A Fine Familyful Feasty Day

Just returned from the southern-more states where we stayed with Teresa’s parents in Lillian, Alabama.  It’s about a sneeze and a Cam Newton first-down lunge away from Pensacola, Florida.  It was the feasting holiday, and a day to be thankful for things like a close family, a crowded house, and plates piled high with food.

Sleeping arrangements consisted of multiple pull-out couches, an inflatable bed, and a chilly camper with a space heater.  One common room housed most sleepers, and I’m sure people are headed back to their lives with tales of snoring and dogs walking around at night wearing tap shoes.

The days were full of cooking, and forays into Pensacola for important things like whipped cream (that was forgotten), pickled jalapeno peppers, bacon, sausage, and even frozen biscuits that ushered in a new era in the traditional Davis family breakfast of biscuits and gravy.  They weren’t the best at sopping, though.  There were several different varieties so we may need to experiment before we find the perfect kind.

Diets were put on temporary hiatus as the war between fridge space and leftovers tempted everyone to consume, and consume often (especially when it came to desserts).  It didn’t help, though, because two more pumpkin pies were crafted the next day.  One disappeared very quickly.

Walks and bicycle rides around the block occurred daily, and one resulted in more than a dozen hitchhiking ticks returning to the house with the dogs after the nature trail.

One afternoon was spent looking for a wandering Harley, who had snuck out a screened doorway while the cooks were trying to air out some of the cooking heat from the kitchen.  Harley’s wandering is nothing new, but is rather tiresome.  Multiple trips around the community were fruitless, despite a sighting by security.  I even stopped and asked people if they had seen him.  A family had sheltered him, and on my ‘one last time’ around the block they flagged me down.

Larry sacrificed his TV and his recliner for two days in a row as football reigned with the NFL on Turkey Day, and the Iron Bowl on Black Friday.  The kids mostly had their noses in the screens, with the XBox 360 and several laptops around, but there were outside forays.  The previously mentioned bike rides, and the grand-daughters played outside constantly.

The troops dwindled slowly.  The girls left for home on Friday, and on Saturday the elder Stanton’s, along with Dean, Kyle, Julie and Ethan all headed home.  Saturday afternoon was a quiet day, and a stop at a wing joint and pizza place supplied the evening meal; a much-deserved relief from cooking.

Sunday was our turn to head home, and through timely use of technology we were able to avoid two large traffic jams along the way, getting home with plenty of time to go and discuss our holidays with Chris and Veronica across the street.

Meandering Post

Not sure if this post will have a specific point, but I wanted to make sure I put in an update.

In fact, I want to do this every few days, rather than once a week.  I really want to get into the habit of writing.  I’m making no predictions, or promises.

November is coming up, and so is the buzz around NaNoWriMo… National Novel Writing Month.  Since I follow writers on Twitter, and have writing newsletters land in my e-mail inbox I’m getting tempted have a go at this this year.  I’ve got an idea kicking around in my head.  I’m mulling that over.  Going to see if anyone else is planning on it for perhaps some support.  Twitter just might be a good source for that, since you can find people that do just about anything you like to do on Twitter. 

I’ve been listening to a bunch of D&D folks on Twitter lately, and they have great tools, review the latest releases from Wizards of the Coast and it’s just overall pretty cool listening/watching them talk about their D&D games.

It’s fall… and the weather has been beautiful.  Our air conditioning has been off, and haven’t needed the heat for almost a month. 

Had a great weekend.  Decorated the house for Halloween, even though we won’t be here for trick-or-treating.  Webs on the bushes, half-buried skeleton and gravestones in the bed.

Finally moved the mulch I’ve needed to move for several weeks in order for our yard guy to lay down pine straw.  It’s so nice to have a yard that looks nice.  One of these days we’ll need to get a new lawn-mower and take it back over ourselves.  Sigh.  Not looking forward to that day, but hey, maybe it will count as activity points for Weight Watchers.

