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.

I was had. There’s no other way to say it. For over a year, I was taken in. I tend to be pretty good about spotting things like this. It’s hard for someone to lie to me for any length of time, because I can remember the smallest details that other people forget. When these small details conflict, I see it. I can also spot plot holes in movies and stories pretty well. I have a knack for sensing surprise plot twists before they happen (This has ruined many a good movie for me, especially when I predict the surprise ending from the trailers, like Sixth Sense. The only movie I recall fooling me, and it was so good it fooled me twice, was Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.). Still, this time I fell. But I wasn’t the only one. I was fooled reading the journal and exchanging email. Others were fooled over the telephone and the postal mail as well. It came to light over the weekend, while I was thankfully away from the internet, that Kaycee Nicole, the young woman I grieved over last week, never existed. The person who’s journal I read, who replied to my email, who talked to others over the phone and exchanged handwritten notes and gifts with them was a construct. I was mighty surprised to see what had been uncovered by my fellow members over at Metafilter, but I wasn’t shocked. (For a summary of events, visit here.) Juswt Sunday, I was in the garden weeding, when the Carpenter’s song from Kaycee’s final entry popped into my head. That got me to thinking about how perfect that entry and the ones leading up to it were. How perfectly scripted. Of course, I didn’t think it was because they actually were, but maybe because she was preparing hereself as well as us for her departure. Or, I thought, maybe they were pre-written, and her mother (who was a vital part of Kaycee’s journal and who had her own adjunct journal) fed them to us as Kaycee wished. Nope. Kaycee was just her mother Debbie’s brainchild. Every word, every image, every object, and maybe every voice came from Debbie. So, I’m left with two possible reactions. I could become ever more cynical and cautious, and check out everyone’s story in depth before I interact with anyone. That’d keep me safe for getting needlessly emotionally attached again. Or I could consider the emotions I’ve felt and the energy I’ve spent keeping up with her to be my latest payment of an optimism tax and move on, knowing it could happen again. I’ll take the latter.