on track?

Got my laptop back from the computer place, seems like they cleaned it up real good. So I am going through the GLO records looking for prairies. Man this is dull work. The college boys next door are moving out and I am watching them load a trailer through my bedroom window as I "work". Got a very nice email from E today which made me feel good about the future. Spending too much time on Facebook, which makes me feel guilty and stupid. Also have a sore throat and cough and body aches. But the lady still likes me and my kids are happy.

Design project

I have decided to put a copy of my Grad Studio 1 design project up here for safe keeping. The assignment was to trace a drop of water after it leaves your rooftop and as it goes to the sea, and then back. To recall what you experienced living in your home town watershed, what you liked about it, what memories were pleasing to you and then consider what improvements can be made to the watershed to preserve or enhance those good elements. It wasn't a design problem so much as an exercise in interpreting and showing an understanding of one's home town watershed.

Sunday morning

Sad news yesterday, one of the dogs we are looking after around the corner suddenly became paralyzed and had to be put down. The owners are in Colorado. S spent the whole morning in the ER at the vet school. I cleaned the house a little. Balmy spring like weather with all the windows and doors open. I need to get to work on my prairie research, but it's hard with the kids out of school. My laptop is supposed to be fixed tomorrow.

a fog in your nog

A light rain tonight, what the Brits would call a heavy fog. S cooked a lovely meal of roast, rice and veggies. All the toys santa brought were gravity or brain-powered, which was nice. Played with marbles a lot today. Just back from checking on the neighbor dogs, they seem fine. Am enjoying some bourbon a friend gave me called Buffalo Trace. Also enjoyed a movie mom sent called "Howl's Moving Castle." I am living the good life. Wish you were too you sorry dog.

Adeste

Lots of shopping today and yesterday, not sure why, mostly to keep the economy alive. All Christmas related, more or less. We plan to cook an eye of round roast. New one for us. Sausage cassarole in the morning. Mimosas. That the plan. The new tub faucet arrived today, a nice project for tomorrow. The weather will be warm again. I am really happy with the picture of the sopping wet kids and mommies I took with my phone last saturday. One mom mildly annoyed, another bemused and resigned. sawyer saw it today and said "I look blue. Why am I blue?" I said because you are playing in a fountain five days before Christmas! I need to be working on my prairie research but it is much more fun and perhaps in the long run more beneficial to humanity for me to team up with my little boys and shoot at stuffed animals with foam darts.

Tuscaloosa

Just returned from a fun weekend visiting friends in Tucsaloosa, Abalama. Nice place. It was a warm day Saturday and we visited this plaza with fountain on the campus of the University of Abalama. Here the kids frolic not five days before Christmas. The warm weather is over, though, we are back in Starksville and are expecting a low 19. I did not have my camera with me and had to take these with my phone.

Jolly day

Been stayin up to the wee hours and getting up early working on my grad studio project. Now it is done and I am just a little tired. Another student is driving the projects to Hattiesburg, where it is snowing.

pretty...pretty...

Final project for design one coming along but still a long way to go. Here is a litttle piece of it I did today with GIS. This is where I used to play.

Hammered

Reasonable progress today. Cub scouts wrappen presents for the angel tree. Treated myself to the first three episodes of the fourth season of the Wire last night. You earned that buck like a motherfucker.

Hey where'd everybody go?

Upstairs in the studio working on my design project. Sure is quiet. I once heard somebody say: I have created a fool.

jumbo mumbo

Finished my watershed management paper, but was deterred greatly all afternoon by a trojan virus in my laptop. Zapper had it worse, getting two front teeth pulled at a surprise trip to the dentist. The orthodontist said they had to go, should have gone by now. Now gotta take the laptop to the doctor.

here i come baby

I am starting to feel, as Bob said a while back "totally committed to major independence." Got an embryo of a thesis proposal conceived today. The despair is losing that palpable quality.

Uranus

Hi folks not much going on with me anymore. I have been studying the watersheds a lot lately and reading books like Forests: Shadow of Civilization by Robert Pogue Harrison. Boy my Dad would have liked this one. Maybe he read it. Two weeks left before Thanksgiving, when the semester will pretty much be over. I am taking it all in as fast as I can. The other day I walked into the house and my son was sitting on the couch reading a book called Space and he said "Dad, did you know that your anus rolls around in space like a bowling ball?" "Good one!" I said, "very nice. I like it..." He turns nine in a week. Holy moly.

