Just a' good ol' boys...

Oh, and I'm feeling much better now. Biscuits consumed, porch rockers rocked, and much sleep was had. I recommend a rainy afternoon on a screened-in porch with a mountain view to anyone who is stressed. And thanks again for all your concern. ~J

Waylon didn't write that song, but he did sing it.

We had a minor scandal here in Effingham County not too long ago, involving some of our county's finest. Or maybe not so fine.

Seems a couple of our sheriff's deputies were bored with the graveyard shift one night back in January, and decided to liven things up by playing a prank on the Rincon Police Department. Too bad it cost them their jobs.

Deputy Brian Davis and Corporal Stacy Strickland are accused of making prank 911 calls from various pay phones around town, and then leaving the phones off the hook, resulting in Rincon cops driving all over the place to check out the calls. Not only that, but Cpl. Strickland is also accused of playing his cell phone ring tone through his cruiser loudspeakers while driving down Weisenbaker Road around 4 a.m. I have no idea what the ring tone was, but it might as well have been the Dukes of Hazzard theme song. There's more on the story here, from our local paper. So far, no charges have been filed, but each call could cost them about a thousand dollars.

I have to say, it's kind of reassuring that there's so little going on out here that law enforcement has the time to play like this. You know, no child abuse, no drug busts, no car wrecks , or anything. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. But then again, if the boys are bored, maybe they need something to keep them occupied on those long drives around the county. Kind of like me giving TFYO paper and crayons to keep her busy on long car trips. So here's a list of things those bored deputies can do.

1. Count pine trees. Effingham County still has a thriving lumber trade, and I'd say about half the county still has pine plantations. Each night, the guys can count the trees in their patrol area, log them, and do it again the next night to see if any have fallen.


2. Pull over any speeding ATV's. My neighbours seem to think it's okay to go cruisng through my unfenced back yard after nightfall, and I'm sure they're out driving on the streets as well. I don't know if there's a speed limit for ATV's (aka four-wheelers), but I'm sure we could work something out.


3. Log the number of blue vehicles they see each night. Then switch it to red the next week, and green the week after that. Have them sort the vehicles by make, model and year. Cross reference how many are pickup trucks.


4. Count the number of cars up on blocks in people's yards. Then compare it to the number of bass boats, also in people's front yards.


5. Clean pay phones in Rincon, and make sure each one of them are on the hook.

These are just for starters, of course, I'm sure y'all could come up with a few. Maybe we could send them on to Sheriff Jimmy McDuffie, just in case he needs help keeping his deputies occupied.

So let's go on with the shoooooow...

Just picture Ethel Merman singing that title, and you'll get the idea.

It seems I am awash in awards again. Both Jo Beaufoix and Rotten Correspondent have seen fit to give me awards.

I have to say, it would be nice to give them awards occasionally, and since we know all the same people, it also makes it tough to pass these awards along sometimes. But here we go!


From Jo, I got this:






And as she says on her blog, "Excellent, dude!" I'm not bodacious, my blog is. I'm going to put it on my resume. For those of you who have forgotten your 80's slang, Merriam-Webster has this to say:

Main entry: bodacious

Pronunciation: bO-'dA-sh&s
Function: adjective
Etymology: probably blend of bold and audacious
1 Southern & Midland : OUTRIGHT, UNMISTAKABLE
2 : REMARKABLE, NOTEWORTHY
3 : SEXY, VOLUPTUOUS - bo·da·cious·ly adverb



So, my blog is sexy, and I can live with that.

I'm giving it to (where's an embedded drum roll audio clip when you need one?):

Bellevelma at Running with Books. She's a runner and she likes books, too. She must be bodacious, and her blog surely is.

I've also decided to give one of these to Willowtree. Not because he needs the ego boost (he really doesn't), but because I'm on a quest to see how many of these things he can squeeze in his sidebar. He's got an interesting recipe for baked beans over there today.


Rotten Correspondent gave me this:




I'm calling it the Splat award, because that's what it looks like. But it's actually for blogging that "hits the mark".

I'm giving it to Dumdad at The Other Side of Paris. He's got a series going on his early days in Fleet Street, and I love reading those posts. That, and he's wonderfully funny and plays a mean game of ping-pong (table tennis, depending on where you're from). So, Dumdad, that one's for you.


