OK. But believe it or not, Saint-Tropez itself once looked just like this. It’s a start!

Happy New Year.

I’m on something of an enforced vacation these days. Current work at the property (fooling around with the boat, removing old seats and carpets to make way for new) is of the type that doesn’t require two. Steve says when I’m along on a job like that all I do is “hover,” and it’s true. There’s nothing worse than somebody standing around just watching, hoping to be useful. So this week my mornings are at home. Yesterday I intended to use the down time to play around in the blogosphere. I got waylaid.

When I booted up my computer yesterday morning my McAfee security app notified me that my subscription, which had been free to me as a Comcast customer, had expired. Since the Comcast freebie was a vestige of Arlington and the relationship no longer exists, that meant the time had come to take advantage of another free McAfee promotion, this time through my bank. It was a simple enough operation on the face of it: uninstall the old Comcast McAfee so that a new download wouldn’t recognize a twinned image of itself and abort, go to the McAfee site and establish a new account via my bank, and then download and install the new virus protection. Even at my middling wireless speeds the operation would take an hour at most.

Wrong.

The McAfee installation refused to finish. It would go through every slow-as-molasses step, checking my computer for old versions and viruses, downloading the six components of the “security suite,” and then trying to install them. Always, at the very end of the process, the word “failed” would appear.

I made my first call to McAfee tech support at around 10 am. I would make 5 more such calls over the course of the day. Until 6 pm I was mostly sitting in front of this screen, either explaining my situation to unfailingly courteous Indian citizens whose accents ranged from Simpsons Apu-esque, fun and totally understandable, to the utterly incomprehensible, or watching the slo-mo progress of another ultimately failed installation. At the end of the most frustrating phone session–the one with the diligent and hardworking man 95% of whose words escaped me–I thanked him for his hard work, congratulated him on his knowledge and his seriousness, and urged him to get training in American English if he intended to stay with McAfee so that all that knowledge could be put to its intended use.

In the end it turned out that somehow my computer had become infected with Trojan horses, applications that appeared normal to a virus scanner but were really spyware, and that my Windows security settings were wrong. These discoveries were made when I turned over control of my computer to the technician on the phone with me in India. I watched as the cursor drilled into the nether regions of this piece of machinery I so take for granted and discovered rafts of stuff that shouldn’t have been there. It was an eye-opener to learn that even though I may be conscientious about scheduling regular virus scans and emptying temporary files, the control a lay user really has is limited. I always wondered why so many temp files remained after I “emptied” the folder. Still don’t know why, but the removal yesterday of all of them doesn’t seem to have hurt my computer.

It was on one of the earlier phone calls that I had the fear of God struck into me about using Firefox. The fact that I was trying to download through Firefox was the first theory about why installation was failing. McAfee, I was told in no uncertain terms, does not like Firefox. I dutifully uninstalled Firefox and worked all day only through Internet Explorer, which only added to the fun–IE is exponentially slower on this computer than Firefox. It was a relief to put Explorer back to bed and welcome Firefox back as my default browser.

How’s that for a boring day? Geeze, we can blog about anything, can’t we? For relief I put up a picture I took a couple of months ago of the beautiful Perquimans (rhymes with “persimmon”) River, one of the great, completely unheard-of streams that water this part of the country. It’s brackish, doesn’t taste salty but has enough salt to support a very healthy population of fish and blue crabs. The picture looks east, into the sunrise, toward the river’s mouth (not visible) at the Albemarle Sound. We make this crossing every day on our way to the property.

Steve just called to tell me the electricians are back, putting in light fixtures and switches. One more step. Electricity to the house can’t be too far behind….

Before I get to the local specialty promised in the title, I bring your attention to photo above. It’s what you see at the driveway entrance to our new home as of today. Our imagined concept of seeing a lovely house peeking out of the woods is becoming a reality. The color looks a bit drab now, but it’s the effect we were after: a large-ish structure that looks like it belongs in its environment. We will add splashes of bright color to bring it to life after we move in.

The siding guy must have a sadistic streak, because he came the other day and finished the entire job except for the shutters on the room above the garage. The box containing the shutters is there, waiting to be used. It means he’ll have to make one more trip all the way out there just to hang two more shutters. We don’t get it. He’s not paid by the hour. Sadistic, like I said. Has to be.

