) The planned move to the FEMA trailer at The Land is, plain and simple, an admission that he can no longer afford the rent at Casa Southern Man and the only reason he's not out there right now is because he can't afford to break his lease. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise - divorce is harsh and life after divorce is, at least for a while, no fun at all. For men, the exciting post-divorce single life consists mainly of being broke and alone and wondering if you'll ever love or be loved again.

Southern Man's son is in a serious relationship (as in shopping-for-a-trailer-together serious); teen daughter is on the cusp of her dating life. Southern Man doubts that they have yet experienced the agonies of genuine heartbreak and figures that they will learn the truths of relationships the hard way, as Southern Man did. He certainly didn't pay much attention to his elders at that age, so this post will probably be of little help to them. Heck, Southern Man has read the words of the Apostle Paul about husbands and wives and love and respect for most of his life and didn't really begin to actually understand them until a few years ago. It's true - Southern Man can be a very slow learner. But perhaps they and others will read this and take a bit of care as to how they explore uncharted territory. And here are ten more books that Southern Man has found helpful over the last few years when dealing with relationship and their occasionally bitter ending. Lord, teach my children to guard their hearts and chose carefully who they love, but not to be so guarded that they don't love fully when they find the right one. Amen.

State Of The Land

About fourteen years ago Southern Man and Southern Ex had a dream of building a house and raising our (then two) children in the country so we went shopping for land. We looked at a couple of lots and weren't very excited but one evening Southern Ex called on a lot and was told "by the way, we're cutting a road in to some new lots that back up to a little lake on Thursday. They're not even listed yet." We went out the next day and Southern Man fell in love with Lot #2, a long, skinny lot that was nice and flat in front (this was retired farmland that the owner was parceling out) but a couple of gulleys and depressions in back that cried out "Farm Pond" and "Koi Pond." We bought that lot. Somewhere in a box is a hard drive with a snapshot of the older two kids looking over the lake into the sunset. Southern Man is not much of one to carry pictures but he carried that one in his billfold for years and years, until it plum wore out. It was a film camera but we loved that photo so much we had it scanned (which was kind of a big deal back then) and Southern Ex used it as her desktop background. Some day Southern Man will find that hard drive and post that photo. And from that time on we always referred to our country property as The Land.

A year later Lot #1 (which was on the corner and did not go all the way back to the lake) was still unsold so Southern Man and child number three (then just a month old) went to the realtor and bought it (much to Southern Ex's ire) and that gave Southern Man two adjoining lots totaling ten acres that wrapped around a "common lot" that was supposed to one day have a boat dock and picnic tables and such but none of that actually happened so in effect Southern Man has pretty much free run over five additional acres.

We built a little storage shed and planted trees (hauling water in buckets from the lake) and the kids played Raptor in the tall grass and we fished and waded and even camped out a few times. And in 2000 and 2001 we dug trenches and moved sand and built forms and the Sunday School class came out to help pour concrete (thanks everyone!) and in the long hot summer of 2001 Southern Man built The Barn, which was to be home base for tools and building materials for the future house.

And then the marriage began continued to unravel and...well, a lot of stuff happened and The Barn never got finished and The Land was more or less neglected for many years. During one long hot summer our faithfully-watered trees were the only green things in sight and the deer ate them down to stubs. And when the marriage ended The Barn became the storehouse for most of Southern Man's books and records and such but due to neglect the roof leaked and much that was stored even in the middle of The Barn was damaged or ruined. And still The Barn remained neglected and the rats and mice and snakes and mud daubers pretty much had their way with it for many years.

After the divorce Southern Man was working two and sometimes three jobs and putting his time and money into buying his kid's love (every divorced man does this for a while before he figures out that they'll either love him or not regardless) and putting the rest of his time and money into two more relationships, the second of which ended in flaming ruin and put Southern Man on the brink of bankruptcy. He chose the current casa based on a hunch that Teen Daughter The Elder would move in with him when Southern Ex remarried and moved out of state - she did, and she did - and slowly started to put some time and energy and work into The Land. And over the next few years he tore down the remnants of that first shed and built The Woodshop in its place and finally repaired the damaged south roof on The Barn to stop that leak and slowly started to put things in order.

The Land, complete. The upper left is the Common Lot, upper right is Lot #1, and across the bottom is Lot #2. For a more detailed view of the lower left corner where all of the interesting stuff is, click here.

So now that Southern Son is on his own (more or less) and Teen Daughter The Eldest is about to embark on a four-year tour with the Navy and Teen Daughter The Younger is with her mom for at least another year Southern Man has made The Land a priority. He's always wanted to live out there - he bought the FEMA trailer with that in mind - and now is his chance. There's no well down so there is no running water (the worst part about that is no shower) and no plumbing and both cell phone and internet service are sketchy at best ("no service" is typical) but as of a few years ago electricity is finally in (Southern Man has four, count 'em, four, 'fridges out there now) and Southern Man just loves it out there. Every time he makes that half-hour drive he feels refreshed and renewed as soon as he puts his feet on that good red dirt. And every time he reads Walden he wants, wants, wants with all his heart to be out there even without running water or 'net service.

