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.