YAY we only have ONE HOUSE!


I'm still not over the excitement of selling the old house, at last! It's like being released from prison. It's like having sunshine after 8 months of rain. It's like losing those 10 vanity pounds. It's like the departure of the airplane when you've been sitting on the runway for 3 hours trying to go home. It's like chocolate cake after finishing your liver and brussels sprouts. I think I'm taller now...


Over the weekend we did a bunch of house maintenence stuff. We rebuilt the pantry so that it's usable, just in time for the big Thanksgiving shin-dig this week. We burned a bunch of branches and stumps in the firepit in the backyard, adding to our trailer-trash mystique that we've tried to establish in our new neighborhood. The guys next door came over and drank beer around the fire for awhile, and then we made apple cobbler over the coals in the dutch oven after dinner. Let me tell you, it does NOT taste the same to cook it in an oven. Next, we've got to find a big brisket and do 12-hour-firepit brisket. It doesn't need a knife, it doesn't even need a fork. It's "need no teef to eat my beef" brisket.


I guess soon it'll be time to start holiday shopping. As usual, I'm going to do as much of it online as possible. This year my friend Peace is doing a fundraiser for an organization that she heads up through web-shopping. You shop online through their site (www.hec.onecause.com) and a percentage of the revenue goes to them. Hey, if you want to shop online, and some of the places you'd shop are on the list, you could support HEC, too. They're a pretty small organization and they have a HEC-k (:-P) of a time raising funds for their outings, which require a lot of specialized equpiment such as wheelchair-accessible transportation, medical supplies, etc. There's a link to their homepage at the top left side of the onecause website.


Did you know that during mating season, bucks (as in male deer) get so crazed that they've been known to attack people? Have I ever mentioned that we live in deer-central? Manhattan-for-deer. And our deer are HUMONGOUS. They're taller than I am. I'm starting to get a little nervous jogging home from work around sunset. If I don't blog for a few weeks, just assume I've been gored by a crazed blood-thirsty 300 pound buck, and am lying in a ditch in the state park waiting to be found.


To prepare for this eventuality, I've been practicing kicking the heavy rubber kickboxing-dummy we have at the gym. If I set him to "short attacker" height, I can repeatedly kick his jaw with pretty good accuracy with my roundhouse. I figure that's about where a deer neck would be, so if I practice a lot, maybe I can go Mr Miyagi on the attacking deer. It's the antlers I've got to watch out for. So I'm also practicing side-kicks in the ribs-- which should be about rib-height for the deer, too.


I should write one of those worst-case-survival guides: Urban Trail-Running Survival Guide. I could discuss how to deal with attacks by snakes, deer, squirrels, beavers, hawks and equestrians. What to do when your shoestring gets caught in poison ivy. How to escape a flooding creekbed. The safest way to pass a steroid-raged high school track team.


The royalties will make me rich!