Everything’s Perfect Here

Everything...Except For ME


Good God this place is beautiful.

The houses, the trees, even most of the people. No one is even FAT up here…it must be a law or something.

While we were walking around in the quaint little downtown shopping district yesterday, school let out and we were suddenly inundated with teens and pre-teens and if I were a 16 year old boy I would feel like I looked like this:





…while most of the girls looked like this:

Seriously, we live in a marvelous place on St. Simons Island, but IF I didn’t love the south and the coast so much, and IF I didn’t hate the cold so much, I would seriously consider relocating to the Fairfield County, Connecticut area.

The only problem would be that we would probably have to live in a homeless shelter or something, because things in this area are a bit ’spensive. I was doing some checking on the internet and the median per capita income is over $80,000 per year!

Just Damn.

Even the maids must be pulling down mid-five-figure incomes to afford an efficiency apartment on the edge of town…and speaking of apartments and condos--I haven’t seen any.

Even the most modest housing in the area consists of three or four thousand square feet of 150 year old boards and shingles, surrounded by a Revolutionary War era stone wall. Many of these “cottages” are actually “second homes” for people who live down in NY City.

There’s no Wal Mart, no Home Depot, no hotel/motels, and just a couple of Bed and Breakfast Inns in the area. It makes for an interesting population dynamic when compared to places like our little island which prostitute themselves for hoards of the almighty tourist dollars.

I’m not saying that they’re rude or anything because everyone has actually been very gracious, but this part of Connecticut isn’t going anywhere but up, even if another tourist never sets foot in the county in their second 270 years of existence as a settlement.

As some of my readers know, I have a few culinary hobbies including fine wine and cheeses. I walked into a wine shop yesterday and almost had a heart attack looking at their Port Wine selections. In Georgia you might find two or three vintages of Fonseca and Taylor Fladgate Porto in any given shop.

Not so in New Canaan.

Instead I found one bottle of 1963 (at nearly $500), in addition to bottles and bottles of 1970, 1985, and a number of vintages in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. Probably $7,500 worth of Port in one store on two shelves. The only things missing were bottles of the famous 1966 and 1977 vintages, else one could have stocked a complete cellar of excellent Port Wines in a single stop.

Next there was cheese. This one little private grocer that we visited had an infinite selection of fine hand crafted domestic organic sheep’s and goat’s milk cheeses, in addition to many fine imported European products that we never see in Georgia, even in our snobby Harris Teeter that serves the wealthy denizens of nearby Sea Island. One ten pound wheel of wax coated ambrosia was priced at nearly $150.

Now that’s some big cheese…

Thus far I’ve managed to enjoy our visit without uttering words like “shazam” and “Ggawwww Leeeee”, but I did get a bit excited in the wine shop--enough so that the manager came over and calmed me down by offering to box up and ship his entire inventory down to Georgia via FedEX.

I had to explain that I was afraid I was a few thousand short of funding THAT endeavor right now, but I'd keep his offer in mind in the future.

More Redneck adventures & commentary to follow...

News Withdrawal

And A Little Travel Fatigue...


If a substantial portion of the world blew up yesterday, I wouldn’t have known until the past hour or so because I haven’t been near a TV that carried FOX News since about 5 AM yesterday morning. Right now I’m having to settle for CNN--I’ll tell you why in a minute.

After three hours on regional jets and a couple hours in the Atlanta airport, we drove into New Canaan, CT about 2 PM and checked into our historic Bed & Breakfast, The Roger Sherman Inn in time to collapse for a few minutes and take our shoes off.

The Inn is nice and quaint and bigger than I expected, and it’s right down the street from our old friend Bucky’s abode and just a minute from downtown so we’ll get to spend our time socializing rather commuting.

Now back to my lack of news…The only gripe I have with our room is that someone has deprogrammed FOX News out of the cable programming on our TV, even though it listed on our in room TV directory. I guess that it was the handiwork of some sniveling liberal one of the lovely previous guests that was afraid of FOX’s programming or something.

Any way…having lived on our little island for three Fall seasons now, it’s really nice to see some trees with colored leaves, even though things are way past peak now and many trees are bare. At home things are basically green year round since the Live Oaks don’t ever lose their leaves at one time and almost everything else is things like pines and other evergreens.

I wanted to take out my tripod and make some pictures several times today, but the tripod doesn’t take very good pictures without important things my DIGITAL CAMERA, which is currently spending it’s vacation in our trunk at the Brunswick airport parking lot.

Sometimes I’m such a BONEHEAD…

MORE...

I fumbled around with the TV remote, did a little reprogramming, and I have the following announcement:

I CAN NOW VIEW FOX NEWS!!!

(I also resisted blocking the Clinton News Network CNN in a moment of weakness)

An Alabama Redneck In King Arthur’s A Connecticut Court

Look Out New England…Here I Come…Yeeeeeeeee Haaaaaaaaaaa


Well, we’re getting on an airplane a little after 6 AM tomorrow, heading for part of the country that I have thus far avoided gracing with my presence.

