Heya Mom! It is insane how long it takes to take 6.5 tons of stuff and stuff them into a bag, move it three thousand miles and then distribute the tonnage through a 3,000 square-foot antebellum house. I am still scrapping and tapping and hauling and moving things around. Today we had a bamboo expert come by to size up our bamboo grove which is overgrown and thick with deadwood and some thirty feet high. I learned more about bamboo than I though could be possibly known.

So many subjects are like that--you skate around the outside of them thinking you know something or other and then someone comes along and starts filling in the details, and before you know it you are overwhelmed with information, very little of which is useable.

Anyway we are just another week away from having an operational house with AV wiring put right, bamboo cut back, paintings hung, cars registered and licenses re-generated. By the end of February we will be wholly operational, I expect, and by the end of March I plan to be made whole on the house-sale thing and get that all set back up right. Jaysus Christ, this has NOT been a vacation, but the town is loverly and the beer and friendship andf good neighbor-ness beyond compare.

So gawd bless our little hearts, and we will keep on trucking hoping to get where we are going. Right now I am bone-sore, back-broke, muscle-mangled and work-weary, but tomorrow is another day!

A