Today, we are off to the child psychologist for testing, but I'm feeling much more relaxed about it now. Had a run in with the school psychologist last week, and we exchanged some words. The best part about her visit to the school, though, was that my child was a perfect angel the whole day. TFYO sat still for the entire forty-five minutes of circle time, raised her hands to answer questions, quietly helped her classmates complete their projects after finishing her own and played nicely on the playground with all of her peers. The only way the day could have been better is if she'd had a giant middle finger sticking out of her head and aimed at the school psychologist who is so hell bent on putting my child in a "special ed" class. I know that's petty, but she was really putting the pressure on my to let her do an evaluation. She was incredibly unhappy when I told her we were having an independent evaluation done. Both me and TFYO's teacher, Mrs. P, are on the same page with this. TFYO wold likely wither and die without being mainstreamed. Mrs. P doesn't like the school psychologist, either, which tells me something.

Morning has broken, like the first morning....

With much thanks to Cat Stevens (and the hymnal from which he lifted it) for the lyric, from the song of the same name.

Most people I know are not morning people. They're grumpy when they get up, they'd rather not watch the sun rise, and when the alarm goes off, the snooze button is probably the first thing they hit.

It's been years since I worked a morning drive radio show. It's tough. You get up incredibly early, and are a quarter through your working day by the time most people are getting in the shower. Ray gets up at three a.m., and I used to just roll over and go back to sleep. But the last few days, I've realized how much I miss being out and about early in the morning.

And I've also discovered there's nothing so pretty as a south Georgia morning. I've been trying to take pictures to capture it for you all, but none of the pictures seem to do it justice.

It takes about fifteen minutes to navigate our back roads to get TFYO to school, and another forty-five minutes after that to get from her school to where I work, so I've had plenty of time and miles of countryside to look around me the last few days.

The sky yesterday was a pinky-golden haze, the sun filtered through the morning mist that comes with living in a humid climate. Dew hung on every leaf, every roof, every rural mailbox we drove past on the way to school. The corn is pretty high here, about ready for harvest, or in some cases already taken, with just the stalks left behind. The mist was hanging low in the fields, and gave everything an absolute magical quality. I was amazed at how water droplets reflecting light could make even our old tin-roofed shacks look majestic as I drove past.

It was almost like looking through a pair of rose-tinted glasses wrought by Mother Nature.

I'll see if I can capture some of this on the digital camera for you, but so much of the picture is dependent on the shadows, I'm not sure it's going to work. I suppose you'll all just have to use your imaginations until I can get it right.

Get on Back to School

Lyric courtesy of Jimmy Buffet and Dan Fogelberg from Domino College

There are some things I love about living in a place like Effingham County. I love the small-town atmosphere. I love how my hair dresser knows a really good local place to get a sandwich, and how they know a really good local place to get mulch for my garden. Everyone knows everyone, and everyone looks out for everyone, in a very down home, "Hey, I brought y'all some fresh biscuits" manner.

There are also some things I don't like. The schools here are fabulous, which means everyone is moving to this area to take advantage of the cheap land and good schools (we're part of that group), but the schools aren't ready for it. Not by a long shot. So much so, that my daughter was on a waiting list three months ago for a slot in the state funded free public pre-kindergarten program, and was still number eleven on the list yesterday as school started.

To say I was in a panic would be putting it mildly.

Ray and I spent most of yesterday calling every state funded program we could find in the county, and everyone had waiting lists a mile long. I looked at churches, but most of the ones in the area that we could afford to pay for were way too conservative for us. But finally, some of those phone calls paid off.

Ray called a bunch of places listed in the local phone book. Most of the day-cares and private pre-kindergartens had been put out of work by the elementary schools getting into the pre-k business. One phone number led to a woman who used to work at a pre-school in Springfield, up the highway about ten miles or so from where we live. She just happened to have the number of a woman whose daughter was opening a brand new state funded pre-school in Old Guyton, not far from where we are. So we called the woman, who gave us her daughter's cell number, which went to voice mail, but had the number of her new pre-school listed. And we hit the jackpot. They had three slots left open.

The building isn't much to look at. It's an old county building across the street from the Guyton Volunteer Fire Department, and half a block up from the county sheriff's building in town. But the folks were nice, and the Four Year Old loved the classroom, even if they hadn't finished putting everything up yet.

And so now she has a place to belong. She's one of only six girls in two pre-kindergarten classes. Truthfully, she's probably not going to learn anything academic from her new school. She can already read, she can print simple sentences, she knows some addition and subtraction, and her multiplication tables. But she's going to learn about dealing with other kids, which makes me happy.

