"Exactly what your father told me not to"

That was my response to the question: "What'd you get?"

The thing being referred to? The first deer I ever killed.

I had decided several months ago that I wanted to go hunting. 3 reasons for this:

1. I've become pretty close with 2 guys in my nieghborhood, both of whom hunt. A little male bonding in the woods is good.
2. I have acquired a taste for venison since we moved here.
3. I am a fan of Michael Pollan and the real food movement. We're members of our local CSA, we don't eat anything that has over 5 ingredients listed on the label, and the farther we can check out of the industrial food complex the better. 

Hence, going deer hunting makes sense to me. It's another Southern experience to write about.

On Dothan and Alligators

Look at that thing! It's huge! (That's what she said....HEE-YOOOO!!!)

We've never been to South Alabama before. Our neighbors who used to live here in Auburn moved back home to Dothan two months ago, and we decided to visit them.

We were told we were going to go fishing, and that we'd be hunting an alligator.

Wait, I'm sorry....A what?

Tuskegee Adventure

Tuskegee is famous for a lot of different things. The Tuskegee Institute and George Washington Carver. The birthplace of Rosa Parks. The Tuskegee Airmen. Tuskegee University.

We had the opportunity to visit one day, lured by the promise of Sweet Potatoes and a celebration of George Washington Carver at the Farmer's Market there.

Unfortunately, the Sweet Potato Festival was a complete and total bust. We arrived to a practically empty Farmer's Market (save for a few farmers), and a small table manned by a few schoolgirls and their handmade signs about what Carver did with sweet potatoes. It was a sad, but amusing sight. The girls had a small microphone and gave a short presentation on all the great things Carver did. It was like I was back in elementary school listening to classmates give book reports in the front of class.

"George Washington Carver was a great man. He was a scientist, and studied sweet potatoes. He raised them in his garden....He was a great man."

You get the idea.

The mini-vacation: Maker Mark Day @ Keeneland and Disney

We just got back from driving 2,000 miles in 5 days.  Wooof...my butt hurts from sitting that long, but we did have a great time. Allow me to explain.

Racetracks. Yes, we are bettors

Every year, the bourbon, Maker's Mark, sponsors a day at the Keeneland Race track in Lexington, KY. As we are Kentucky Colonels, I like drinking bourbon, and the wife's Dad and wife live there, we decided to head on up and bet the ponies. 10 races, 5 bets, we walked away with about $65, basically breaking even when you consider we paid for lunch, etc.


It was a nice afternoon, followed by a delicious dinner at a local German restaurant named Marikkas. Brats, sauerkraut, wiener schnitzel and beer? Yes, please!

Maker's Mark day at Keeneland was followed by the Retirement party of the CEO of the company, Bill Samuels. He's the 7th(?) generation of Samuels to distill bourbon and he had a blow out to celebrate. A very large tent was set up in a hotel parking lot in downtown Lexington. There was a band, lighting and sound equipment, food, and of course, booze. Tickets were $10 a pop and all proceeds went to a local shelter for battered woman (insert snarky comment here about booze and abuse).

In the Country

Another Saturday, another day of adventure and new experiences. This time it was a next door neighbor's piece of land south of Tuskegee where we played with some horses, tried to catch cat fish, and looked at some cows.

The drive through Tuskegee was extremely pleasant. Our next door neighbor and his wife had grown up in the general vicinity and shared a lot of nice tidbits about the area, the way people live, etc. In fact, they pointed out two houses, both opposite one another, that were the exact same. Huh, why's that?, I wondered. Well, it turns out that the homes were both built by the same man. The first home was built for he and his wife to live in, and the second home was built to satisfy a stipulation of his divorce from the same woman that he build her a home that was its exact mirror. Hence, two houses, opposite side of the street, exact mirrors of one another. Spooky.

The first stop of the day was the hay field to check on the bailing process which my friend and his pops had worked on earlier in the week. Not too much progress had been made, but form what I could understand, there were some mechanical issues involving sprockets, and flanges, and hinges, etc.

And here's where my yankee-ness comes into play. We had stopped at a nearby farmer's house who had helped with the cutting and the bailing. This man was my father's age, and had been raising beef cows his entire life. And much like the time I was in Maine and spoke to a Maine fisherman and had a really hard time understanding what he said, I had an equally hard time understanding just wtf this guy was saying. I've noticed that there is bit of a lag time between what people down here say to me, me mentally filtering out the accent, and then me fully comprehending what they've said.

We went over to the barn and took the opportunity to put our neighbor's 5 y/o on a horse and take a spin. I think she had a lot of fun

The horse, maybe not so much.

Just kidding.

