Tao’s 2 Cents

Two months without a post is like a death blow to a blog, but life was just too crazy to have time to write anything.  Let me see if I can review briefly.

 I fell in love.  Then I moved away from Baltimore and got sidetracked in Roanoke, Virginia.  I’m helping my girlfriend fix up her house here so that she can rent it out and move out to the farm in Missouri with me.  We’ve been busting our asses for about a month and we should be done by this Friday, or at least we better be.

My job at the University of Baltimore decided to let me work 20 hours a week from wherever I am, which is incredibly generous and trusting of them.  Of course, I’m a pretty sound investment.  It’s been like working 14 hour days trying to keep up with the renovations and web work.  I’m exhausted most of the time and that’s why my blog hasn’t been getting much attention.  I just sat down this morning and got caught up on web stuff and Liz is still asleep so I’m taking a minute to write.

 Along with all of that we also took a 2 and a half week road trip as well as went to Bonnaroo.  Bonnaroo was quite an experience.  It seemed like it was about the same as when I went 6 or 7 years ago except they’d seem to have gotten their shit together a little more.   There were permanent stages and buildings now and they seemed to be keeping up with the bathrooms and water better.  The music was good and we had an excellent time.

We started off the road trip by taking a natural building workshop at a place in Asheville, NC called the Ashevillage Institute.  It was a 2 day workshop so we camped out and learned about building with natural construction materials like clay, sand, and straw mainly.  I’d already read a lot about it, mainly in the “Hand-Sculpted House” about cob construction(like adobe but sculpted as one piece).  It was nice to finally get my hands dirty and got me really excited about building like that out in Missouri.

After that we drove to Pickwick Dam on the Mississippi/Tennesse border for about a week.  Liz’s family has a lake house there and her family gets together every 4th of July there.  We got there a few days before everyone else and enjoyed the quiet time.  It was nice to meet her family, although I’d met most of her immediate family before.  We spent our days swimming, taking the pontoon boat down to the waterfall/rope swing, and canoeing around some backwaters.  We even saw a bunch of blue herons nesting back there.

We went down to Jackson to see Dad and Charlotte and to hang out with old friends.  Allan happened to be back in town from Columbia(the country) for a few weeks and John came down from Starkville for a little while too.  It’s always good to see them and wish it happened more often than every couple years.

After a few days there we headed up to the farm in Missouri where we met up with Mom and Gary who we thought were just stopping by on their way up to Michigan but had really driven all the way from Texas just to see the farm and hang out with us.  We went out and checked out the cabin and lake one day with Mom and Gary and after they left we went out for several hours and just wandered through the woods.  We had been planning to go to Asheville to camp for the end of the summer and then find an apartment there over the winter but Liz fell in love with the farm and so we’re planning on camping out there for the end of the summer and then possibly spending the winter in Asheville.  That part is still up in the air.

 The idea is that we’ll go out to the farm and get a better feel for it so we can start coming up with some plans when we move there in earnest early next spring.  We might even clear some space in one of the now grown up fields so we can have a little lumber curing over the winter and have it ready for us next year.  I’ll still be doing my web work with broadband cell phone internet and some solar panels.  A pretty sweet setup if you ask me.

We’re trying to get the last of the renovations done on the house and we’re having a family get together here on Friday to show it off and have a farewell/birthday party for Liz.  Then on Saturday we’re having another party this time for her friends.  Her birthday is actually on Saturday.  Then we’re hopefully going to pack up on Sunday and then we’re off to her lake house in Tennessee on Monday for a week or so of vacation and then on to the farm.  Exciting and chaotic times ahead.  Once all this renovation is done I’ll hopefully have more time for blog posts.

 If you want to see more pictures go to the Summer Roadtrip 2008 Gallery.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 4th, 2008 at 10:16 am and is filed under Life, Tao. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.