So he has given notice that he'll be out of the apartment at the end of August. Teen Daughter's deployment date is still a bit up in the air as she keeps passing tests for more advanced positions but she has more or less migrated out to Southern Parents anyway. And Southern Man will spend the next week - his last week off before the fall semester kicks in - preparing for the move. Tomorrow he tackles the ground floor of The Barn...

Recovery

The neighborhood was fairly busy today as families continued to take stock of the situation, recover what they could, and prepare for rebuilding.


This photo was taken from the southern border of The Land, facing southeast. The home two lots south of Southern Man lost a lot of shingles, but no sheathing; they spent much of the day yesterday covering the roof with those blue tarps. Note the capsized boat and trailer in the foreground. To the left are the contents of the immediate neighbor's tin shed, less the shed - that was about their only loss. The house on the other side of the street (in the center of the photo) is missing most of its shingles and a fair amount of brick facade but with almost all of the sheathing still intact. Whether due to differences in workmanship or just the capricious nature of tornadoes, the four houses north of that one suffered substantially more damage.


South of that house are eight lots of rubble.


The fury of Mother Nature is no match for a Southerner's indefatigable spirit and sense of humor.


The couple on the far southeast corner runs a rock-and-gravel service and they've already used their surviving heavy equipment to clear their slab. But not all made it through - that is a full-size gravel truck on its side in the background. Their truck barn was also completely blown away.


This pickup was picked up by the storm and dropped in the middle of the neighbor's yard...


...and here's a big truck in the middle of a field that started out in the truck barn mentioned a few photos above...


...but the most spectacular vehicular damage was this capsized motor home - which belongs to a family six houses away. Yes, the tornado threw a motor home half the length of our quarter-mile-long road. Of this house, only the eight-year-old boy's under-stairs closet survived. They attribute this to the sheer volume and weight of his toys. The storm took the house and garage, but left their car battered but unmoved. Also look at the ground in this photo (and in others above) and compare to the first photo in this post; the tornado plucked most of the grass right out of the ground.

Southern Man was deeply touched by the breadth and depth of the support these families have received. Yesterday Southern Man made a run to the local Sonic for a bag of burgers (when the manager heard what they were for, he halved the price) and had a hard time giving them away, there was so much food and water coming in. Today the ladies working a State disaster-services van were joking that more people were offered them food and water than were accepting theirs (but Southern Man, having put any number of nails through the soles of his boots in the last two days, took them up on a free tetanus booster). Everyone was in good spirits, openly thankful that no one in our neighborhood was harmed. The family from the home in the photo above were sitting under a canopy eating pizza and cracking jokes. Lord, keep us ever mindful of what is truly important. Amen.

Holiday Weekend Day 1

Five glorious days with very little structure and few scheduled events. Now that's Southern Man's kind of holiday, as he is still decompressing from SC11. So, here's the schedule:

Today: doctor's appointment at 8:00, free the rest of the day.
Tomorrow: morning free, then lunch at Southern Parents and evening free.
Friday: nothing!
Saturday: free until mid-afternoon, then dinner with friends.
Sunday: Sunday School in the morning, then free for the rest of the day.

So after this morning's appointment Southern Man meandered home and did a little geocaching on the way and picked up a few groceries. And the afternoon developed into such a stunningly beautiful day - crisp and cool and clear skies and no wind - that Southern Man decided to head out to The Land but did so much 'caching along the way that it was dark when he arrived - where he stepped out of the truck and was greeted by a beautiful turquoise sky with Jupiter and Venus glittering like jewels overhead. It was a stunning sight and Southern Man just sat down in wonder for a while. The pond was dead calm and about thirty inches up, enough that the three-cinderblock-high dock pilings he'd finished at the water's edge a few weeks ago were now entirely submerged. Looks like he needs to go up one or two more.

And then Southern Man discovered that he'd forgotten the bag of food and supplies and faced a night without supper and a morning without breakfast. Not to mention that the entertainment options in the trailer are still pretty thin - a VCR (but no DVD player; that half of the VCR/DVD combo died a day after it went to the trailer) and a little TV, a portable AM/FM/CD player, and that's about it. And there was no dark chocolate at all in the trailer. So he piddled around for a while and then bowed to the inevitable and came back to the apartment and put that bag right in front of the door so after Thanksgiving lunch tomorrow he'll go back out properly supplied for a planned two-night stay. Sadly, the forecast calls for rain on those two days...

Friday!

And not just any old Friday, but the end-of-the-summer-semester Friday! And it was a busy one.