Yeah, started Weight Watchers again.  Self-guided dieting is wrought with pitfalls and failure, so Teresa and I went back to WW last night.  I did great on it before, so I’m looking forward to working way back to my 36 waist jeans (and beyond?).

Mountain Life–Perimeter Men’s Retreat

The men stood around, their hands warmed by the coffees they were holding.  Their breaths cast misty clouds into the crisp air.  Golf clubs sat beside their vehicles.  A plastic crate of day-old baked goods is passed around.

I guess the day-old gives it away that this is not a scene before some golf tournament.  It was the parking lot of Perimeter Church as we were standing waiting for all the members of our group planning to carpool to a Men’s Retreat, hitting up a golf course along the way.

Paul’s wife Laurie was gracious enough to let me use her clubs.  It really is saying something, considering my history of ‘borrowing’ things from the Farley’s.  Somehow, someway I seem to trash the items that Paul has let me borrow, carry, move (although the soft-pine end-table being kicked into the parking lot incident was not me) things over the years and sadly, more often than not whatever it was has been returned in worse condition (if at all).  This time was an exception, though. (phew!)

I had bought some golf-balls at Goodwill and made a friendly wager with my neighbor Chris concerning how many I would lose.  He bet 18, or more.  I thought that number was ridiculous.  I hadn’t seen the course.

We played Cider Ridge, in Oxford Alabama.  One comment while golfing was made that any golf course with the name ‘Ridge’ in it is bound to be a monster.

It was a beautiful course, even though the front nine were closed so we played the back nine twice.  The second time through we played from the blue tees in order to have the course play different.  The idea is great.  The fact that we actually did it could be called ‘foolhardy’. 

I’m not real sure how many golf-balls I lost.  It wasn’t just water holes.  The out of bounds was pretty rugged, and swallowed balls even when you knew precisely where they went.  I only used two sleeves, I think.  The rest of the golf-balls I lost were scrounged by a couple of guys with us that didn’t play.  At least I wasn’t the only one donating.

We played pretty relaxed golf… who knows what I scored.  I didn’t do too badly considering it was the first game in years.  Got tons of exercise… probably two or three times as much as your average pro would get, if you add all the practice swings.  Had some great swings and some good shots.  Those seem to stick in my memory more than the bad ones, which out-number the good ones considerably.

The next day we played paintball.  I wore the loosest clothing I could scrounge up, and only came away with three and a half bruises (my wallet saved me from half of one).  And it was really only from one attack where I was crawling through an empty creek-bed, and got ambushed by someone with the same idea.

Most memorable was standing on the hill firing down as the other team charged into cover right below me.  I got to take down a couple of the other team at once.

Talking with another player in passing the next day I asked about his bruises.  “They’ll fade, but the glory will last forever”.  Maybe he meant the glory of God, since it was a church retreat, but it still makes a lot of sense as the glory of the day, too.

The weekend was awesome.  Spending time with Paul is a rare treat.  In many ways we fell back into our familiarity very easily, and what a great thing it is to have a friend like that.  Thanks for the invite, Paul!

Sometimes you feel like a nut…

Even though I’ve already told all the people who would listen (and some who probably didn’t want to) about the camping weekend, I still figure I’ll put down some words about it.

Cameron and I went camping with his Webelos den this weekend up at Unicoi State Park in a unique section of the campground called the Squirrel’s Nests.

We started with a hike up to see Anna Ruby Falls.  It was a nice hike, on an asphalt path which made it a bit easier on the feet.  No tripping over roots, or rocks.  It followed the creek all the way up and there were great little babbling brook waterfalls.

 

It wasn’t a bad hike at all, really.  Bit of an incline, but it was the beginning of the weekend and we all had plenty of energy.

Then it was off to the campsite.  I have no pictures of the campsite at all because I had left the camera in the van, and the camera and the memories we would have forever about the camping weren’t worth the hike back to the van to retrieve it.  Either that, or I was just too exhausted from carrying cooking gear (made of iron) through the Georgia mountains to consider it.  But it does look exactly like the picture on the website.