I leave you now with several images of our latest attempt to blot out the sun. We just might succeed this time. Our new jumbotron, which we have decided to actually build during football season because we really just can't wait any longer, will be the biggest in the Southeastern Conference and one of the biggest in the galaxy. It almost dwarfs the stadium and can be seen from my studio desk. I get a little emotional every time I drive by it. The glory of it.

shovel baby shovel

Sorry about leaving you'uns out of the loop for August and now half of September. I have nothing left to say. Everything now pretty much amounts to lists of attributes, I have lost faith in my little machine to convey the ding an sich. We have between ourselves but a pair of snapshot images of what life is like for me at three of the clock on Sunday afternoon somewhere in east central mississippi, in the Hollis Creek watershed, the Tombigbee river basin, under the languid tropical arms of Ike, my espresso pulsing, a pot of black beans gurgling old archetypes upwards and outwardly, and aside from that, nothing new under the sun, my queer shoulder still to the wheel, while all about reel shadows of indignant birds, and darkness drops again, but my back sure does feel better.

This Long Road

These lousy kids. Washing bedding in hot water. Up all night. Heat and haze. Some call me a fool. Huck and Jim argue over the relative wisdom of Solomon as nightly I read aloud their iconic meanderings. Team Granada sees hope and light at last. Other kids get thrown out of hair salons, stung by jellyfish. An amusing yarn about teenagers and a pet rat spun upon a Sunday eve of shrimp and rice. My neighbor mysteriously blasts top forty radio at me from underneath the figs by my carport. It takes a few days for me to realize that this is an attempt to mitigate bird predation. Branches heavy with figs gesture and reach for my vehicles. I bicycle to the downtown community market and bring home cucumbers, tomatoes, granola, peaches. The livin’ is easy. Late at night I hear that a man in Rhode Island breaks the D.U.I. record after crashing into a road message sign and blowing a .491, and then resisting arrest. Alleged war criminal Radovan Karadzic was found this week living in Belgrade incarnating the archetypal wise-man, a practitioner of talismanic healing arts. Sales of large cars plummet, and neither the consumers nor the manufacturers know what the fuck to do. A long road. An empty room. Information is neither matter nor energy.

Elijah Pope And The Hurricane

The government surveyors of the early nineteenth century had to work quickly in order to create the maps necessary to process the land claims of all the people moving in. They worked very hard and all the time. They worked on Christmas day. They worked on July 4th. Sometime in 1809, Deputy Surveyor Elijah Pope worked through a very strong storm, possibly a hurricane. On the left side of the page he records his distance in numbers of chains. His task is to go forty chains and set his half mile post, then forty more to set a corner post and record the bearing or "witness" trees. He has to keep the line absolutely straight. The surveyors made notes about the lay of the land, whether it was flat or rolling, the dominant vegetation and soil quality. Very rarely did they make any other comments. But on this page, Elijah can’t help but note how slowly the storm was moving through. After setting the quarter section post and recording the bearing trees at forty chain links, he notes the 30 chain point: "Pass out of hurricane." In the column where the chain measurement should go he writes “oh oh!” and then: “It is extremely remarkable that this reigning torrent of air seems to have lost much of its rapidity in passing from the pine hills on the W. to the east side of the Magachitto. Tho it appears here to be gathering much of its former violence.” Still he presses on to the corner of sections 1,2,11 and 12 and records two pines as bearing trees.


On the final page of the survey, below his signature and those of the chain carriers, and in a much calmer hand, possibly days later at a table inside a building somewhere, he writes:
“Immortal hope is made a squatter
I wade knee deep in mud +water”

I have read hundreds and hundreds of these pages in my effort to locate pre-European settlement prairies. With Google Earth I can locate their positions on the grid of Township, Range and section lines and observe present land uses. The work is interesting and not that hard. It is tedious at times but on occasion I do encounter an interesting story like this one. Stories in the original manuscripts that few people have ever seen.

