Just time for a brief note because I'm about to walk (virtually) into depositions here in the office. It's just Connor and me--Stacy's home sick with Covid, and it sounds like Joanna may have it as well. We're keeping our distance from everyone, although it's difficult in this maskless, heedless place.
We took delivery on a new truck for the farm this past Saturday, a new Dodge 1500 sort of like the 2017 we've been driving since the Mercedes caught fire a few weeks after the storm, only spiffier.
The new John Deere showed up the day before. That gets a post all to itself.
Yesterday we drove over from Wyldswood, via Tallahassee so I could buy a driver to replace the 20+ year old John Daly "Grip It and Rip It" driver Issac left behind for me to use. I ended up buying a whole bag of new clubs.
Gotta love that bag. I think I'll make that our New York set--you don't see many Dawgs wandering the course at Corning.
The drive over from Tallahassee was lovely--I always take the Sneads exit off I-10, then meander through Altha and Shelton's Crossroads before spitting out at the Marianna cutoff and Highway 231. I've driven that route ever since I sat over a highway atlas at Jim Fensom's desk back at B&R maybe twenty years ago and traced the highlighted path he'd decided after careful study was the fastest way to get to the north side of Tallahassee.
It's a really pretty drive through farm country that's finally coming back to life after the hurricane.
We traveled with hope to the condo, supposedly nearly finished. But then we arrived, and Peg's lovely head exploded and caught fire.
The wrong cabinets were in the kitchen, painted the wrong color and not centered on much of anything. At the 90 degree "L" turn there's a big dead spot of inaccessible space. The shower door was installed backwards. The enormous island in the kitchen is in the wrong spot, and visitors will have to slide past it to get to the living room.
And yes that countertop is a cluttered mess, because we don't have anyplace to store the items we brought in the truck for our time here. It's par for the course in the panhandle of Florida in the wake of Hurricane Michael. The workmanship is mostly slipshod, and if you're not standing over the contractor to watch every move, something cheap will find its way into the home in the place of whatever you thought you were getting. And the price is much higher than what you'd pay in New York to have an anthill of Amish guys do the job correctly in a fraction of the time. It's all incredibly frustrating.
But the cats didn't seem to mind, sprawling on the bed to the sound of the bay lapping the rip rap down below our patio.
This was after they took turns leaping up and down off the patio railing, which about gave poor P a heart attack.
Last night we had supper at Bayou Joe's (Peg can never remember its actual name, and always calls it "Massalina Joe's"), a feast of fried oysters and fish with a side of fried green beans and a pile of piping hot fries. I took an extra Prilosec before sitting down to gorge, which made the rest of the evening bearable. Sitting out there on the porch on Massalina Bayou, looking at the lights on the water and smelling the breeze off the Gulf, we remembered why we love it here, despite all the other stuff.
Time for that deposition. A week of conflict begins.
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