Couple aspects the picture on the website doesn’t capture, though.  One of them is the constant bombardment of the campsite  with acorns by the majestic oaks that kept the site shaded.  Even at night.  The second is that those stairs are double-height and rather random size.  Yeah, stair-masters ain’t got nothing on those stairs.

Which is why I don’t have any pictures from my phone, either, because I had left my phone in our ‘nest’, at the top of the stairs.

I would venture a guess that if I lived in these Squirrel Nests for two weeks I’d drop at least 10 lbs.  It was the most physically challenging camping event I can remember.  I slept very well up there in that nest, although the moaning spirits in the area woke me up a couple times throughout the night (there were some seriously weird sounds that night).

The ground was just about covered in acorns, and what always happens when you cross a pack of boys with a ready supply of ammunition happened, many times.  If we go there again we’ll definitely need to take some cans and a slingshot.

Very few squirrels, though.  Maybe they come out during the week.  Or maybe because again, boys with a ready and virtually unlimited supply of ammunition are something squirrels avoid.

This squirrel was stuffed, in the gift shop at Ana Ruby Falls.

We and boys had a great time, and we all had some great food.  They had a large role in preparing the food, and they got to cook their own pancakes Sunday morning.  They also cleaned up all the gear after the meals. 

Links I Find Interesting

Wind-farms not so green… unless they’re put in the right place.

Man gets mad at elevator doors, and dies.

Zarmina’s World

Minecraft is awesome.

Headed up to Helen, Georgia for Oktoberfest tonight with friends.

My Minecraft World–Look Closely

A day in the life of a shelf-maker

My weekend: built bookshelves, stood in line at a BBQ festival, threw some darts, played D&D.

Three shelves, one long piece of wood… how long could it take to hang some shelves?  Answer: Longer than expected.

It took most of my morning. 

I first started looking for my triangle-thingie that I use to make sure the line to make is straight.  Thought it was on my work-bench… work bench was a mess.  Had to straighten it up, and once I did that, no triangle.  I also picked up the garage a bit.  Not as much as it needed, but ‘a bit’.  ‘A bit’ is just enough to feel like I did something, but not enough to notice if you looked at the garage before and after.  But I could point out the things I did.

Forty-five minutes… and all I had in my hand was a pencil, and the board.

What’s next, Mr. Project Manager?  I need something to cut with, and something to cut on.

I needed my saw-horses. 

The saw-horses are stored in the shed.  Ahh, the shed.  Probably more out of sorts than the garage, since we actually have to walk through the garage.

I spotted them, underneath a gutter, and a piece of wood that I don’t recognize any more.  While unearthing the sawhorses it struck me that my circular saw and sawhorses are, along with my grill, the most-used Christmas gifts.

I couldn’t just yank them out, though… there was too much clutter.  I started straightening up the shed, making space.  I found a field mouse nested in a container I have full of sawdust that I want to use to make fire-starters for camp-fires.  I let him be.

I also discovered that storing the muriatic acid on the top shelf in a metal toolshed isn’t a good idea.

Okay, saw-horses, saw, pencil and board.  I’m ready for my three cuts to make shelves, so I cut.  To get there, though, it took a couple hours.  I did more than just cut, and you actually could tell I moved stuff around in the shed (as opposed to the garage).

Afterwards we went down to Atlantic Station to the Atlanta BBQ festival.  I made the serious mistake of not eating before I was going, thinking of all the delivious BBQ I was going to be consuming once I got there.  MISTAKE!  Lines, lines, lines. 

There was a line to buy tickets, in order to stand in line to use the tickets to buy BBQ!

The literature for the event had over-sold the number of things for kids to do as well, and the boys were with us so we decided that once we had gone through the lines, gotten the BBQ, and satiated my hunger that we would head on home.

More later, but for now I need to go to the store.

News of the Week–Sorta

As we all say… I want to blog more regularly, and since it’s Friday it’s as good as a day as any other.  I’ll set a reminder, ‘Blog day’.  Reminders can be easy to ignore, though. 