After this we took a quick spin over to the lake where the cows were resting, and we did some fishing. MMMMM.....Black Angus

Hey, you in the back. I am going to eat you eventually!

Last, but not least, it was time to take the little one in the tractor. Again, it looks like she had a great time.

BBQ in Alabama

Place: Birmingham, AL. about 2 hrs from Auburn, AL.

Event: Stoking the Fire BBQ Festival

Otherwise known as, Eat the Pig, Stuff your Face, I Love Butt, etc.(I'm just kidding. Those aren't the alternate names) But some teams did have some really funny names. case in point: Butt Rubbers, whose motto was, "Keep it Wet, and Do it Slow" Truer words have never been spoken. And while I didn't try the butt rubbers pork butt, the rest of the butt we did try, was very good indeed.

Interesting note before we move on, the pork "butt" is not actually the butt. The "butt" is the shoulder, while an actual pork butt is called the hock, as in ham hock. Now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's move on.

The event itself was held at Sloss Furnaces, a national historic landmark. I took a picture of the landmark sign, here: The story goes, from I could gather, was that the furnaces intersected 2 rail lines, making it a pretty logical place to set up and make very heavy things made out of metal so that transporting them long distances wasn't difficult. And while the vast majority of the operation was no longer working, you could tell the furnaces were impressive by their sheer size and scope, as evidenced in the pictures below:

This one doesn't do nearly as much justice to the "largeness" as the one below.





























See what I mean? This photo, from the opposite side of the structure, gives a little bit better idea of how big the place it is.


Anyway, the comp- etition has four categories: chicken, ribs, butt, and people's choice. The others are self explanatory, but people's choice refers to Saturday afternoon when the gates to the festival open up for the vast majority of people to roll in and taste the pork bbq (made out of the butts), that the teams have been smoking for the past few days. You then vote for your favorites. The results, for most of the teams, were delicious.

Post bbq, slightly buzzed stoopid faces

We met up with the college roommate of our next door neighbor here in Auburn, and he treated us to a few ribs, which were fantastic, and a couple of nice cold, high gravity beers. Sipping beer and eating ribs and bbq (by the way, if you are eating shredded, or pulled, or chipped pork with bbq sauce, you are eating bbq specifically. If you are eating ribs, or brisket, or anything else "bbq", you are eating bbq generally. Got it? Yeah, I was confused, too.) Man, it was good, as evidence by our silly faces. -->

We walked around some more, trying bbq, sipping beer, and then headed over to the stage where the organizers announced the winners of the competition. And because part of the furnaces are still working, the prizes were cast in iron right on the site, which I thought was pretty cool

There were also some pretty funny "sculptures" that the teams had set up, as evidenced here (ewwwh), and below

Good times were had by all, and while our friend's friend's team didn't win, these people know how to cook pork. God, I am glad I am not Jewish or Muslim.

It's my birthday!

And to celebrate, the wife and I went down the Gulf of Mexico and the Redneck Riviera! (Seriously, they themselves call it that, so I can too. So, there.)

Anyway...

Perdidio Key is southwest of Pensacola and a part of the Gulf Islands National Seashore. The drive from Auburn took about 4 hours, but that's only because Google maps had us take the Blue Angels Parkway, a one lane road that could have been avoided by going the way we went home (along the 110 into...oh, wait. I just realized I am doing that thing that my adult male relatives do after they've arrived somewhere. That's another post at another time.) We headed straight for a bar that I'd heard of from people both here and in Connecticut. The Flora-bama

The carnival

Good god, what a shithole. It strattles the Florida - Alabama border on the beach, and is an amalgamation of tents, coverings, wood platforms, and other assorted crap glued and screwed together to somehow pass code. It's a classic hole in the wall bar, as evidenced by a shot I took of the inside to the right.


See what I mean?

There are other "areas" that are all sort of cobbled together. You have multiple stages for performers to set up on, so forth and so on, and lots of individual bar stations. One thing I did notice was that there weren't too many TV sets, which was nice. Nothing I hate more when I go to a bar is to have nothing to look at except TV's.

Oh, and did you notice what was hanging from the clotheslines up there? Here's a better picture.

"Oh look, there's mine!"

Lots and lots of bras. Gives the place character and class, doesn't it?

Since we hit this place up right around lunchtime, we weren't expecting it to be crazy. But as evidenced by the underwear, clearly good times had been had here.

As it was lunch time, oysters and fish po-boys had to be eaten.

Yes, please!

After lunch we headed back to the beach and laid out on the beautiful, white sand beaches of the Gulf of Mexico. And they truly were stunning, until you walked up and down the beach and saw the oil response clean-up teams, their equipment, and tar-balls. Lots of little tar-balls.