After breakfast with Teen Daughter the Elder (who is slowly recovering from her bout of shingles) she headed out to yet another top-secret meeting with her military masters and Southern Man checked Craigslist, as is his habit, and saw an offer for twenty free cinderblocks. Now Southern Man is a building materials whore and will jump on something like that in a hot minute but the lister said they were just stacked up by the curb and he'd delete the post when they were gone. So there was not much chance of getting them but it was on the way to work so Southern Man leaped into The Titan to check it out. The address was strangely familiar and it turned out to be a guy from whom Southern Man had gotten a load of firewood a while back. The cinderblocks were still there, plus he had PVC pipe that he'd used to build a little greenhouse and some bricks. In fact the entire pile was from tearing down his greenhouse and since he's moving he gave it away. So Southern Man got a full truckload of goodies. There was no rush so he brought it all home and switched to The Hyundai for the rest of the day.

A Titan load of goodies. The battered north roof of The Barn is the next major project.

Then it was off to work, to deal with paperwork (including the upcoming year's contract, which includes a nice raise, and final details for the upcoming supercomputer conference, and some travel-grant applications) and grading final exams and post grades for both summer classes (one at each school). That last required a trip to the community college on the south side - yes, it's 2012, but they still require a signature on a hard copy of the electronically-submitted grade form - so Southern Man printed off a list of geocaches to hit while he was on that side of town. These were all fairly challenging, many in wooded areas, and Southern Man had a lot of fun hunting them down. But at the very last cache The Hyundai wouldn't start.

Well, it did this once a while back and Southern Man suspects that he's gotten all he's going to get out of the factory battery so he put the hood up and stood by the road to flag down help. And now an observation: not a single woman stopped, but every guy stopped. Every single one. The third had cables and a quick jump had the car running again. Then, happy and tired and covered with burrs and scratches Southern Man headed home for a shower and dinner and rest.

But when he got out of the shower the phone's voice mail light was on - it was RCJ, and could I run over to his mom's house and help him fix an air conditioner? Of course, so Southern Man threw on some clothes and headed out in The Titan. We took care of the chores and had pizza with his mom and sister and brother-in-law (they all share a big house that's only a few blocks from the mini-mansion that Southern Man and his ex bought in '04) and then RCJ went to work (night shift) and Southern Man headed out to the land to unload his truckload of goodies.

And after unloading and stacking the goodies and clearing out a corner of The Barn Southern Man relaxed for a bit in The Trailer and finally solved the mystery of the occasional stabbing pain in his left foot - a rusty nail that had come through the sole of that boot, so there will be a tetanus booster in his immediate future - and relaxed for a bit. And then he came home for another dinner (cold chicken and hot veggies and cold beer) and to reflect on a busy and productive and fun day and plan tomorrow's activities with Teen Daughter the Younger, who is back from Teen Camp but was scooped up by her grandmother until tomorrow. Lord, I'm so lucky. Please continue to bless me and my family. Amen.

Trampoline

Today's big event was the purchase of a new trampoline for Twelve-Year-Old Daughter's birthday (her previous birthday trampoline was pretty torn up and was abandoned in a move) so having shopped last weekend we piled into The Titan and headed to Academy - which was absolutely packed, with a huge crowd of people in the front of the store crowded around tables piled high with shirts and jerseys and caps celebrating the local team's recent victories - and finally got the trampoline purchased and loaded and then headed off to Home Depot to get some stakes with which to anchor it down only to be told that "we don't have those, but Academy does!" so back to Academy we went for the tie-down kit and then we headed to The Land to set it up.

We set it up behind The Trailer. That's The Workshop in the background on the left, and The Barn on the far right.

Twelve-Year-Old Daughter frolics on her new toy. This plus The Trailer (with kitchen, AC, and video player) ought to make trips to The Land a bit more bearable for her. But Southern Man has got to get a well down out there.

This was also Twelve-Year-Old Daughter's first visit to The Trailer so we brought food and had our lunch there as well. Alas we could not stay long as she had an afternoon swim date with her cousin later that afternoon so we headed back to La Casa for her swimwear and went to the Ancestral Manor, which gave Southern Man an evening to himself. But then Southern Son came by and we went to Wal-Mart and did a little shopping and talked for a while. He's going through a rough patch right now and needed support. Also, food. Happily enough the girls got home in time to see him and cheer him up a little as well. Lord, guide and direct my children in all that they do. Amen.

Survival 101

Well, I see that this blog hasn't been updated in a while. The reason is simple: Southern Man has been busy, busy, busy for the last few weeks. However, not so busy as to deprive the blogosphere of the first edition of Southern Man's Survival Tips for Single Guys. Today's issue covers one of the most important needs in the single man's life, and that is food.

Oh, you were thinking of that other most important need in a single man's life? Sorry, got nuthin for you on that. Check back in a couple years, or post your own tips if you got 'em. Do remember that this blog is rated PG, not NC-17.

