Moving North, to the South

I thought today would be the day I was finally free of my dad’s boat. Wrong! It’s Columbus Day. Bank employees are not working. The brokerage can’t have the money wired today. I don’t know if title can pass before the money moves, but the brokerage appears to think it can’t. So I’m on the hook for another 19 hours or so.

In the meantime, I have accomplished some stuff here on the farm. I did some more work on the stupendous live oak that fell on my chicken house, I got a safety chain reattached to the bush hog, I bush-hogged part of the pasture, and I threw a whole lot of wood on the burn pile.

I assume the purpose of safety chains is to keep the bush hog attached in case the three-point hitch fails. I removed one chain because I needed to attach a strap to the pin the chain attaches to. I was pulling a tree down. After I got it down, the chain wouldn’t attach. Suddenly it was shorter.

It turned out the chain had done something physically impossible. It’s too boring to describe, but a chain link moved through an opening it was too small to fit through. No idea how it happened. I adjusted it and got the chain attached.

I’m sick of the piles of dead limbs all over the farm, and I’m tired of their huge masses of brown leaves. I would guess I got a thousand pounds of this stuff onto the pile today. As I expected, the pile was still burning from yesterday, so once I got a couple of forkloads on it, it started flaming up.

In the past, I have been unwilling to put wood on a live fire, because I didn’t want to melt the tractor. What if it stalled by the pile? I’d be in trouble. Now I’ve decided I don’t care. I have to get rid of this wood, and the odds that the tractor will stall and be unwilling to start right when I’m next to the pile are very low.

Like the odds that a hurricane will hit Miami one month after you list a yacht for sale.

Anyway, things go much, much faster if you’re willing to shovel wood on a live fire. You can do three days’ worth of burning in an afternoon.

I’m not sure I’m mowing correctly. The bush hog does not give me nice short grass. It seems to knock the grass over and tear some of the top off of it. This is a lot better than nothing, but it’s not what I want. My pasture is full of bahia grass, which is very tough, and it doesn’t seem to want to yield to the bush hog. I have the RPM’s at the right level, and I lower the bush hog as much as I can. I don’t know what else to do.

I do not like Columbus Day, and it’s not for the usual reasons. It’s not because Columbus was a white man who wasn’t gay and had a holiday named after him. I hate Columbus Day because every year, people in Miami use it as an excuse to cruise around the bay, drunk, stoned, and completely naked, performing sex acts in public.

Miami now has two disgusting holidays. The other is Memorial Day Weekend, which is now part of Urban Beach Week. Sleazy rappers descend on South Beach and scare the crap out of the locals, and they don’t spend money. They bring their own weed and cheap liquor, they pack ten people to a hotel room, and they don’t go to expensive clubs and restaurants. They shoot at each other a lot, so it’s always a good week for the TV news people.

Wait! I’m not in Miami! I have to keep that in mind. I’m on my own farm, with tractors and a shooting berm.

Whew.

Urban Beach Week is funny to watch (if you don’t mind watching a city sicken and die) because it exposes liberal hypocrisy. South Beach is a gay stronghold, and gays take great pride in their far-left leanings. Gays love crowing about the way they support minorities. Now they are watching their Shangri-La disintegrate due to an influx of two-bit gangsters, most of whom are black. There’s a lot of pressure to “fix” South Beach and bring back the days when it was all gays and Europeans, but how are socialist gays supposed to discuss the problem without being PC’d to death? They can’t. Local bigwigs made a sneaky effort to bring in a big air show to break the minority Memorial Day monopoly, and people saw right through it. Amusing.

The weather here got cool, and I was pretty excited, but then it got hot again. By the end of next week, we should have a return to normal October weather. Even with the heat, the sun is milder here than in Miami, and it cools off at night. It will probably be 80 degrees at 10 p.m. in Miami tonight.

I may have to go back to Miami at the end of the week. I sincerely hope not, but I knew when I moved up here that I would have to return from time to time. Visiting briefly is a whole lot better than returning to Miami after visiting some other place. You know it’s not permanent. When you re-enter Miami after visiting…anywhere…it’s like being returned to prison after a month on the run.

There is something seriously wrong with people who like Miami.

I don’t understand people who don’t like Ocala. It’s quiet. The people are wonderful. You can have land. You can have a tractor and a big workshop. You can speak English and be understood. There is good barbecue everywhere.

Some people can’t entertain themselves. They have to be able to go to bars. As if bars were exciting.

I can shoot here. I can use tools. I can ride motorcycles. I can enjoy the outdoors. To me, that’s too much entertainment to deal with.

The other day I saw a pickup truck here with a four-foot-wide Confederate flag flying from a pole in the bed. I thought that was neat. Years ago, I got rid of the only two items I had that had Confederate flags on them, because I don’t want people to think I support the Confederacy’s position on slavery, but I hate the hysteria and self-righteousness currently surrounding the flag. People who want one should be able to fly it. They’re not thinking about slavery. They’re thinking about how much they enjoy being Southerners. If you flew that flag in Miami, you would stand a pretty good chance of being run off the road and beaten. It’s neat that you can have that flag here and not have people take it the wrong way.

Being a Southerner is pretty cool. You get to shoot. You get to have tractors, golf carts, four-wheelers, and ATV’s. You get to drive to the mailbox instead of walking because it’s more fun. You get to be nice to people instead of going through life generating aggression displays like an angry lizard defending its territory. It’s understandable that people would be happy they’re from the South.

This place is great. Miami is a stinking abscess. That about covers it.