Hockey season starts tonight, and I’m ready. This year I’ve joined an on-line fantasy league along with a few other Metafilter readers. It looks like it’s going to be fun. I’ve never played in a fantasy league of any sort, unless you count the baseball computer games I used to play by myself, but the idea always intreagued me.

Over the weekend Chris and I put in an offer on a nice piece of property we’d been looking at. It was accepted. Assuming the bank gets things in gear soon, it’ll be ours by the end of the month. That’s a mighty big assumption, but I think everything will work out. Here’s the property on a 1970’s topo map, marked up thanks to equill. The red line is the property line – it’s not quite thirteen acres. It’s got 1000’ of river frontage on the Broad River, Georgia’s cleanest, most pristine river. Much of that frontage is beach-like. There’s a small pond, colored in blue. There’s a newish upper-high-end double-wide on a foundation at the top of the property, drawn in purple, and a concrete block shop near the river, also drawn in purple. The topo map shows it as wooded, but it’s mostly cleared pasture/scrub. It’ll need a serious bush hogging to get rid of the briars everywhere. Here’s an aerial photo, taken shortly before the new home was put in. More to come…

I mentioned Perceptions a while back. If you didn’t look then, look now, particularly at the Bush / bin Laden Instant Message transcript.

One month from today, I will be Mr. Eric Wagoner.

Someone got my dander up and so I had to write a letter to the editor, which was published today.

Since I am officially a farmer, I took some of my produce down to the county fair today for judging. I brought a quart of pickled beets and eggs and pints of pickled green beans, salsa verde, tomato sauce (made from the white Dr. Carolyn tomato), and apple butter. I’ll find out next weekend if my goods are ribbon-worthy. I think I’ll go to the fair next Saturday, wearin’ my overalls.

The kind folks at HomeExpo have compiled a gigantic list of plans and blueprints to build practically anything you might want to build, from greenhouses to solar cookers, walking sticks to chainmail armour. It’s do-it-yourself heaven.

So you’ve got a major appliance on the fritz. Squeaky dryer, for example, or leaky dish washer. Odds are you can fix it yourself if you only know what to fix. To educate yourself, make use of the American Appliance Company’s appliance diagnostoc charts. They’ve got charts available for most every brand of major appliance, complete with photographs. And should the repair require parts, they’ll be more than happy to sell you some.

A family of five cats plus two diagnosis of feline leukemia (despite vaccination) equals a very upset household. We’ve turned our house into two sealed quarantine chambers, with the two separate from the three. All want to go out and play like they used to, but they can’t for a long while. If ever. We’re still sorting things out and coming up with a plan.

What do I and the Thirty Years War have in common? As of today, we’ve both been around the same length of time. Though I doubt that, hundreds of years from now, people will write about me in the next twelve months as “The Thirty Years Eric.”