It’s not all a bad thing, however, because the trip helps me knock another couple of states off of the map in my plan to visit all 50 before I physically leave the planet.

After this trip, I’ll be able to mark Connecticut and Rhode Island off of my “not visited list”, leaving the total at an even dozen of sovereign states that I haven’t wandered into yet and tortured the residents with my southern accent, attitude, and stories of gun ownership.

Although it would have been an advantage to have visited a little earlier in the season while the leaves were still on the trees, at least the weather is predicted to be relatively mild--with highs near 60 and lows in the mid 40’s.

After spending a few days visiting our friend and former neighbor Bucky (Dartmouth Class of 1942), we‘ll be moving out of our Bed & Breakfast and taking an auto ferry across Long Island Sound to Montauk, New York for a couple of days of sightseeing and eating New England seafood. I hope to come home with some interesting photographs of lighthouses and the coastal scenes found there on the northern most tip of Long Island.

Thinking things through, I guess that I’ll have to restrain myself over the weekend while watching TV, with Georgia Tech playing North Carolina in Chapel Hill and the NASCAR race on Sunday out in Phoenix.

If you have relatives in that part of the country, you might want to phone ahead and warn them that I’m coming through…

Republicans Make Trip To The Woodshed

I Hope You Get Your Money's Worth...


I voted for the Libertarian candidate in a few state offices today. I would have probably touched the screen for more candidates with the "L" behind their name if there had been any.

It seems that people that would normally push the "R" button went for the "D" button with a similar sentiment.

Now, with the US House of representatives clearly in the Democrat's hands and the Senate teetering by one or two seats from being a tie, I look forward to the next two years being an even greater stalemate than we've witnessed over the past six years of the Bush Presidency.

All of you folks up there in Ohio and Pennsylvania should pat yourselves on the back because it would appear that the election was swinging largely on your opinions of how things should be done.

Look for the "tit for tat" mentality to continue, only with the Republicans playing partisan politics, and important issues like border security/immigration reform and Social Security taking a back seat to endless debate over redeployment of our troops and investigations and rumors of impeachment of the president taking the front page.

I hope the lamestream mainstream media is happy...they certainaly got their money's worth for their efforts...

IT’S TIME TO GO VOTE

Then Go Home And Stop Complaining...


And if you stay home today, you get EXACTLY what you deserve--no say in our political process.

I predict, in spite of the media hysteria to the contrary, that the Republicans will hold both the House and the Senate. In fact, I think that they might even INCREASE their margins.

Fortunately, just like football, polls mean absolutely nothing--we have to play the game to see the outcome...

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This just came in to my E-mail from the John sKerry website:

This is our chance to take the power to lead America out of the Bush Republicans' hands. Winning means raising the minimum wage. Winning means moving towards health care for all, starting with every child in America. Winning means forcing an end to the disastrous war in Iraq, and getting our heroes home.

Winning means firing the incompetents, stopping the corruption, and making America stop being the world's leading denier of global climate change.

OK John,, let's take this thing point by point.

Point A--Raising the minimum wage will do nothing but hurt young people's chances of getting their FIRST job since employers will hire fewer people and demand more for their government mandated money.

As I've said many times before, if you're trying to raise a family of four working a minimum wage job you've also probably been smoking crack else you dropped out of/slept through high school and there's nothing that the government can do other than extort money out of employers to ease your pain--but the pain won't go away entirely because you are obviously STUPID.

Point B--Health care for children...hummm, let's see here.

I don't know a single instance where the parent of a sick child in Glynn County Georgia can't take their child to a free clinic or a doctor's office/emergency room in the area and receive treatment for their chirrun', on demand...UNLESS said parent is some crack head idiot that is so stupid as to be still working a minimum wage job in their thirties (see point A above.)

Point C-- Mr. sKerry, Hero's wouldn't be Hero's if they spent their time sitting on the sofa in Brunswick, Georgia. If we listen to you and John Murtha, Iraq will implode and terrorists will be over here mowing my grass within six months while they plot how to blow up me and my condo building.

Of course John skerry doesn't have to worry about terrorism because he parks in a secure garage in DC and has Secret Service personnel looking up his ass 24/7 while sleeping in his Chateau in France, his Lodge in Colorado, and his Georgetown mansion.

Point D--John, John, John...Regarding Global Warming, there is no such thing, DAMMIT...at least as far as there being any PROOF that the current slight upward trend is man made. What happened to the "Killer Hurricane" season all of the pundits and media was predicting for this summer?

And by the way Mr. sKerry, why is China and most of the third world exempted from the Kyoto Treaty and it's business killing limits on emissions? Why should President Bush be forced to sign a treaty that President Clinton also refused to sign when he was running the show here?

Yeah...I though so...

I bought A New Gun

The Squirrels Are Nervous


A couple of summers ago, when we first put our bird feeders out, we elected to use Safflower seed rather that a wild bird mix--thereby limiting the species of birds we attracted but also trying to not attract squirrels to our second story balcony.

