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.

The joys of home working

That is my foot. Under my desk. Being used as a pillow. By my cat.

Late night Mud-riding

I was thinking I really should have pictures for this post, but I don't think they would capture the thrill of barreling down a dirt road in the middle of the night. How do you express the joy of riding a roller coaster to someone through words or pictures? It somehow doesn't do the experience justice, and I certainly want to give the proper props to this.

It's late. It's the middle of the night. You're in Alabama, and there's several acres of woods with a"road" cleared out through them, leading to a pond in the middle. The road is the red clay of the South, not gravel or asphalt. Now, you've gone off-roading before, when you were growing up, living in Connecticut. But it somehow doesn't live up to what you think you are about to do, because, let's face it: You're a stranger in a strange country, and you've placed blind faith in a person you've just met because they told you to get in the truck and not to ask questions. You're going for a ride, and that's about all you know.

You drive down the road, and turn off, facing the "road" that goes straight into the woods. The driver puts the peddle to the metal and away you go, flying torwards trees before the wheel is turned and you're faced with another set, the headlights illuminating just what's directly in front of you and nothing else. You hit the clearing where the pond is, stop, pile out of the truck and look up at the moon, and all the stars, and listen to the silence, something you haven't heard in a long time because of the years you've spent living in New York City, or Bridgeport, CT, the drone of I-95 constantly in the background.

And it's here that you thank yourself for trusting people, for believing that people are inherently good, and that you've missed the woods, the stars, and the silence.

Our new home

I figured since its been about 2 weeks, I should probably do a post on the actual place we live. Stalkers out there take note: we will perform IP searches and report you to the police.

Kidding! Ha!

No, seriously, we will.

Anyways!

We live on the northwest corner of the Shug Jordan Parkway (we call it the Shug Knight. Just sounds more gangsta, doesn't it?) off of Richland Road. It's a relatively new development (2008), with each house on about 1/4 acre. Here's a shot of the street with the other houses. Pretty nice, right?

Yeah, they're a little cookie cutter, but they're new and we didn't have to do anything, which was pretty nice. And all the people we've met so far are super nice. (Incidentally, it took us, like, a year before we met anyone in our old neighborhood in Black Rock, but that's another post) Anywho...

If you haven't guessed by now, that's our house's front porch on the right of the picture there. Those are our chairs we will sit on in the evening before dinner when it isn't hot as Hades outside. And here's a front view of the house

It's a nice color. I like it.

And you see the garage peeking out the back of the house.

Inside is pretty nice, too. It's pretty much a great room with living, dining and kitchen areas in 1. Here's the kitchen and the "dining room", situated in the middle of the house, basically.

And here's the living room if you literally rotate 180 degrees from the position I took the above photo.

The picture is a little dark, but you get the idea. To the right of the picture, is a set of french doors that leads out to a little patio area and the back yard.

Domino's decapitated body make an appearance to provide scale. And that's my grandparent's patio table and benches in the background. They're more than 50 years old and they made the trip all the way! (a little banged up, but nothing a coat of paint and new nails can't fix.)

The rest of the backyard can be seen in the following pictures.

A fenced in back yard makes Domino and his owners very happy.
















And then there are the upstairs bedrooms, 1 for guests and the other for our office. Fufi makes his home above my desk where I spend my time these days.

And that's it, folks. That's our house!

Blueberry picking

I ditched the home office today to go blueberry picking. We scored big
time.

I see blueberry crisp in my near future

First Impressions

We've been here a week. So, I guess that qualifies me to provide first impressions. Here goes.

1. People are super friendly in the South. Everywhere we've gone we've been welcomed to Auburn profusely and continously. As a northeasterner, I find this slightly disturbing because I am expecting the catch. But there may not be one.
2. Auburn itself is a delightful, small college town. As such, all pretty much revolves around the university.
3. The university is gorgeous.
4. The sun is a lot stronger here than what I am used to. I also had a hard time catching my breath while working out. Indoors. Maybe it's because I haven't worked out in 2 weeks and my fitness level has dropped, but still, it's hot.
5. Working from home is a very civilized way to work. Except that I go stir-crazy by 3 pm and have a mini-freakout. I need to resolve this.
6. We are in the rural South. As it was put to me earlier this week, "Drive 20 miles outside of town, and you've traveled back in time 50 years." (Full disclosure, we have yet to do this.)
7. The bbq is "chipped", not shredded or pulled. And so far its been very good.
8. The produce, specifically, fruit, is 20 times better than up North
9. Did I mention it was hot? Yes, I believe I did.
10. Like Lincoln, NE., life revolves around football season.
11. I will not be eating chittlings (or chitterlings as they are referred to in other parts of the world).
12. I don't like my kitchen sink faucet. It's too high up and I splash water all over the place when using it. Very annoying.
13. The summer thunderstorms are really good. They remind me of my childhood.
14. We've found a working farm that runs a fall CSA. We've been there to pick blueberries which were ridiculously good. The lamb steaks were amazing as well. We shall be spending more of our $ there.
15. DSL is not awful. Is it the best? No, but I can upload and download at a reasonably fast speed. So, that's good. (I still prefer cable, though)
16. Satellite TV is a racket and I feel like I am getting raped. I was fine getting basic cable back in CT because I never watched TV.
17. On a related note, tv antenna bunny ears have not progressed well since I was a kid. Or we live in a tv signal vacuum because we tried and failed miserably.
18. Our house is pretty much perfect, kitchen faucet excepted. Side note: I will never not have central air again.

So, them's it. Back to work, and then back to organizing the house and putting away our stuff. Woo-Hoo!

Back to School

Spotted taped up on campus. It feels good to be back in an academic
environment.