And I'm not talking about procuring food using the time-honored methods of VISA or Discover. I'm talking about actually preparing food in a kitchen. That's the room with the sink and the cooktop, by the way, if you've never actually been in there. At some point you have to quit eating out three times a day and learn to cook at least some basic meals. So here are some tips to get you started:

When milk is on sale, check the expiration date. There's a reason when milk that's normally $3 per gallon is suddenly marked down to $1.38, and that's usually it.

Ditto for soft drinks. When name brand soda is on sale for $2 a case, that means it was abandoned in a hot semi trailer for a couple of weeks and has been chemically transmuted into the equivalent of your middle school kid's science experiment. On the other hand, when you forget this rule you can call the toll free number on the can and complain and they'll send you coupons for free cases. Try to keep these requests down to one or two a month; more than that is just plain greedy.

The above are specific example of a more general rule: you get what you pay for. Consider the difference between name brand chili at $2.79 a can and the generic stuff at two for a buck. The first is sometimes edible; starving stray dogs will turn their noses up at the second. The only known exception to this rule are some of the generic cold cereals, which can actually be pretty good as long as you don't pour that $1.38 milk on 'em.

The little one is the "teaspoon" and the big one is the "tablespoon." Don't ask why, just remember it. While we're on the subject of kitchen measurement: there are three teaspoons to a tablespoon, two tablespoons to an ounce, eight ounces in a cup, two cups to a pint, two pints in a quart, and four quarts in a gallon. And you thought the damn metric system was hard. If you need more information than that, what you're trying to do is too complicated; throw it all down the disposal and go to Chilis instead.

When following a recipe, ignore terms like cream, blend, whip, beat, fold, stir, and sift. Just dump the stuff into a big bowl and bash at it with a tablespoon (that's the big one, remember?) until it's all mixed up.Your oven will never know the difference.

Lots of food has what's called a shelf life. That means it don't last forever. Be aware of this and eat things before they grow legs and walk away. Rotate your fruits and veggies (you are buying fruits and veggies, aren't you?) and keep an eye on your leftovers. In fact, write dates on your to-go boxes and throw them out if they get a couple weeks old. Take-out Chinese does not age as well as you might expect or hope.

However, some things can still be eaten fairly late in the game. In particular, overripe apples make good apple butter and mushy brown bananas make terrific banana bread. Find good recipes for apple butter and banana bread and learn to make them. Don't worry about cream, whip, blend and all that, just throw the stuff together and it'll turn out just fine. Trust me.

The directions for heating frozen foods are always for a microwave you don't have, so ignore them. Instead, nuke for two minutes and check. If it's not hot enough, do it again. Repeat until you're hungry enough to eat it anyway. Note that "nuke" is the only microwave setting you'll ever need.

If you're like Southern Man and have kids that deign to visit on occasion, keep plenty of kid food in the house. Southern Man's girls are content with Easy Mac and Kid Cusine and his son will eat canned clam chowder and ramen noodles and all will eat various flavors of Hamburger Helper. Find out what your kids like and keep plenty of it around. Also keep candy and chips and popcorn and ice cream and their favorite drinks in the house. You do want them to come back, don't you?

Learn to cook one meal well. You never know when you'll need to entertain and guests are impressed if you can actually produce something in the kitchen. Spaghetti is relatively foolproof, especially if you grab a loaf of hot garlic bread on the way home, make the sauce by dumping a jar or two of the cheap stuff into a pound of browned and drained hamburger meat, and buy Caesar salad mix in the bag. Dry spaghetti can sit in the pantry forever but don't forget about shelf life on that salad. No one is impressed by brown Romaine.

Note that a few enlightened companies now realize that there is a market for the kitchen impaired. That's you, by the way. Seek out their products and buy them. You can get some surprisingly good meals that require little preparation once you know where to look.

OK that should be enough to get you started. If you have your own tips, post 'em and I'll steal the best ones for the next edition of Southern Man's Survival Tips.

Labor Day Weekend Day 0

No better way than to kick off a new adventure than a long holiday weekend. Southern Man must work in the morning but as soon as he's done with his lab at one o'clock it's off to The Land to grab The Titan, hasten back to the apartment, finish cleaning it out (all that remains is the bed and a few baskets and boxes, plus a bit of a mess in Teen Daughter The Elder's room), check the mail one last time, and turn in the keys. Sadly, he's not leaving the place all that clean and will probably not get much (if any) of his deposit back. But, face it, the price on their charge sheet for new drip pans is less than what they run at Wal-Mart and it's worth $20 to him to not have to scrub that oven. It didn't help that when faced with the horrible mess that was the carpet Southern Man's old vacuum cleaner first groaned in agony and then burst into flames. That was the point where he pretty much gave up on actual "cleaning" and just focused on packing instead.