It sounded good IN THEORY, and I'm happy to report that the scheme worked, until about six weeks ago.

Since that time, we've had an literal aerial circus of squirrels, leaping off of the roof and from adjacent trees; climbing the tabby walls, and apparently flying in from orbiting squirrel satellites to land on the patio and on the two feeders, thereby wrecking havoc on an almost hourly basis during daylight.

After chasing the little bastards around a dozen times a day and throwing ice cubes at them for a few weeks, on Saturday I went to Wall Mart and purchased some firepower.

A crappy little $28 crossman pellet/BB rifle (dang it, but the really good guns with a scope and 1000 fps muzzle velocity are over $100 now.)

I don't intend to kill anything, but using BB's and about two or three pumps, over the past day I've reduced the squirrel incursions by at LEAST 75%. I've managed to sting two or three in the butt as they retreated to the adjacent trees, so now their tactics involve running out of sight as soon as I open the sliding glass door.

There was a time in my life when I wouldn't settle for a BB and a few pumps of the handle, but would use a pellet and about ten lethal pumps.

I guess I'm getting mellow in my middle age...

Beating A Dead Horse

Can They Find Someone That Actually Gives A Damn?


I’ve been aware of this story for a while, but didn’t comment because I figured that it would end up being a tempest in a teapot.

I guess I was wrong, because the partisan ass that calls himself the Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor refuses to communicate with Ann Coulter and her attorney except in writing, and is now going to try to prosecute her for election fraud:

WEST PALM BEACH -- Conservative columnist Ann Coulter has refused to cooperate in an investigation about whether she voted in the wrong precinct, so the case will likely be turned over to state prosecutors, Palm Beach County's elections chief said Wednesday.

Elections Supervisor Arthur Anderson said his office has been looking into the matter for nearly nine months, and he would turn over the case to the state attorney's office by Friday…

Anderson's office received a complaint in February that Coulter allegedly voted in the wrong precinct during a Feb. 7 Palm Beach town council election. Since then, Anderson said he has made repeated attempts to resolve the matter with Coulter and her attorney but has been rebuffed.

Anderson said an initial letter was sent to Coulter on March 27 requesting that she clarify her address for the voting records ``or face the possibility of her voter registration being rescinded.''…

In July, Anderson said, he received a letter from Coulter's attorney, Marcos Daniel Jimenez D'Clouet. The letter said the attorney would only discuss the matter in person or by telephone because he complained Anderson had given details to the media. Anderson said the matter had to be discussed in writing.

Let’s think about this for a minute, shall we?

If this were anyone but Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, it would already be a total non-issue.

After all, judges in almost every state and most of the Democratic party absolutely refuse to pass laws requiring your residency and identity to be positively verified when you present yourself at a polling place.

The fact that someone actually recognized Ann Coulter because of her celebrity and accused her of trying to commit voter fraud in of all things--A TOWN COUNCIL ELECTION--makes the story patently absurd.

I’m impressed that someone as busy as Ann took the time to be one of the 19.5% of the electorate that actually turns out for those type of local elections, so let the lady vote for Christ‘s sake--it‘s not like they‘re saying she drove from precinct to precinct and voted twenty seven times or something.

These idiots are actually implying that Ann Coulter knowingly and fraudulently went to an election place and presented herself to vote without actually having resided in that part of West Palm Beach.

I say that it has to be a paperwork error or something, because the people that staff the polling places down here in Georgia verify my name and address every time I walk in the door, and since I live on the border between two precincts there is always a discussion about my residency because apparently there was some problem in years past that they are still correcting.

By the way, you could swing a dead cat and fire a cannon down through the building and not hit anybody on off season local elections like we had here last summer for local sales tax referendums and such, so I hardly see what the bru-ha-ha is about other than it being some partisan, politically motivated vendetta against Ann’s outspoken position and an attempt to embarrass her publicly.

At one time I thought that I would like to live in West Palm Beach eventually, but the more I hear about it the more I think that it would be better that I stay away lest I end up strangling some liberal and spending my golden years in the lock-up.

Saddam's Getting A Little Taller

And A Little Deader...


I turned on FOX News about 4:30 this morning and they were reporting that a guilty verdict had be returned against Saddam and two of his cohorts, and the sentence was DEATH BY HANGING.

I wish that I could be there myself to witness the event. I would also like to round up a couple thousand little baggy pants wearing hip-hop punks here in in the US and make them come along to witness what should happen to you when you are found guilty of killing people.

The US mode of operation where we convict murderers in a jury trial, then allow them to fester in prison at taxpayer expense for twenty or thirty years while their lawyers further waste the taxpayers time and money filing endless appeals and the do-gooders argue about what form of execution is "humane" is a total exercise in stupidity, in my opinion.

I'd like the little thugs and animals wandering our streets terrorizing law abiding, God fearing citizens to be forced to witness Saddam drop off the gallows and shudder, jerk, shake, and soil his pants as his eyes bug out of his stupid head. I think an image like that might just change the future of our society.

I hope they really hang the bastard, and soon...