The boys and I have been playing Minecraft lately.  It’s a subtley dangerous game because it lets you do so much.  A world is randomly generated of blocks of dirt, sand, rock, gravel, lava, and water.  Trees, sheep, pigs, cows, and chickens also appear once you start playing.  The object?  There really isn’t one.  You knock down trees to get wood to make tools to let you knock down trees, dig dirt, mine ore (there’s ore in the rock under the ground, but you have to find it), and build a nice safe house.  You need a nice safe house, because at night the zombies come out.  Really… zombies, skeletons (the skeletons are the most annoying), creepers, and spiders come out.

You can knock down just about anything.  You can carry lava in a bucket.  You can forge iron and gold.  Coal can make pork steaks and torches (and smelts the iron and gold).  Everything else is up to you.

It’s like a great big digital sandbox, and it’s very easy to lose hours in it.

One of the amazing things about Minecraft is how it has exploded recently.  I think it’s been in development for a while, but lately the word has been spreading, and was even in a Penny-Arcade.com comic.  The websites crashed last week, and after bringing them back up the author said he sold 250,000 copies in 24 hours.  It sells for 9 Euro, which is about 14 bucks.  And the game doesn’t even have a point!  Maybe that’s the trick.. give people tools, and a medium and they will build.

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Our dining room is carpetless.

Teresa had been using our ‘dining room’ as a homeschool materials storage facility.  There had been hopes of actually using it to homeschool, but there is an extreme lack of space. 

As I’m home more often these days and I needed a place to work we cleaned it out, boxed up some books, rearranged a little and tada… working space!

But as I sat here I realized … well, more accurately my nose realized that those years of dog urine as we were figuring out Bingo’s habits had left a odorous residue. 

After a few days of complaining, a couple days of attempting to mask the issue with a Febreeze-type product, and some careful contemplation, Teresa said “Rip it out!”   So I did.

We’re looking at some faux-wood resilient tile products, but in the meantime a $14 Home Depot rug will do the job.

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Rabid Zombie Chipmunks

Cameron and I headed out to Scoutland this weekend in order to participate in a Cub Scout camp called Webelos Woods.  There were many events over the weekend, official and unofficial. 

“Let’s poke each other with sticks” was one of the unofficial events, and Cameron bears a couple marks from that event.  It consisted of all the boys scrounging up sticks in the woods, then running through the camps at full speed in the dark screaming like banshees.  It appeared to be an extremely fun event, and lasted until one unfortunate kid took a stick scarily close to his eyeball.  One of the den father’s was telling the boys how he had to push the poor kid’s eyeball back in with his thumb, and the sickening sound it made, but I don’t think the kids bought it.

It didn’t keep them from running the same event the next night, albeit a much tamer version that ended a lot earlier, and before any more carnage.

One of the official events was ‘Playing with matches and eating from a hot pan.’  Technically it was called ‘Golden Griddle’, and the boys were timed how fast they could light charcoal, cook a pancake over those charcoals, and then eat it.

Another unofficial event was, “Let’s see if the young boys’ bathroom can make someone throw up”.  Evidently having a bathroom that just the boys use for safety’s sakes results in janitorial issues when there isn’t an adequate supply of toilet paper, and toilets that don’t flush.  I didn’t witness the results of that particular event, but from how it was described it may have qualified for a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts.

More official events were the stretcher race (the boys pretended to need stretchers, they weren’t actually medically incapacitated), tug-of-war, BB shooting, Archery, and fire-building.  The boys actually didn’t want to take part in the fire-building event!

All in all it was a very fun weekend, and appropriately capped off by the “pack up camp before the next band of rain showers comes through” event, and the “how to make it home when the main bridge across the lake is closed” event.

Oh, the title?  Rabid chipmunk zombies?  One of the other den fathers had a great campfire story about running through the forest at night that involved rabid chipmunk zombies attacking him.  The boys listened, and then ran off into the forest.  Kids these days.

Today’s tweets:

• 16:19 Holy Froyo Updates, Batman! All my apps are updating to support Froyo… I think the official word is ‘before Christmas’ for Incredible tho #

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