An old memory

Chapel Hill in the late eighties was a town much like the Chapel Hill of the late sixties or late aughts, our present decade, in that, in addition to the student population, which tended to disappear in the summer, there was a much larger population of dropouts, dreamers, druggies, townies, bums, artists, rascals and other assorted characters who never left, who live there still, and who contributed to a sort of social network of sufficient mass and energy that the party could be located on any given night of the week in any house, basement, apartment, toolshed or country shack throughout the summer months, months that move more slowly in college towns anyway, as jobs are temporary and academic commitments, for the minority or us who counted themselves as students in good standing, were at a minimum. I didn’t really know Randy Ward much at all by day, but as parties were thrown or rumored to be thrown or hosted or located or simply invaded, he turned up or was turned up, at times coincidental with the appearance of Cray Dingle, him of the lambchops and chicken-bone necklace, Mark H-lin, Lucas, the haunting beauty Catherine Wahlen, other ragamuffins, the cooler (to me, because, well, for one thing they were not attending the university nor would they ever be, but also because these were just gone cats) of the folks around town back then, and I noticed him, with his blond curly hair, wifebeater (before we even knew it was called that) and far-away blue-eyed countenance. One summer night he pulled into a parking space outside our basement apartment (9A University Gardens) in a black station wagon which simply expired on the spot, or perhaps he had the car towed there on a rope, at any rate, it was inoperable. A few days later, as the skies darkened and thunderheads blossomed to the east, he emerged from the back seat with a hacksaw in his hand and removed the roof. I am not sure how many days passed after that but I do recall that at some point I noticed that he had transformed the car from the dashboard up into a sort of windowless shed or large closet. The term “shanty” would not have done it justice, for the joinery and overall design of the structure bespoke skills that were impressive by my youthful slacker standards. Upon being invited inside I encountered a small but comfortable hovel, an attraction to all who gathered there those first few nights due to its novelty and its recent history as a derelict automobile. Cray Dingle, who goes by a different name now, and is as far as I know still in the building and remodeling business, was there and took credit for a portion of the work, and proudly announced that he could do the same thing to anyone else’s car, for so many dollars. I almost took him up on it, before realizing, of course, that I had no car.

My roommates, which at this point might have included Kevin and Laird D, Brian W, Steve C--per, Shawn Al---, or maybe none of these people, all appreciated having Randy as a neighbor. We even went so far as to supply an extension cord from out of our below-grade window, across the sidewalk, to his “house”. About that time somebody showed up with a heavy three-ring binder, pulled from what was commonly regarded as the best dumpster in town for discovering such items, of studio-quality photographs of skin diseases of all kinds: gangrene, fungi, an assortment of unimaginable and grotesquely fascinating rottings and inflammations. The particularly startling images were of course those that depicted afflictions of the face or genital area. That such things could happen to people, and not by the evil hand of man but rather the capricious touch of the gods, was a potent, frightening tonic to our young minds, and the reaction upon viewing the images was physical: spine-tingling, foot stomping, the intermittent twinge of nausea. I (and perhaps the others) surmised that therefore these images must be of some value (in the same way that, I suppose, a Lucky Strikes or a bottle of National Bohemian beer is of some value), and that there must be a way to cash in. I proposed a booth be set up downtown, where passersby would be cajoled into plunking down, say, five dollars, to READ THE BOOK. If you could get through, say, twenty pages, you would get back the price of admission with interest, if not, you walk away and we keep the jack. I must have had a very high estimation of my own strong stomach, because I and those around me must have gone through dozens of pages on the occasions in which the book was removed from its sacred arc and its contents laid bare for observation. At some point the revenue-generating aspect of the enterprise was abandoned, and Randy accepted our offer of a collection of the milder images as decoration for the walls of his new home.

As you might expect, the buzz-killing and sternly worded call from the landlord eventually came, and Randy was consequently forced to arrange to have his home hauled away. I didn’t know at the time that Randy could play guitar, didn’t think he owned a guitar, but a few years later I certainly noticed his guitar chops in bands like Family Dollar Pharaohs and Metal Flake Mother, playing way better than I ever will.

Over the years I lost touch with Randy. We were never friends really, but I always admired him. Today a quick web search of his name reveals to me that later in his life Randy Ward became a one-man band called Protean Spook, “an ongoing project, part old furniture assemblage, part robotic instrumentation (with a real drum set that played itself)” writes Chris Toenes of the Independent Newsweekly in a May 31st, 2006 review of a DVD of one of Randy’s performances entitled “Live at The Penland.” Randy died of cancer in 2004, and the world is poorer for it. We definitely need more people like him, especially theses days.

tennessee

Car camping in Lewis County, Tenneessee, just a few miles from the Grinder's Inn site where Meriwether Lewis died at age 35.

