Ahoy!
I have returned from Alamance County, North Carolina. During my stay I ate a fried pork chop sandwich and drank Cheerwine. I watched tomatoes grow and fed ducks (whilst bottle rockets flew at troublesome geese.) I watched a 4th-tier minor league baseball game (go Royals!) and took advantage of the $1 beers sold at such an event. I saw Cheng and Eng’s grave and James Ruchala’s new home. I met a lot of nice people I’d met before and had to ask Ann “how they fit in to the family, again?” I ate thin ginger cookies in “Old Salem” and fried chicken off the interstate. I saw an antiques mall larger than the largest Pathmark and sifted through all of their Spock-related material. I bought a kitchy beer glass and a kitchier coffee mug. I shopped at Wal-Mart with no regrets and reveled in the enormous savings ($41 for TWO giant bags of awesome stuff!) I shopped in other stores I never heard of and couldn’t believe how easy it was to find clothing in, um, a “larger men’s size” and how inexpensive these items were. I won’t have to buy underwear for years. I went to the top of Pilot Mountain. I did the tiniest fraction of driving, but almost all of the twelve hours there and back were tackled by Ann. I fed the CD machine, though, and we sang along to Meat Loaf, Neil Diamond, The Stones, The Marshall Tucker Band, Fountains of Wayne, Elvis, Queen, NPR, the Jayhawks, “Cowbells Greatest Hits,” the soundtrack to “Until The End of the World” and a tiny bit of the Mars Volta. I watched no feature films but did get some good reading and Trek-watching in.
I also took many photos (as did Ann) so you can watch this space as they will be uploaded in a handful of days or so.
don’t forget about our awesome tour of the alamance battlegrounds where we learned all about the regulators. also the battle my dad is waging with the japanese beetles and the strange algae on the lake. the man in mt. airy telling you about the wonders of fish pills. were we going to speak of waffle house? i know sometimes we eat somewhere and you say let’s never speak of this again. hardee’s anyone? hursey’s always worth mentioning! mmmmpulled pork. yum. — Ann