The piles of brush in the front yard are the leafy, twiggy parts of five trees that had to come down to make way for the septic field. If it ever dries out enough, we’ll have bonfires to dispose of them. Outdoor fires are legal here with a permit that is free and downloadable. (All of a sudden we are once again savoring the spicy aroma of burning leaves–an experience I haven’t had since the practice was outlawed in my suburban Virginia neighborhood when I was a teenager.) We dodged rain yesterday to get the trees cut into logs; we ended up with at least another cord of firewood, and we decided it was just too much for us–we already have enough wood to last a couple of lifetimes. We found a young couple on Craigslist who needed it to heat their house, so we let them have it for free.

And so, what to do?  Psychologically we are are not permanent yet because we really don’t “live” anywhere–this current roof over our heads is a mere way-station, populated with as many of our things as necessary to make life possible, but it’s not really ours.  We have done all the day trips in the region that can reasonably be done between sunrise and sunset, and haven’t really discovered anything anywhere that makes us want to return.  Our two home bases, Edenton and Elizabeth City, are well served by restaurants, but very poorly by movies, so we are well fed, but other entertainment comes mainly via either Netflix or DVR’d movies off the TV.  We do scare up the occasional odd job:  we’re working on the boat and dock at the moment, preparing to install new seats on the boat and making the lift run more efficiently.  We want to paint the wicker furniture we’ve found in antique stores–the pieces are in excellent shape but their white needs touching up, and it makes sense to have that done before we move.  It seems to be staying warm enough here well into autumn for us to be afforded the occasional 60-degree day that makes that outdoor job possible.

Otherwise, strings of empty days loom ahead.  I’m more OK with that than Steve, who was not raised for introspection or a life of the mind.  He does welcome the occasional day off, but usually as a reward for some just-completed hard work, which is his normal medium.  When he gets down to spending hours playing Monopoly on the computer, it’s clear he’s scraping bottom.

We’ve been in one stage or another of “move mode” for about two years now, from the disruption of preparing the Arlington house for sale, going room to room dismantling and re-creating, to the emotional roller-coaster of the selling process, to the physical move itself, to making ourselves ready to hit the ground running when we finally take possession of the new house, free to tackle all those new chores with the big exterior work behind us.  We’re very smart, very efficient.

But we’ve been living <span style=”font-style: italic;”>in anticipation</span> all this time.  Our present has been completely filled with preparation for the future.  I’m the first to acknowledge it could be a hell of a lot worse–at least we have a future, and a very bright one at that, to prepare for.  But what I wouldn’t give for a group of friends who were a mere phone call away for an invitation to dinner and conversation.  That day will come, I know.  But it’s not here yet.

I was recently found on Facebook by one of the boys who made my first couple years of high school (high school for me was grades 8-12) a living hell.  He actually “friended” me.  Like all bullies, he appears totally oblivious to the havoc he wrought all those years ago, and comes to me all friendly-like.  I took him up on the friend offer just so I could take a look at what he considers worth sharing about his life today.  There he is, those familiar features now encased in rolls of fat, smiling out at me, the happy grandfather.  His interests and his politics are the polar opposites of mine, which is not surprising.  I’m pondering taking the opportunity to thank him for teaching me some important lessons in life–patience and perseverence in the face of extreme unpleasantness being the most important–but will likely instead simply ignore him.  Still, it was a shock to get the message, and interesting how those ancient insults to the soul still resonate.  It’s also remarkable to reflect on how far behind I have left that life and those people.

We bought a canoe!  One of the houses we pass every day on our drive to the property suddenly had this shiny red number in the driveway with a For Sale sign attached.  It’s a fiberglass 2001 model in very good shape, and we got it for less than half of what it would cost new.  The creek we’re on is ideal for a canoe and we had been toying with the idea of getting one, especially since Gary, our builder, actually designed a large, overhead space in our garage specifically for hanging a canoe.  So now we can fill the space.  Can’t wait to take her on her maiden Lunker’s Creek voyage.  A canoe was pretty far down on our list of needs/nice to haves, but when you’re faced with a deal like that…..

