The Morning Commute

Here, we see the Mini apparently speeding down our dirt driveway and through the open gate. In the background and out of view, the dogs are eating their breakfast and the chickens are starting their morning wander. This is how our ride to work begins. Rest assured: we are late and the theme music to the second round of Morning Edition is playing.


It is a Monday and the grader is scraping off the surface of Old Wire. After a weekend of heavy rain, the clay and sand can become quite the driving hazard. The grader can be found on our road about three days a week scraping away. I've never spoken to the grader pilot but he appears to be a jolly man and waves back every time. The road is lined on both sides with many ancient live oaks that form a canopy over the road. Sometimes I worry about those 300 year old branches that hang 30 feet above us. We have a few cows, goats, horses, sheep, bunnies, deer, wild turkeys and the occasional fox squirrel (an odd creature, and good eating we hear) as neighbors and we usually say hello.


At the northern exit of Old Wire we begin a unusually winding stint on the local county road. Here we drive past children at the bus stop, a kestrel, two dogs that might be related to Lula and a woman that we have been watching for months who obsessively text messages someone or plays a game on her phone whilst sitting in her minivan in her driveway. For some poorly defined reason this last item drives us nearly crazy. For Cymande, it is the fact that this woman is in the exact same position (head tilted, looking at phone) every single morning since at least August, 2007. Which brings us to the next step in the journey...


Dead Man's Curve. Yes, DMC is a much feared and perfectly flawed piece of road. Conceived by a band of civil engineer drop-outs, this curve somehow is tilted inversely and tends to launch drivers across the center line or off the road. You decide. Either way, DMC can be both exhilarating and disturbing. It is not uncommon for me to be muttering profanities and beeping the horn at this point during the trip. Cymande just screams, or if she's had too much coffee, yells wheeeeee!


After surviving DMC we find ourselves exiting on the unusually named Tustenugee Road. This road takes us through some quaint agriculture. There is a large donkey population along this stretch of road. What is the deal with donkeys? I mean, I love to look at them in the morning sun, but do they serve a purpose? Perhaps they are pets. I have never seen donkey as a key ingredient in dog or cat food, but I wonder. There are also tobacco fields and cattle along the way.



Here we cross Interstate 75. As we casually drive to work, carloads of excited midwestern children and an obscene number of Quebecois pass below us and are only 2 hours away from Disney World. Five minutes away from I-75 is a lobby full of ill children awaiting our arrival. I take another gulp of coffee and look at the clock that displays...


(8:12) and I feel a twinge of guilt. Then I remember that I will be at work for the next 10 hours and I don't feel so bad.


Approaching the clinic, now we pass Club Rodeo, a burned down trailer and the Flamingo Motel-now-apartments that still boasts about 'cable TV.' We pass by the High School and its garish purple/yellow tiger mascot, pass by Dollar General #23987, pass by the car wash and pass into a small piece of what is left of Florida's oak hammock where we will spend our day, indoors.

Technical Difficulties

Hello everyone. The month of January brought technical difficulties to us at OWR. Our mac crashed and we were told it was a 'node b error' which translates to approximately $400, a new hard drive and two trips to Jacksonville. This explains, somewhat, why we haven't updated the blog and we have few photos to share.

After the 'node b' incident we experienced a mystery. I was on a post-call-day-off and I did rounds at the hospital with the dogs in the Big Blue Van [BBV]. After rounds I drove to the feed store. I paid for the feed and drove home. This would be the start of a two week absence of my wallet. We searched high and low including the coop and freezer. We finally blamed Buckley... turns out, our blame was correctly directed. Cymande's cell phone was, in the search for the wallet, discovered in a state of partial digestion...well, at least chewed up, in a pile of hay with, lo and behold, the wallet. The new cell phones with new telephone numbers on a new carrier and assorted accessories, of course, about $300.

We also had a human 'node b error'. That is 'b' as in 'back pain'. About a week ago I woke in a sorry state after moving a washer and hot water heater. I tried to ready myself for work, but ten minutes before I was supposed to be at work I was found contorted on the couch, sweating and repeating 'I'm not going, I'm not going', Cymande snickering creully (a result of what she called 'stress and concern'). Luckily, I'm better now, and Cymande doesn't have to do everything for me, although that was fun. 'Do this' and 'Do that', said I.

We also 10 new chicks in the flock. They love blueberry muffins and apples.

The Year 2008

Buckley's wish for the new year was granted at about 10 AM this morning.

10 Blue Bird Boxes

Christmas Eve

All of us here are nursing our swollen bellies after a pre-Christmas feast delivered by Faye and Anthony yesterday. We had a relaxing day of food, drink, walks in the field and football. We wish we had more time to visit friends and the rest of our family, but Cymande is on-call for Christmas and we spent our vacation time early in the year. While Cymande is at the clinic I will spend some of my day tending to our newly hatched chicks. Finally, we have a broody hen that also is interested in caring for her chicks. In fact, she is not conviced that we are entirely benign entities and we are treated with a great deal of skepticism. Cymande has a small wound on her hand repesenting this relationship. I guess she (the hen) doesn't remember the daily rations of scratch and fresh water which has been generously supplied by humans. Charles and I built a developmental staging system for the coop. This is to avoid some harrassment and hazing activities that adult chickens like to subject upon the youngsters.





