Tales from FAR Manor

Gardening in Georgia is always a crapshoot. One can  usually  deploy plants that don’t handle frost well once mid-April rolls around… but no...

Mason was out of school, this last week, and I’ve decided to try taking days off when he’s off—just in case we get the chance to do somethin...

In the brief two years I was on my own, I concluded 15 changes of clothes was the ideal number. It let me do laundry every two weeks, with o...

With a new car in the garage—a 2019 Kia Soul EX—I now have that critical extra seat to take both Mason and Charlie places. I still have the ...

I had Charlie out in the gazebo Sunday evening, because he likes to be outside and I wanted him to see the low beach chair I found in the ga...

Most of Mason’s soccer games are at the local park, but each season they have two or three out of town matches. Saturday’s game was up in To...

Mason got a mountain bike a while back, and lately he’s wanted to… well, go mountain biking. Imagine. Raleigh M-60… 1998? Well, gee. I...

Spring #3 has been pretty wet so far. All the rain melted the snow in a hurry, and it’s supposed to be sunny and 70°F Sunday and Monday. If ...

We only had three mini-winters on Planet Georgia this year, although they were pretty harsh. In mid-spring, we get a cold snap they like t...

Winter #3 brought snow and a little ice to FAR Manor, and a recurrence of the winter congestion that lingers for weeks. About the time the s...

Thanks to the wonderful collection of wisdom that is the Internet, I now know what a couple of our mystery plants are. Call it “Carolina...

Long November hung on as long as it possibly could, and then some. But the march of seasons persists, and the cold and cool days have become...

Once more unto the breach, my friends, once more — Shakespeare, Henry V Shooting straight up… and it’s shot, all right! I always th...

To misquote Monty Python: “And fall gave winter a miss and went straight on to spring.” If you don’t count what was essentially two days of ...

I took Mason out for a little walk this afternoon and shot up a few things I’ve been meaning to shoot. But first, the weekly shout to the ne...

No way I’d mistake it for the Fourth of July, but it was an awesome day for February. That’s a little ironic, since the upcoming episode of ...

If a picture’s worth a thousand words, this would be a looooong blog post. We keep getting cool snaps, and I keep thinking “this one must b...

Wow, the week’s already gone by? I'm running on battery power, writing through a thunderstorm. Funny how I was thinking earlier this wee...

Just a few of the things, normal and not-so-normal, going on around the manor this week… The dogwoods shook off their yellow early in the we...

Last Sunday was Easter, and that’s the day when the kids get christened. Mason was right up there to get his head wet and he didn’t mind the...