And all because a woman knew a woman who had a daughter with a business. I love Effingham County.

I Make My Livin' Off the Evenin' News...

Thank you, Don Henley for the lyric. I actually used to make my living off the morning news, but thankfully, only my husband does that now.

I've always believed you could learn a lot about a place by trolling through the local cemetery and reading the headstones about who was there, who they were married to or born of, sometimes what they died of, and the dates they lived and died. It's probably the archaeologist in me. I've also discovered that you can learn a lot about where you live simply by picking up one of those small, locally produced newspapers. I'm not talking about the big ones with multiple sections and ten quires of paper just for the coupon section. I mean, the little, bi fold papers that cover those great rural stories about tractor pulls, hog futures, and of course local community announcements.

We've got one of those, which comes as an insert in our big paper, The Savannah Morning News. We get to see it three times a week, Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Right now the big stories are school uniforms for Effingham County (reaction has been mixed, at best) and the fact that our Country Board of Elections was incapable of electing a fifth "at large" member themselves, and had to have a Superior Court Judge do it for them.

But for me, the best parts of the paper are the announcements of births, weddings, anniversaries and the obituaries. Like I said, you can learn a lot from an obit.

For example, I've learned that almost everyone who's died in Effingham County in the past few weeks has had a nickname, a nickname they were so associated with it had to be printed in their obituary. Names like "William 'Billy' Buer", or "George 'Bubba' Tattnal", or one of my favourites so far "Lloyd 'Peavine' Tankam".

I've also noticed a lot of folks here have been married a really long time. Each week there at least three announcements of folks who've been married longer than forty years. Usually, it's people celebrating their 50th or 60th anniversaries, which astounds me. Either we've got a heck of a lot of older people here, or no one ever gets divorced.

The other thing is that everyone who is anyone in this county is in the local Rotary Club. That "at-large" member of the Elections Board? Yep, he's a member of the local Rotary Club, and so was the judge who chose him. Even the local veterinarian is a member, and proudly says so on his website. I think there's got to be something to this whole Rotary Club thing.

People also seem to have a lot of goats for sale, but I don't know what to think about that.

So, I've decided on a campaign to improve myself so that I fit in a little better here.

First, I need a catchy nickname that can be printed in my obituary. Right now, I'm leaning towards "Dizzy", which seems to be pretty popular amongst the women here, but I'm open to suggestions if you have them. Second, I need to make sure I stay married for fifty years, which I think I've got covered. My husband may even go along with that plan, too. Thirdly, either me or my husband needs to join the local Rotary Club, but we need to be invited by the club to join. So, I think we need to make friends with the local veterinarian.

Lastly, I need to buy a goat, so I can sell a goat, which is a problem, as I have no fence, and no grass in my backyard at the moment. Hmmmm. Maybe I need to skip the goat.

Golf Cart Love

Which really is the title of an instrumental by Lyle Lovett, from the movie Dr. T and The Women. Cruddy movie, good soundtrack.

Anyway, golf carts. We don't have a lot of golf courses here in Effingham County. To be sure, there's tons of them around Savannah proper, but not many out here in the boondocks. But we do have a lot of golf carts. Everywhere I go, I see them parked in front of peoples houses, or see them trundling down winding drives, or cruising down the shoulder of our quaint country lanes. For the longest time I couldn't figure it out. We don't exactly live in a resort area. What the hell are all these people who live in trailers, and have giant stables for their horses, doing toodling around in golf carts?

The answer: getting their mail, and checking their fence lines.

Really, it's kind of brilliant, if you think about it. If you lived at the end of a half mile long drive way, you wouldn't want to walk that every day to get the post, either. It's also a great alternative to using an ATV or your lawn tractor to scope out a property that's bigger than a couple of acres. Most of the people that own them are older, or just don't like the idea of gassing up a vehicle for a quick trip to grab the mail, check on the livestock, or run over to the neighbouring farm to borrow some sorghum. After all, most of these little babies are battery powered, and you can just plug them in to recharge.

When we finally run out of oil, these folks may be the only people left with transportation. I foresee a future not unlike Mad Max, but instead of semi-trucks and motorcycles, rural people will be battling it out with tricked out golf carts instead. Can you imagine vicious golf cart gangs, roving the dilapidated country highways of south Georgia, hijacking generator power to charge their carts? The battle scenes could be spectacular.

Hmmm. Maybe it's time to start scoping out cart dealers now.