Goin' Mobile-A Dance Gypsy's tour of the country

   Have spent several days recently doing battle with the trees here at my friends place. I think the trees are winning! I've spent several days pruning up one apple tree that hadn't been touched in years. It was so overgrown that there was no room left for any actual apples.  After several days of whacking off limbs, it looks like some kind of weird, full sized bonsai experiment gone bad. Still a bunch of other trees that need to be trimmed up, but they will have to wait until a few more critical things are finished up.

   Along that more important category was helping to fell a couple trees and cut them up for firewood. Plenty of dead trees just around the house and barns so far, but many of them are to far down the hill to really want to go after them, especially after I discovered that an 8' long, 8" diameter piece of white oak weighs a whole lot more than an equally sized piece of aspen does. It was pretty much all I could do just to pick it up, let alone climb back up the hill with it. Either that or I'm just getting old....

On the other hand; I had two nice meals out two days ago with friends. Lunch was at a local cafe in Riner, that specialized in buffalo. I had lunch there with my friend Jean, where a mushroom-buffalo burger was on the menu. Will have to go back to that place in the near future though, her buffalo quesadilla looked wonderful. After lunch she took me out to show me the house she and her husband had built. What an amazing piece of workmanship. Built in a spiral, it was designed to mimic a 'Nautilus' in shape, an ocean going arthropod that has a shell that follows the shape and design of a 'Fibonacci Curve'. I hope to have a photo or two of it up in the next week or so. It is truly a masterpiece in wood.

   That night Rima and I went over to Natasha's where it was 'adult' mac and cheese for me while she had a buffalo burger with fried green tomatoes of her own. Yum!

    Yesterday was a day to work on mowers, trimmers and all other manner of outdoor cutting implements of destruction. All eventually worked, but in the end it took an old fashioned, human powered weed whacker, and a couple of hours of hot sweaty work to knock down about an acre's worth of head high weeds. Hopefully, in a day or two, I'll be able to go back in and mow over that whole area and chop everything up. Will have to see what, if anything, stands back up first though.

   Also took down a couple more trees and got some of them cut up. Still need to go back and clean up some of the slash and finish cutting up and moving some of the larger pieces, but that is for a later time. After all that hot and sweaty 'work' I was just to tired to think about cooking for an hour or so before eating, so Rima and I headed back to Natasha's for 'Soul Food' night. For me it was this amazingly good fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy and home cooked greens while Rima had the house meat loaf with black eyed peas and greens also.

    Finally, last night was kick-back night with a movie, The River Why, shots of lemoncello and pieces of macadamia nut and white chocolate cookie dough. Life is really pretty good at the moment, even though my whole body aches from to much work. :)

Colonial Williamsburg Virginia - Sept 2013

At the opening to the park is what they call a 'standard plantation' from the era. For me one of the things I always like at places like this are all of the different fences that were used.

The salt-smoke house that would of been used on a common plantation.

Inside the separate kitchen building. Kitchens during this period, especially in the south, would be separate buildings in order to keep the heat out of the main living quarters. It also kept the whole house from burning down if the kitchen happened to catch fire.

One of the tobacco drying barns.

Inside the barn were racks to hang the leaves of the tobacco crop to dry. The interior posts had multiple rows of mortises to hold additional cross poles for holding more tobacco leaves.

One of several oxen yokes that are still being used here at Williamsburg.

A 'pit saw'. Used to saw 'squared up' logs into boards. It my seem like it would be a nightmare to be the bottom person because of all of the saw dust that would fall on you, but after watching for a bit, it soon became apparent that the top guy had the harder job in that he had to 'pull up' the saw after each stroke, where as the bottom guy gets to pull down on the saw. Also a hot, difficult job, but maybe a bit easier.

One of several oxen used on the plantation.

A team of oxen being used to plow one of the fields on the plantation.

The slave quarters. A nice, neat looking little building until you realize that there might be as many as 15-20 people of all ages living in that one tiny, one room building.

Another interesting fence built out of bits and pieces of sticks and vines. It does a very good job of keeping critters out or in though. Inside was one of the house gardens.

My first introduction to the okra plant. I had actually seen the flower at Monticello last spring, but didn't have any pods on the plant to tell me what it was.