Then it was off to The Land to unload and unpack and start to settle in to actually living there instead of just visiting. High on the agenda is to get all of the kitchen goods safely packed into sealed plastic tubs, as there is still a bit of a mouse issue with The Trailer. And there's lots going on this weekend - meeting with friends tonight at a local lakeside eatery to dine and dance, morning coffee with the church singles group, church and then lunch with Southern Parents on Sunday, and then a big cookout on Labor Day at an area park. And of course there will be plenty of geocaching! The weekend will also be Southern Man's first opportunity to take advantage of the new Gold's Gym membership, which will be Southern Man's place to shower must mornings. The one he chose is the newest in town (he got in on the tail end of the "grand opening" special) with a saltwater lap pool and hot tub and lots of shiny new equipment. They even have an exercise bike room in a cinema that shows movies all day. This will hopefully inspire Southern Man to work out four or five mornings a week and get back into some semblance of shape. A good sign is that while signing up with the two cute Gold's Gym girls he ran into Trip, a young man who used to run student activities at Southern Man's workplace (the go-cart racing on Valentine's Day 2011 was one of his best). A former basketball player, he's about six-six and built like a tank. The conversation started like this:

Trip: Hey, Dr. Southern Man!
Southern Man: Hey, Trip! How's it going?
Cute Gold's Gym Girl #1 (to Trip): Wow, you do know everyone!
Cute Gold's Gym Girl #2 (To Southern Man) You're a doctor?

The evening entertainment was to meet up with friends at a local bar and grill that sits right on the big lake for dinner and dancing.

Was there a geocache hidden near this lovely lighthouse? Of course there was.

Not a group you'd want to meet in a dark alley.

The band was one that Southern Man has seen before; they call themselves the Wise Guys and have a lot of fun playing covers (ranging from hilariously awful to stunningly accurate) and poking fun at them, each other, their friends, and the crowd in general.

Setting up the stage.

For the hilariously awful cover of Werewolves of London they dragged a pack of kids up on stage to howl. Of course Helicopter Mom had to be right there to spoil all of the pics.

The band's guest tonight was Johnny Barbata, who's played with Jefferson Airplane and CSNY and Eric Clapton and many others. They made fun of him, too, but did some pretty good Neil Young covers with him on stage.

These pics were all taken with the new phone camera.

We had a good time eating and drinking and dancing tonight. It's going to be a good weekend, a good month, a good semester, and a good year. Lord, thank you for your many blessings, and continue to watch over me and my family. Amen.

Income Inequity

There has been much wailing and moaning and gnashing of teeth of late about "income inequity" or the idea that some people having more money than others is a Very Bad Thing. Southern Man will now explain why income inequity is inevitable and why you shouldn't worry about it and why it is actually a Good Thing.

Capitalism and free enterprise are the greatest engines of wealth that the world has ever seen. They are engines of wealth because they enable people to provide goods and services that other people want. And even in their highly regulated and overly taxed form here in the good old United States of America capitalism and free enterprise are the means by which anyone - anyone - can better their lot in life.

Case Study 1: Some dude named Wayne, the son of Oklahoma sharecroppers, thinks that people need places to store their stuff. He leases some land and puts up some sheds. He was right - people will gladly pay him for storage. He now has thousands of buildings and is worth millions of dollars. His thoughts? You can get money if you're smart or work hard. I'm not smart, but I worked hard. Full story here.

Case Study 2: Some other dude named Bill drops out of school to implement a programming language (BASIC) for an early microcomputer (the Altair 8800).

You don't even know how to turn it on, much less program it.

It's successful enough that he and a friend hire some other dudes and start a company that they call Micro-Soft and write a lot of other software. A lot of that software was for an operating system called QDOS. When Bill learned that IBM was shopping for an OS for their upcoming line of personal computers he took a chance, borrowed a stack of cash, bought QDOS, and marketed it to IBM. Now we all run Windows.

Case Study 3: Yet another dude who goes by the handle of Southern Man had this notion (back in the early nineties) that he can buy components and build PCs and sell them for a lot less than the stores were charging and still turn a tidy profit. He's right and he builds and sells (and buys at auction and refurbishes and sells) thousands of desktop computers. After a while desktop computers become commodities and he closes the business but not before it paid for ten acres of land and two (used) cars and countless tanks of gas and trunkloads of groceries and many many thousands of dollars in taxes.

Case Study 4: Southern Man's neighbor José worked his ass off mowing lawns in the summer. Pretty soon he has more clients than he can service so he buys a couple of used lawn mowers and hires a couple of other dudes to help him out. Now forty guys drive around in green F-150s with "José's Lawn Service" painted on the side while José sits in the office and works the phones drumming up more business.

