Thursday, August 18, 2022

Good morning! We are 10 miles from the historic district, and 2 miles from the beach. Don't think I don't need to worry much about sunscreen, as there is rain forecast everyday. It is keeping the heat down :)

Yesterday we went on a history tour and a harbor tour. Today we are touring a plantation. It is very very important to me that if we are touring a plantation that it present the issue of slavery factually. This place had that reputation.

Off we go!

Good Morning Indeed!

Except its nearly 1 pm here. My main achievements for the day are drinking coffee, having avocado toast, getting dressed, and losing several on line scrabble games.

DH is engaged in WW III with the phone company. They messed up the phone of his 80 year old friend who is computer impaired and DH has taken it upon himself to deal with it. Its like a comedy routine of fighting with the phone trees and trying to get a live agent. Friends phone has been cut off and all the service stuff demands a number and then says "we don't service that number". It would be funny if DH wasn't so angry about it.

Meanwhile the neighbor is here fixing the fence so I am waiting around to pay her. Doing laundry and such.

DD good on you for selecting a historically correct plantation to tour. It would be really interesting to see one but equally important that the depiction of slave life is accurate. I watched a news interview recently about how some state has all this junk in textbooks reporting that a high percentage of captured slaves were sent to south america and implying that the USA was therefore not that bad. Jeepers.

Meanwhile must come up with dinner plans. There is shrimp in the freezer I keep forgetting about. Maybe tonight.

Puppy reunion on Saturday. Three of the five. Should be a hoot.

Cheers all.

diane s

I feel for DH. Dealing with any of the phone/TV/Internet providers (and others to be honest) is SO frustrating these days!

I hope the fence repairs take care of the escape artist issues.

I think we posted at the same time this morning (time stamp was 7:20 pacific time). This is what I wrote then:

Late post (for me). It is 10:15 and we are leaving Saratoga Springs for Lake George shortly. Kind of mixed sun, clouds, and showers today like yesterday but it didn't really "dampen" our time at the track. A fun day but I need to refine my betting strategy, LOL. Losing $6 just doesn't seem acceptable.

Have a thriving Thursday!

ETA at 4:15 pm: Lake George is so beautiful. A fair number of kitschy arcades and shops, but lots of nice places too. We had a great boat ride and then went to this gorgeous inn (https://www.theinnaterlowest.com/). Our room (Horicon Suite) was late being ready but they led us to a deck overlooking the lake and brought us two very nice glasses of wine while we waited. We even have a labeled parking spot. It feels like a mini-honeymoon. I could get spoiled!

I never stopped long enough in Charleston to tour a plantation (just stopped passing through on the way to Florida) - I should have. It will be interesting to hear about your experiences.

So much adulting today... I'm spent. And I know I'm nice on the phone, but sometimes the person I'm talking to takes that as an invitation to push things too far with the chumminess. One of the insurance guys was yucking it up and telling me stories I wasn't interested in and then would apologize saying he gets longwinded and then would do it again. Exhausting. Today was my financial advisor friend's assistant who was acting put out that I didn't recognize his voice when he called. After talking with him once for 5 minutes almost a week ago. Then he decides he's going to call me my nickname plus my middle name so I'll always know it's him. Ugh. I don't want to spend this much time on this crap! I hate doing this stuff, don't make it drag out longer with discussions about why you think my name is pronounced wrong based on the spelling!!! We are not friends! Rant over...

Last night I got an email from the owner of this house saying that if I wanted to buy it they would sell it to me and we would both save money not using real estate agents. Ugh. I don't like your house, lady! (Apparently I still have some rants in me) It's fine as a stop gap, but it needs a ton of revamping... But I think I'll write back and say if she wants to sell it to someone else, don't feel like you need to wait until the end of my lease (which would be great).

I think that's all that's running around my brain today. I think with all of this Korean show I've been watching, I should be able to recognize a word of it by now. But I can't even pick out their names audibly while reading the subtitles. I have yet to hear anything that sounds remotely like "Woo Young-Woo" every time her name is said. Such a cute show though.

Enjoy your days everyone!

Our tour was interesting. The Plantation we visited, Boone Plantation made bricks, (as well as grew cotton etc) Because they had the supplies, irregular bricks that couldn't be sold were used to build some of the slave houses. This would be very unusual, most slave homes were wood, and because of this, they haven't survived, but these brick ones did. So this organization used them to discuss the life's of the enslaved people who lived there, and what happened to them after emancipation. An example of something I learned: Ledgers showed that food allocated to enslaved people did not have enough calories to support the labor they were doing. There are animal bones buried in the slave quarters. What they told us was slaves would hunt and fish to supplement their diet, but they had to hide it because they weren't allowed to hunt etc. Me thinking, you are made to work relentlessly, underfed, you procure other food so you can continue to work, but you could be punished for doing it? Why? Because in the enslaver's viewpoint, it was better to keep enslaved people on the edge of being able to able to work, but not strong enough to fight back or run away. Another way of trying to break people's spirit.

Another thing I learned, if a plantation was close to a city, the family lived there, not at the plantation. In the case of this one, there was a nice farm house for the overseer, but it wasn't Tara. When someone bought it in 1935, they dismantled the nice farmhouse (used parts of it) and built what looks like an Antebellum plantation house, and furnished it with antiques. Plantations in the style we are familiar with with the huge house etc. were the ones far from any city. Kind of makes sense, the plantation is kind of like if you owned a factory, you wouldn't live there if you had the choice to live in a city like Charleston.

I addition to things like this, we learned about petticoat mirrors and pecan trees, and that Charleston bricks have a distinct color because they are made of yellow clay, not red clay, and people had to stay after the Civil War because they had no money or place to go, and they were paid with plantation script they used to buy things from the company store ( St. Peter don't you call me, cause I can't go, I owe my soul to the company store), and there aren't a lot of mosquitos in the area because most of the creeks and rivers are tidal rivers, and mosquitos don't breed in brackish (salt) water. And lots more. :)

Very interesting and educational. I would tour there if I go through Charleston again.