This is harvest time.  The ubiquitous soy and cotton fields we pass everywhere in this part of the state are beyond ready to be relieved of their burdens, and little by little they are being emptied by combines and their fruit hauled away.  Farmers actually defoliate (and kill) the plants in order to prepare them for picking, making it easier for the machines to do their work.  And we’re learning that mechanical harvesting is a labor-saving but inefficient process–right after picking, there seem to be as many cotton bolls left in the fields and scattered by the side of the roads as there are packed in tractor-trailer sized bales, and the birds are enjoying a bonanza of fallen dried soybeans.

And speaking of birds:  lately there is amazing activity among the starlings here.  Thousands upon thousands of them are flocking, flying in a westerly direction in the mornings and then coming back eastward at dusk.  They stop to rest in the trees surrounding the property and create a racket that requires you to raise your voice to be heard.  I’ve checked the obvious websites, including the Cornell bird program, to find out what’s going on, but so far have come up dry.  Since starlings have colonized the entire continent, there isn’t much migration really going on.  So what gives?  Maybe they’re flying from soy field to soy field, gorging during the day and returning to their home roosts at night?  Whatever it is, Alfred Hitchcock’s imagination <span style=”font-style: italic;”></span> had nothing on this spectacle.

Collards and hamhocks for dinner tonight.  Yum!  Am I in the South or what?

All I can do is apologize for my long absence from this space, and make no promises that there won’t be another one. You may remember, my partner Steve and I are building our dream house on the water in rural North Carolina.  Building a house, even when you’re paying somebody else to do it, keeps you busy.  I’ve gone from being a 9-5 bachelor with hours to while away, stitching words together, to someone who commutes daily, 25 miles one way, to the 2 1/2 acres of land that we are preparing to be our world for the foreseeable future.  Whenever I have the time to write, under any circumstances, my stories are about my life.  And at the moment my life is house, the whole house and nothing but the house.  Here’s a vignette.

Among the scores of trees on our 2 1/2 acres was a magnificent and ancient beech. It stood at least 50 feet tall and had a circumference at the base of over 6 feet. It stood within touching distance of our spanking new garden shed and, alas, it was rotten at its roots. Huge holes had been dug into it by everything from microbes to insects to, no doubt, snakes. With regret, we had to face the fact that it must come down.

Dwight was the man for the job. He was the foreman on the framing crew, the man who directed all the very intricate carpentry that made all those peaks and valleys on our roof a reality. He’s a master carpenter and also a nice guy who’s always hustling a few extra bucks. That’s what we paid him to cut the tree down–it was on the ground, cut into immense, even logs, when we returned from our Nags Head vacation in September.

It goes without saying that the eventual destination for this wood bonanza is our fireplace. To get it ready for service, the next step for us was to split the logs into hearth-size pieces, and Dwight said we could borrow his gas-powered hydraulic log-splitter to do the job. We still had to finish building the shed and then put siding on it (a rule imposed by the Homeowner’s Association), so the task had to wait a few weeks. And in those few weeks Dwight, that sterling character of a master carpenter, made like a contractor and disappeared. “Oh, yes,” he said, when we called him to confirm he would still lend us the splitter. But he never showed up on the appointed day, and he stopped returning our calls. He’d gotten his money and had no sentimental need to continue the relationship.

So there we were with many many beech logs to split and nothing to split them with. We looked at renting a splitter and were prepared to do that, even at $69 a day, because we thought we had no choice. Then our Deep Creek Shores neighbors stepped into the breach. One of them stopped by for a chat and in the course of the conversation he mentioned that another neighbor had a splitter we could probably borrow. Relieved, we called that neighbor to talk log splitters. He said we were welcome to his, but it hadn’t worked in months and he’d trashed it. He’d ordered a new one, but it wouldn’t be delivered for weeks.