That's actually pretty typical of how people gain wealth: they have ideas about goods or services that people might want, they put those ideas into action, and sometimes it takes off. However, apparently Wayne and Bill (to pick on the big winners) are EVIL because they now have all this money. It does not occur to critics that they have all this money because they produced goods and services that people want. It also does not occur to these people that Wayne and Bill have created countles jobs and pay enormous amounts in income tax that support all of the social programs that are so precious to their critics. And that's not to say that Southern Man and José aren't doing well, either. Southern Man has ten acres of land, paid for, and José has a new mini-mansion just up the road. On the world income scale we're both one-percenters by comfortable margins. And we did it by figuring out what people would pay for and providing it.

According to the Global Rich List if you make 25K per year in the USA you're in the top 2% of global incomes.

In other words: capitalism and free markets provide the goods and services that we crave, and income inequity is an inevitable result of those very same free markets.

You may argue that these guys were fortunate and lucky and privileged and not like the rest of us. To some extent, yes. Bill, for example, was born of relatively wealthy parents (he borrowed the money for QDOS from his dad) and had opportunities that many of us do not. The same goes for Southern Man. But Wayne, the son of sharecroppers? Nope. José, who never finished high school? Nope. These guys got where they were by sheer hard work and determination in a country where hard work and determination can result in great rewards. Southern Man spells out his privileges this way: born in the USA (which is like winning the birthright lottery, right there) to parents who stayed together, raised him in the church, taught him the value of both education and hard work, and made sure he had a shot at college. Not everyone was as lucky as he. And not everyone avails themselves of the opportunities that they had (Southern Son comes to mind) and Southern Man is fortunate that he did. And not everyone is really aware of how the system works - the über-liberal Southern Sister, for example, who rails against the evils of income inequity and the injustice inherent in our economic system but who recently borrowed money (capitalism) to open a coffee shop (free enterprise) so that she could (surprise!) convert her ideas and industry into more stuff for her and her family. For all its faults, we do have an economic system in which everyone - everyone - has a shot at becoming more than they are.

Now Southern Man will argue that income inequity really doesnt matter because we have for the last fifty years fought the War on Poverty and we've won. Poverty has been largely eradicated in the First World. And by that Southern Man means that most "poor" people live in constructed homes with indoor plumbing and running water and electricity and refrigerators. Not to mention cable television and cell phones and cars. To call them "poor" is a grave offense to the few who are truly poor - who sleep rough, who have no idea where they will get their next meal, who have no access to medical care. Fortunately, to be truly poor in the First World is increasingly rare. The First World has performed a miracle - in their corner of the globe, for the first time in human history, almost everyone is pretty well off. And they are pretty well off because of the wealth produced by capitalism and free markets. In other words, income inequity is the rising tide that lifts everyone's boat.

It didn't used to be that way.


How did they know he was a king? Because he wasn't covered with sh*t!

So it doen't matter to Southern Man that Bill has ten thousand times as much money as he. Is Bill's water ten thousand times as pure? Is his gasoline ten thousand times better? Bill may drive a Mercedes and Southern Man a Hyundai but we drive on the same roads and burn the same gas. Is his health care ten thousand times as effective? Truth is, had Bill broken his leg while in Southern City he might well have ended up with the same surgeon as Southern Man. Bill may live in the House Of 95 Windows and Southern Man bunks in The Trailer but we both sleep with equal comfort at night; he may dine at $300-per-plate eateries but his meal is not that much better than a good $12 steak at Chili's.

So stop fretting about income inequity. It's inevitable and does a world of good through goods and services and taxes that we wouldn't otherwise have. Except to liberals who erroneously believe that income is a zero-sum game and sing "tax the rich, feed the poor, until there are no rich no more." 'Cause then we'll all be poor. Southern Man suspects that's what they really want.

Land Work Day 5

Repeated applications of the mop have got that concrete floor to where it's actually almost clean. Southern Man's schedule all week has been to wake up in The Trailer, have breakfast, work 'till noon or so, come back into town for a shower and wash clothes and clean up whatever needs to be cleaned and run whatever errands need to be run, load up The Titan with more stuff (the rule is, don't drive out to The Land without taking something large) and a few buckets of clean water (yes, water must be trucked out to The Land), work a few hours in the evening, and then relax for a bit.

One of those errands was to get an oil and filter change on The Titan.

And of course there is always geocaching.

Since The Trailer is quite small the plan is to convert a portion of The Barn into a standard garage-conversion man cave. Now that the concrete floor is almost clean Southern Man moved a bookcase and the stereo cabinet and stereo gear out tonight; the futon is already there. It's still a little dusty so there will be one more pass with the mop before it all gets set up. And then a relaxing few hours in The Trailer with beer and popcorn and a movie before retiring to bed!

Southern Man Plays In The Mud

The greatest fear Southern Man has about living out at The Land is not the isolation or lack of water or plumbing or heat in The Trailer or nonexistent cell or phone service - it's that the unimproved "driveway" - native red clay and shale - that runs back to The Barn gets slicker than snot when it rains and he worries about getting in and out. So far so good - there have been a few slippery mornings but he's always made it up to the gravel road OK. And having lived out there for several months now the clay has gotten pretty packed. But every time Southern Man wakes in the middle of the night to the sound of rain he always wonders if he'll make it out in the morning.

