It was nice to see the girl from that record store in town get national recognition.

Q. What song does Eric have in his head? A. The Chicken Dance.

It has rained every day for the last two weeks. It’s been very welcome, of course, as our water table is woefully under where we should be. I looked at the Weather Channel’s outlook for the region, and saw that they’ve just given up trying to predict it. Every day for the next two weeks lists “Scattered Thunderstorms”. I used to think the weather channel was pretty neat. Then I realized that their predictive abilities fall to nearly zero when looking further out than, say, half an hour. Generally, they’re pretty good at stating the current conditions, though even that’s been spotty lately.

I am so very glad I refinanced my student loans through the US Department of Education a couple years back. For a limited time, Congress allowed older loans to be refinanced through the new rules and I made out like a bandit, compared to what I had been paying the New Mexico Student Loan office. And now, my variable rate loan is falling to the lowest rate ever, saving me another few hundred dollars. If only they’d finance that property I looked at…

Chris and I looked at the most wonderful piece of land late last week. If I were to compile a list of everything I’d like in a piece of land, this particular piece had the whole list crammed into 40+ acres. An old farmhouse. Barns. Pasture. Plenty of year-long running water. A small pond site. Old hardwoods. Rock formations. A border on a largish river, suitable for floating on. Cultivateable acres. Areas for livestock. Fencing. Room to build more. Off the highway. Little road frontage. But at least three times outside my price range. (The whole notion that I even have a price range amazes me.) If it were selling for what the tax assessor valued it as, just a few months ago, it’d be neatly at my price limit. If it weren’t being sold by a man who bought it just last year for six times his paying price, it’d be doable. I imagine he’ll find a well-off Atlantan who wants a country retreat to buy it, though, and he’ll get his huge profit. Until then, though, I’m working on a miracle. I did buy a lottery ticket when I last got gas, but that didn’t do the trick. Here’s the land, on a 1970s topo map and a 1996 aerial photograph, with the lot lines hand drawn in courtesy of equill. If you can arrange $220,000 and want to sponsor my organic vegetable and dairy farm, let me know. Athens is a heck of a market for that sort of thing. We could even work out an arrangement where you could have access to the woods and river any time. And the thing is, the current owner doesn’t even need the money. He’s just trying to get it because he can. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course.

Aerial photographs of my house, circa 1996.

This’ll likely be my last Kaycee link: A Beautiful Life, an Early Death, a Fraud Exposed, a story in the New York Times. And I’ll be posting again soon. I’ve been mighty busy, making what my boss calls “Batman’s computer” for our customers as well as laboring in the garden. An earthen oven is in the works… pictures to follow.

Am I patient? Yes. But not nearly patient enough. Fellowship of the Ring trailer is here. The movie’s out in December. Followed by the second the next December. Followed by the third the December after that.

As complete a summary of the whole Kaycee mess as you’ll find, from the man closest to it all.

If you read Kaycee’s last day, you might also want to read a real-life account of a young girl’s last moments. Sometimes, death is not always the worst option.