Back to the rental idea. Since these splitters are big machines that have to be towed, and none of our vehicles has a trailer hitch, our plan was to borrow the truck and trailer from the same guy (yet another neighbor) from whom we had borrowed them to clear brush. But he had major qualms about letting us drive the rig all the way to the rental place in Elizabeth City. Insurance concerns. He was very apologetic and it was clear he felt bad about leaving us in the lerch, but we understood, probably would feel the same way if we’d been the lenders. We went back to square one with our plans, preparing to actually rent a trailer to pull the splitter down from E. City, when the truck-and-trailer neighbor called us to say he remembered yet another neighbor who had a splitter! That was the middle of last week. We called neighbor number 4, and we got the response with which we were becoming depressingly familiar: we were welcome to borrow his splitter, but it wasn’t running at the moment. The difference this time, however, is that this guy is a whiz-bang mechanic who can make anything with a carburetor run. He said he’d be able to fix the splitter over the coming weekend (this previous one), and we’d be able use it for as long as we needed it after that. Since it rained all last week anyway, no untoward time was lost. We found other things to do on the property while it rained.

Finally, last Sunday, Mr. Mechanic delivered the splitter. A noisy monster that applies 14 tons of hydraulic pressure to split the biggest log we’ll ever see (and that’s not even the biggest, which comes in at 20 tons), it will be our boon companion all week. It took us a mere two days to reduce the mighty beech tree to the stacks of wood you see in the photo above. That is about 132 cubic feet of wood, slightly more than a cord. It will last us several lifetimes. And we aren’t even finished. Tomorrow we’ll tackle this pile, which was saved from the original land clearing. It’s oak and cypress, and there’s at least another cord there.

Need some firewood?

Perquimans, with an area of 329 square miles, was accommodating 12,856 souls as of July, 2008.  Just for comparison’s sake, Arlington County, Va., from whence we uprooted ourselves, stuffed 210,000 people into its scant 26 square miles during the same month.  You see the sort of expectations we may have of county government.

Our garden shed needed a permit.  We thought it didn’t, but when the inspector came to look over the foundation of our new house, the shed, which by that time had two walls up, caught his eye.  We grimaced at the thought of the impending bureaucratic hassle and asked our builder to take care of it.  He punted it back to us, saying the shed would have a “lower profile” if we did it.  That made sense, so we bit the bullet and set off for the county seat, Hertford, to take care of business.

We first went to the inspections office, where we were greeted by the same guy who had informed us at the property of the need for the shed permit.  He’s a friendly type who remembered us and was prepared for our visit, whenever it may be.  We happened to arrive around lunch hour on a Friday, so he was alone in the office–the receptionist was out.  He looked at the paperwork he had at hand and told us it wasn’t enough; we needed something else from the zoning office, which is located in the 1852-vintage courthouse pictured above.

We strolled over to the courthouse, checked the building directory, and then headed up the creaky stairway to the zoning office.  On our way there, we passed and nearly knocked over a young man dressed in slacks and polo shirt.  He was engrossed in a document he was reading as he walked and we were barging along in our Arlington County way.  We apologized, had a friendly chuckle over our clumsiness, and continued on.

When we got to the zoning office, no one was there except an extremely friendly young woman who apologized up and down for her colleague’s absence.  “I wish I could help you,” she said, “but I’m the finance officer.”  That is, the county CFO.   She shares office space with the zoning commissioner.  She told us we could probably get everything we needed from the County Manager and directed us to that office, at the opposite end of the hall.  It seemed rather outlandish that the County Manager would bother him or herself with such minutiae–a permit for a garden shed–but figured the receptionist would be able to take care of it.

But there was no receptionist.  We walked through the open door directly into the County Manager’s office, and there at the big mahogany desk sat the same young guy in a polo shirt we’d nearly felled a few minutes earlier.  County Manager Bobby Darden looked up at us with a friendly smile and asked how he could help us.  We rather sheepishly told him we were directed to his office to take care of a permit for our garden shed.   Without further ado, he got up, walked down the hall to a file, extracted the appropriate papers, initialed them, xeroxed (!) them for our convenience, and sent us on our way.  In the course of about 30 minutes, which encompassed a block’s amble from the inspections office to the courthouse and back and talking to a total of three very friendly people (two of whom were top-tier county executives), we had our permit in hand.  It cost 25 bucks, and we learned yet another very pleasant lesson about small-town life.