The following show the tar stained beach and the equipment used by the teams:

Tractors and other "stuff"

Crews getting ready to hit the beach

Used sand sifters. Not small enough to get the majority if the tar balls if you ask me

Oil stained sand

Lovely, right? Sigh.

Pack? check. Beer? check. It's dark. Let's go!

You may also have noticed me with a backpack on my shoulders. That's because the wife and I camped on the beach on Saturday, and we had to hike in about a mile to get to where we were allowed to stay on Perdido Key (the photo was taken Sunday morning on the way out). But here's me gearing up ready to make the trek out at night.

And here we are in the morning after a not so great sleep (due to lack of pillows, a thermarest with a hole in it (grrr.....), hellacious temperature and humidity, and lack of breeze through the floor of the tent (which will be remedied on the next tent purchase.))

Good morning!

Sunday saw us stopping off at the IHOP for breakfast, driving to Pensacola Beach for the, well, beach, and then to the Pensacola Art Museum for a little bit of afternoon culture. Incidentally, the museum has a very nice collection, which we would have seen if they weren't playing a movie about Marc Chagall at the same time we visited.  :-(  Oh well.

We traveled back to Auburn after the museum and drove through a pretty horrendous thunderstorm, one that had a lighting strike right next to our car and which sounded like a shotgun! Fun stuff! It was f'ing terrifying, but, we were alright. Just a little rattled.

All in all: Great trip, glad we went, and we'll certainly go again when it gets a little cooler.

Move Story, part 1

We're here, and despite some hiccups (all minor), we're in the house, all of our stuff accounted for. More on that later.

We took off from CT around 7:45 on Thursday morning, and as expected, sat in traffic almost immediately, which was fine given that I hadn't really gotten used to the truck yet. After we got passed Stamford it was pretty much smooth sailing all the way into Pennsylvania.

We stopped to get gas about 50 miles outside of Harrisburg. Filling up the truck for the first time was a humbling experience. It was a truck stop, and I didn't understand the concept of satellite pumps. Are you confused as well? So, when you pull into a truck stop fueling lane, there are 2 pumps, one on either side. One has the controls for paying, etc., and the other is just a pump. You have to engage the paying pump by pulling out the pump and laying it on the ground. You then have to go to the other side to use the satellite pump and fill up. Additionally, the gas tank on the truck was not like a car's, where you just pop in the pump and away you go, waiting until the pump stops automatically. With this, you had to pump until the pump stopped, and then re-angle the pump and continue until you could actually see the gas at the top of the tank, almost coming out. A little freaky to be sure.

We move on down the road and the check engine light comes on in the truck. Great. I get on the phone with the emergency service folks at Penske while I am trucking down the road. They tell me to get off in Carlisle, and we spend 45 minutes while the techs fumble with their computer diagnostic systems and swap out a bum sensor. An hour later, the light comes back on. I ignore it, and continue to plow down the road, never getting more than 70 miles hr. No pull overs for me!

Virginia is a big state. I never realized how big it was. As you're traveling down 81, you just keep on going and going and going. 300 miles, or so. And its extremely pastoral. Talk about idyllic farm settings. Happy cows on those hills.

We made it to Statesville, NC the first day, traveling 660 miles in 12.5 hours. We would have gotten farther if not for the check engine light, but I'm happy to have stopped and gotten it checked then rather than to have gotten stopped on the road in the middle of nowhere.

The animals did ok, for the most part. Domino (the dog) was great. My one cat, pearl, well, she was great too except for the meowing. My other cat, jasper, however, had a real rough first day. Before we even left, he decided to take a d*^p on the office floor of the house, which was fine because then he wouldn't do it in the truck. But I put him in there and the meowing (read yowling) began big time. he then pissed himself. Awesome! Before we got onto the highway, we stopped for coffee, which gave me the opportunity to swap out the paper towels I had put down on the bottom of his crate. Poor guy. He was a mess to clean when we got to the hotel in Statesville.

End of part 1

Countdown to the Move: 43 days

First off, first post. I've tried to do this before, but without any real success. But then again, I've not had a huge move like this looming in front of me, one that will take me completely out of my element. This blog will keep friends and family up to date, I suppose

43 days: This is the amount of time I have to pack the house, the dog, the cats, and the wife into a rental moving truck and head on down to the Dirty South, a place I've never been to, never spent any time in.

I am going with an open mind, looking at it as an adventure, because, quite frankly, I don't think any other way would allow us to successfully transition. And besides, we're only there for 2 years at the most anyway. So we might as well get our adventure on.