Well, it's been a grubby week, weather-wise; lots of rain and sleet and snow with temperatures hovering at about freezing, so it's wet and icky and mucky and muddy. And Wednesday morning The Hyundai couldn't make it up the driveway. And in his efforts to do so Southern Man managed to slide off into the ditch and get pretty mired in. Fortunately The Titan, even though it's rear-wheel-drive, did make it out and Southern Man got to work on time, where he spent the day pondering on how he was going to get The Hyundai un-stuck.

This was no small problem. The Hyundai was a couple hundred feet off the gravel road - way too far for a winch to reach. That is, if Southern Man had a winch. He's had The Titan for six years now and ever summer he thinks "I ought to put a winch on that truck." A tow truck could probably navigate the muddy driveway and yank it out - and it would be "free" thanks to State Farm's roadside assistance coverage - but Southern Man has his pride. So he thought about it all day and got home at six-ish (greeted by freezing rain and wind) and decided he'd give it his best shot so he put on his work boots and some old jeans and an expendable jacket and put a headlamp on his head and got to work.

So using various combinations of boards from his woodpile and buckets of rock and no small amount of slipping and sliding and mudslinging and cursing Southern Man slowly but surely worked The Hyundai out of the ditch and into the driveway and all the way up to the gravel road. And in the process became thoroughly coated with slimy red muck. And, sadly, the interior of The Hyundai is also liberally decorated in red. It took about two hours, well into the freezing dark of the night. But it was out!

So tomorrow will be Hyundai-cleaning day. And laundry day, with a special load of muddy clothes. And possibly a bit of celebration for completing a difficult task, albeit messily, without having to ask for help. Yes, that actually means something to Southern Man, who is heartily tired of people telling him "you can't do that." Oh, yes he can!

And with finances increasingly in order he's already budgeted for ten tons of gravel, to be delivered as soon as weather permits. That'll be a start on getting a solid foundation under that driveway. Lord, thank you for providing all of my needs. Amen.

Rocks

Southern Man has lots of plans for The Land and usually keeps an eye on Craigslist for anything he might make use of and this morning had the good fortune to be the first to call on a bunch of rock that had been used in a koi pond - highly desirable as The Land has a little washout that has always been designated as the future garden pond and the native rock out there is soft red shale that's not much good for rockscaping. Warned that some were large and he ought to "bring help" Southern Man tossed a couple of long 4x4s and a two-wheel hand truck in the back of The Titan and headed out after work to pick them up. Some were indeed quite large but Southern Man is fairly adept at moving and loading heavy things by himself and once he got started the rock-owner came out to help. He had a large back yard that was clearly in the middle of several projects (including a half-completed swimming pool where that koi pond used to be) and the back of the house was in the middle of a major remodel as well so we chatted about landscaping and remodeling and such while moving big rocks on the two-wheeler and flipping the biggest ones up the 4x4 ramps. The rock pretty much filled The Titan's bed and he was crouching perilously low on the springs but he's a big tough truck and Southern Man wasn't too concerned about breaking anything...

...and then while looking things over one last time before departing the rock-owner's wife came out and Southern Man overheard one of the highest compliments a man can earn:

"How did you get all that loaded so quickly?"
"Honey, that guy really knew what he was doing."

So Southern Man was pretty happy on the slow and careful drive to The Land where he spent an hour or so unloading and stacking the rock on pallets (he'd nabbed a truckload of those last month) and looking the place over as he hadn't been out there (other than a quick errand last week) since the pinched nerve flared up two weekends ago. Curiously, it didn't bother him at all while loading and unloading all that rock (it's really bad when lying down and trying to sleep). He had inadvertently left the AC on in the trailer and it was still cycling just fine so he pronounces that breaker problem solved but has a mild feeling of dread about what the next electric bill might look like.

And now he is home and had breakfast-for-dinner (bacon and eggs and chocolate milk and a hydrocodone in the hopes of getting some sleep tonight) and has a favorite movie in the DVD player and in a bit will take a shower and go to bed in happy anticipation of a long weekend - next Monday and Tuesday are Fall Break and he probably won't work the kids too hard on Friday either.

Land Work Day 4

Today was dedicated to sweeping and scraping and scrubbing that dirt-encrusted concrete floor. It finally got to the point where no further progress could be made so Southern Man went into town and bought a mop and returned and first mopped the trailer (he keeps the trailer extremely clean as to not tempt the mice) and then made several passes with the mop in The Barn. 