back attack

Am back from a pleasant vacation in the Tennessee hills near the village of Hohenwald. I got to visit the sight of Meriwether Lewis' untimely death at Grinders Inn on the Natchez Trace Parkway. Also was privileged to spend a pleasant hour at Colberts Ferry on the Tennessee River in North Alabama. Am reading a good deal about the history of the trace and these little stops helped me appreciate what those people went through sloggin through America's first big highway. We had it easy on the parkway, no traffic, a gas-saving cruise of about 55 m.p.h. for three or so hours down to Tupelo, where the good coffee brews and where a killdeer in an empty downtown lot implored our faithful hound to follow as she hippity hopped away from the debris pile that perhaps held her nest. A hundred ticks on adult and child alike, but pleasant wading in a mountain stream as well as fishing a pond from a pontoon and nobody wanted to go home.

Oh where does the time go?

Found an interesting survey of the 1805 Choctaw boundary as decreed by the treaty of Mount Dexter. The surveyor spends a lot of time in cautious negotiations with Choctaws who aren't happy to see him. The leaders are called Mingos. The Mingo Pushmataha arrives and advises the surveyor not to enter the village up ahead. These Indians did not agree to the treaty, they think Pushmataha is a sell out, the Mingo fears for his own life. The survey goes on and on. They go into Alabama, cross the Tombigbee River and set a post on a ridge marking the corner of Choctaw, Muskogee (west side and east side) and the United States of America (to the south). It goes on and on, with many twists and turns, like the rivers.

The U.S.A. signed nine treaties in all with the Choctaw Nation. The final one, the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, 1830, ended the Choctaw nation and sent most of the inhabitants on the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma.

I have moved into an office on campus to avoid the distractions of home. Now I have two monitors. I can switch back and forth from the surveys to my notes much more easily.

Sally's friend Eddie Mae is staying with us this week. She is in her eighties but is still very sharp and is pleasant company.

Life goes on

Life goes on even though we ran out of money somewhere back along the road. A reasonably informative visit with the physical therapist. Recommended I work at a desk top, since the laptop involves looking down in a way with which the damaged nerves are not happy. One unclaimed desktop still resides in the studio, but the studio is in a serious state of disarray brought about by the housekeeper and his floor-cleaning adventures. So I prop my laptop on a stack of books at a crazy angle on my little table in the breakfast nook and pretend I have a monitor. Tapping through the General Land Office records looking for sections in the Jackson Belt. For the past two days I have been stuck in the swamps and pine forests along the Louisiana state line. I follow along with my Mississippi Atlas and Gazeteer, watching the lonely surveyors and their chain carriers hack their way through the snakey creeks, wondering if they were gonna head home when the War of 1812 breaks out, which is just a few months away, or will they stay on the job. Deputy Surveyor Elijah Pope finds himself in a bad storm and writes “It is extremely remarkable that this reigning torrent of air seems to have lost much of its rapidity in passing from the pine hills on the W. to the east side of the Magachitto. Tho it appears here to be gathering much of its former violence.” A few pages later he mentions “the distance of 65 chains being laid west by the fury of the aerial element…” and he ends the survey with:
“Immortal hope is made a squatter
I wade knee deep in mud +water”
But I don't have time for such romantic distractions. I must move on.

Outside gardenias and magnolias pump out a rich fragrance that makes me feel like a king in the castle. As I walk the kids to extended day along the broken sidewalks and chainlink fences, the mockingbirds and weedeaters chirping in the distance, I sense a Bessemer City kind of vibe, more Bessemer City than Hillsborough or Marion, two other towns of comparable size I can pivot on as referents in the arc of my narrative, and I can't really say what it is that makes it seem this way, other than slight aromas noticed at random through the day. If you didn't notice the huge university just across the highway, you might imagine you were in Bessemer City. At least for now it kind of smells that way.

my summer vacation

lagoon



moss



pretty lady



baby alligator in lagoon



spooky cemetary at the end of the garden path



entrance to Orton Plantation



Haw River flows under 15-501



Weaver Street Market, Carrboro


We spent a fun week at the end of May roaming around North Carolina seeing old friends and generally carousing. I spent a very pleasant and quiet afternoon at Orton Plantation, south of Wilmington, with one of my sons and my brother-in-law. Pleasant late spring weather, spooky surroundings, lagoons, gators, huge live oaks and ghostly wisps of Spanish moss gesturing in the breeze.