A couple photos here are a peak (pun) into the YL'S recent project, but the birdhouses are my creation. If you don't know who the YL'S are then I won't ruin it for anyone and they will remain a cryptic oddity of the rural south. There are also some images of the night sky and moon. We welcome the return of longer days and our migratory winter residents. Which reminds me that we recently went on the Hamilton County Christmas Bird Count. We identified 67 species and hung out with some truly great people/birders. If you ever find yourself in the rural south and are feeling alone or marginalized because your interests are...well...outside the local dominant paradigm...then you will feel better in the company of southern birders. A great moment on the bird count: Birder:"Have you seen any kestrels today?" Nice farmer on tractor:"Kestrels?" Birder:"Tiddly hawks." Nice farmer on tractor:"No tiddly hawks today."

Florida Crowned Snake

Tantilla relicta

Description: A small – 7 - 9 in (17.7 - 22.8 cm) – slender snake that is tan or light brown with a black head, chin, and back of neck. A light spot occurs on each side of the lower neck, and the belly is uniform whitish-yellow. Scales are smooth, and the anal plate is divided. This species is most easily distinguished from the similar Southeastern Crowned Snake (Tantilla coronata) by geographic range and by lack of a distinct, unbroken light ring on the back of the neck .

Range and Habitat: The Florida Crowned Snake is primarily restricted to Florida and has only been found in a few locations in extreme southern Georgia. They are found in well-drained sandhills and hammocks and are often associated with longleaf pine or turkey oak scrub habitat.

Habits: Crowned snakes are almost exclusively fossorial (living underground) and are seldom seen. They may be found under rocks, logs, leaf litter, and other debris and are reported to occupy pocket gopher and gopher tortoise burrows. Crowned snakes lay several elongated eggs in the summer. This species provides the principal prey for the rare Short-tailed Snake (Stilosoma extenuatum).

October/November 2007

In October we went on an overnight trip to Orlando. We saw Cat Power at Firestone and it was truly unforgetable...a few distracting on-stage breakdowns, but otherwise a superstar performance. We shared the hotel with Ursus sapiens...it was interesting and strange! We also watched cable!




We completed the exterior of the laundry room and wired the interior. Progress continues... We also bought faceshields which we now refer to as helmets. It protected me from a screw laden board that fell and struck my helmet instead of my vulnerable head. It didn't protect my extremities when I fell from a step stool. I'm now nursing a sore left knee, but in the tradition of noncompliance I've done next to nothing to make it better.





The chickens are well and we have two juvenile chickens (a cockerelle and a pullet) and we have a chick. One of our broody hens sat on her eggs to the bitter end. We tried to break her, but she ended up getting weak and finally died. The cockerelle escaped the coop last week and Buckley found him. Good boy.



We also enjoyed the week of Thanksgiving off from work. We realized that we hadn't had a vacation since our last trip to San Fran 9 months ago. This explains the exhaustion. We cooked a Thanksgiving feast and hosted Anthony and Faye. We took a couple laps around the field and napped after. Autumn has arrived in Florida and the almost all the leaves fell from the trees today.

The Demolition and Reconstruction of the Laundry Room

Common Name: Giant Intestinal Roundworm

Ascaris lumbricoides
Host: Humans
Portal of Entry: Mouth
Mode of Transmission: Ingestion of egg through contaminated food
Habitat: Small intestine
Size of Specimen: 6.5 inches
Prevalence: 1.5 billion people worldwide, primary in Asia and Africa, but areas of the US, specifically the Gulf Coast are endemic. This includes a little town north of Lake City where the above specimen was happily living in a 3 year old.
Description of Disease: Ascariasis is a human disease caused by the parasitic roundworm, Ascaris lumbricoides. Perhaps as many as one quarter of the world's people are infected, and ascariasis is particularly prevalent in tropical climates and in areas of poor hygiene. Infection occurs through ingestion of food contaminated with fecal matter containing Ascaris eggs. The larvae hatch, burrow through the intestine, reach the lungs, and finally migrate up the respiratory tract. From there they are then reswallowed and mature in the intestine, growing up to 12 inches in length and anchoring themselves to the intestinal wall. Infections are usually asymptomatic, especially if the number of worms is small. They may however be accompanied by inflammation, fever and diarrhea, and serious problems may develop if the worms migrate to other parts of the body.
Treatment: Mebendazole

On Spontaneity

Well. We left the farm for once. Without warning, we shunned housework and ran off to the beach. We could have checked the weather. Perhaps we should have checked the weather. I barely had time to contemplate the fact that I was sitting on the edge of a continent when blammo! A squall. Being a professional planner, I had of course already decided upon an emergency protocol to be used in the event of a tsunami (1. shoes, 2. camera, 3. car key, 4. run, 5. go shopping). When the umbrellas lifted straight up in the air and began to tumble down the beach, I took it as a sign that the tsunami protocol could be used for squalls as well. We went for fish and chips, then to anthropologie for odd Japanese perfume in a fancy bottle.

An aside further into the umbrella incident: the sky darkened, the wind began to blow, I stood up, at the exact moment that I stood, the umbrellas, propelled by the wind, shot straight up into the air, tumbled painlessly across my back and continued down the beach at which time i shouted "Babies! Children!" because man, those things were dangerous. Gregg and Charles ran, saving several lives. We were at the beach for like, 20 minutes total. Overall, a good day.