Southern Man also dropped by the big gym near the current casa (he has budgeted a gym membership, not only to work out but as a place to shower) only to find that due to some new federal regulation they are closing their lap pool. It's just ten bucks a month but Southern Man was kind of hoping to swim laps in the mornings so he checked a much more upscale (and pricier) health club that does have a lap pool but is $50 per month. That's not much more than the local YMCA and much nicer, so he'll check out Gold's Gym (there are several between The Land and The Job) and make a final decision sometime this week.

Southern Man has had long-standing issues with insomnia but sleeps quite soundly in The Trailer!

Weekend Update

Well, blogging has been light because Southern Man has kept busy. Also, the lack of internet out at The Land does put a damper on things as well.

Now that it is late fall Southern Man's routine is get up (in the dark), have breakfast, go to the gym to work out and shower, and go to work. On the days he teaches evenings he does his evening work and then goes home (in the dark) and relaxes for a bit and goes to bed. On the days that he doesn't teach evenings he takes care of errands and laundry (once a week) and usually has a little daylight in the evening to work and play outside. Alas, Southern Man has repaired the Windows 98 SE game computer (the five-volt line went out on the power supply about a year ago and Southern Man has just now gotten around to replacing it) and now spends an inordinate amount of time playing old games instead of being more productive.

We are The Borg. You will be assimilated.

The Trailer gets pretty cool at night as Southern Man doesn't trust the gas heater so he has an electric space heater in the kitchen and an electric blanket on the bed. The blanket has a three-hour timer, which works out well. He is getting more accustomed to the gas cooktop; he hasn't yet tried the gas oven. Actually groceries are not much of a problem as Southern Man is an expert at scrounging after the various lunches hosted in his building. Two weeks ago he pretty much lived off of leftover lunchmeat, lettuce, and potato salad all week long.

The weekend was fun. Saturday was spent working outside and reading and watching DVDs and playing Armada, then finished with an evening cookout (hot dogs and s'mores) and hayride at a nearby "party barn" with the church singles group. It was dark and the phone camera is pretty hopeless in anything other than ideal conditions so no pics unless Southern Man steals some off the group's Facebook site. Sunday morning was the usual breakfast, workout and shower, Sunday School, and then lunch with Southern Parents and Southern Son, followed by an afternoon and evening of fun and relaxation. Life at The Land is very low key. Southern Man likes it.

But next month will be busy, busy, busy - a week of poll-watching and the election, then a week in Salt Lake City for SC12, then Thanksgiving, and then a weekend in Chicago for Teen Daughter the Elder's graduation from Navy Boot Camp. And then the Christmas holidays will be here before we know it!

One More Deep Breath

Tomorrow we plunge into Finals Exam Week at Southern Man's university so it will be a busy time of writing and administering and grading exams as well as taking care of the thirty-odd appointments students have made to demonstrate their final programming projects. That goes clear through Friday, which is packed from morn 'till night: breakfast with a candidate for an open Dean spot, academic meetings later in the morning and early afternoon, Winter Commencement, and various receptions afterwards. There is an hour that evening when Southern Man needs to be in three places at once and that doesn't count the airport as teen daughter flies in that day; it is not yet determined who is free to pick her up. Twelve-year-old daughter arrives on Saturday. And that means that during the week before Christmas Southern Man will have both girls at home and the usually quiet Casa will be filled with chattering and laughing and music and cooking and (occasionally) fussing. It Will Be Good.

Yesterday Southern Man dropped by our monthly "Coffee Talk" which is usually at the singles director's home but he is down for knee replacement surgery so we met at Panera Bread instead, which Southern Man usually avoids but made an exception this time. There was a geocache in the parking lot so he dragged a couple of the girls out to find it...

Two happy cachers and proof that Southern Man has a social life. A small one, to be sure, but it is there.

It was a cold but beautiful day so Southern Man was determined to spend a good deal of it outside. He went after another cache that had been nagging him for a while and couldn't find it on the third try but he knows it's there somewhere (this is what they call an "extreme" cache out in a wooded area) so he will hit it again later. Then he went out to The Land and fooled around a bit but it was too cold to do anything really productive and he decided to come back into town instead of spending the night in the (cold) trailer. He either needs to fix the trailer's gas heater or pick up a couple of electric heaters pretty soon now. And get an electric blanket. Today will be much of the same - it's cold but not too windy so it will be another outside day.

The evening's entertainment was...well, let's say that no one throws a Christmas party quite like a charismatic megachurch. It was big and crowded and loud and while Southern Man is and will always be Nazarene he can't quite imagine any of his former pastors standing in front of a high-octane rock band and dance troupe proclaiming that "Santa is in the house!" and then witness the Merry One himself zoom overhead to the platform on a zip line. So that was great fun and Southern Man was in such high spirits that he even did a little night caching on the way home. And in an hour or so a delicious pot roast will come out of the oven (his secret broth recipe includes a beef bullion cube and a bottle of beer) and Southern Man will have his own private feast. It's not too early to say "Merry Christmas!"