Saturday

Spent most of Friday in the Bienville National Forest with my thesis prof laying out survey plots in six newly established prairies. Some of these are quite large. I took a lot of pictures and they will be up soon. Lady Icker finished up painting the dining room. I helped. A little. Azalea number two finally got moved, the day the VW had an unexpected trip to the ER. Car is OK now but cannot be locked. Had some great enchiladas at H and Js last night, with a pitcher of mojitos. On Thursday I strummed guitars for a while with some other Starkville dads, noodled on some Beatles tunes and an obscure Kinks number called "Harry Rag" which I had never heard before. It is about people jonesin' for smokes. Today will be a house-cleaning day, also planning an upcoming trip to Chapel Hill. Research on the thesis is going slowly. And that's about it. No punchline, sorry.

Friday

Spent the first week of summer break trying to move three very large azaleas to create a parking space for my shorty. These bushes are bigger than me. For the first time in twenty months I missed my Bobcat 463. I used the Tacoma to pull the second one out. A passing thunderstorm had soaked the ball and filled the hole with water, so, while I managed to break it loose I could not actually lift it out. So I am waiting for things to dry out.

Yesterday I gave a ten-minute talk to my son's second grade class about being a landscaper. I passed around some pictures of my Bobcat 463 and some of the jobs I did back in North Carolina. I talked about how much fun it was, working in the dirt, being outside, making stuff look nice. I talked a little about landscape architecture grad school and showed them the site plan I just completed. I printed it on 11x17.

Then I went to the studio to get some of my stuff. I got an email that we needed to have everything out by the end of May for the summer cleaning. E.O. was there and we went to lunch at The Veranda. A blue plate special for eight bucks including drink. Mighty tasty. She has an internship in Atlanta this summer.

My shorty and I just watched "Hustle and Flow," which was kind of like the cherry on top of the first season of the Wire, which we wrapped up this week as well. So we have experienced a pretty big shot of ghetto. I turned the TV off and said "Let's get some Jane Austen in this bitch, knowwhatimsayin." I didn't realize pimps had it so hard. Selling people is a lot more headache than selling dope. The Wire is about much more than the ghetto, cops and dope. It is about institutions and self-preservation, something that is all around us. The character development was really sharp, the whole gang was a lot of fun to just watch through the twelve episodes. Bunko and Greggs where amazing, I hope to see more of them. That annoying, jovial, ass-kissing homicide commander and his boss...I especially enjoyed watching Herc, the white narc with the Brooklyn accent and Omar, the whistling stick up man. And of course Wallace, the poor fella. I really want to see season two, but, like I said, we need a break. We need to get some toga and sandals epic in here or something. But honestly we both need to just get back to work.

Lazy Sunday afternoon

Typical back porch scenes. Occasionally elves from the nearby woodland wander into the backyard to take a nap on the swing.

Hello everybody

Hello my friends, I am glad to be back at Blogger after such a busy semester. It was the first semester of my educational career (that I can recall) in which I pulled an all nighter, two in fact. I share with you today the end result of one such all nighter, a site plan, a zoomed in view of the restaurant in front of the department store in that lame-ass strip mall plan I posted about three weeks ago. I was probably the only kid who did a plant list for his site plan (take it to the bank, I was the only one) and my plant list works, I say. The only negative feed back was that my courtyard was too "fussy." The simplest courtyards work best, but they are the hardest to design. It takes a lot of guts to just put a circle in a square and walk away, but I think what they were telling me was that that is what I should have done.

Today consisted of a casual brunch with friends around the way and an afternoon of yard work, much overdue mowing, and beginning to extract massive Chines privet bushes from my grape arbor. Gotta get with perennial agriculture, dude. Yesterday began with a pleasant nature walk at the Noxubee Refuge, where I met a cool soil scientist and a mushroom guy. We found some amanitas in the parking lot.

here:

I have not been around these parts much as I have been wrapping things up in Stats I and design II. Boy, those were some difficult classes. All in all, things went pretty well. I think the university will let me come back in the fall for another tour of the battlefield. I plan to do a lot of research this summer, and home improvement projects. Here are two things I have laying around: an imaginative little narrative STG wrote, and his trophy-winning pinewood derby car. My pinewood derby, circa 1976 or so, somehow has followed me lo these many years and was able to pose alongside. STG has the lego driver, in case you were wondering which was which. I have some other things to share but I am cooking chicken at the moment.