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HBTY, HBTY, HBDE, HBTY
There's no graceful way to say this, but Exurbitude is a year old today. While that's only a drop in the bucket that barely makes a flash in the pan, I know that, similar to adult sea turtles, for every blog you see there are 1,200 that didn't survive. I'm pleased to be one that made it safely to the sargassum.

In that analogy, dear readers, you are the sargassum.

Whither
As of January we'll have lived outside of New York for half as long as we lived inside of New York, and neither of us works there anymore, so it's a little hard to continue the pretense that this is a blog about leaving New York. The idea was that I felt so much an outsider at the auction house -- a non-wealthy, non-art-history-major who barely knew anyone famous -- that my evolving country life stood out in even starker contrast to the city lifestyle I practiced at work. This was exemplified one night last May when I got home from a Contemporary art auction attended by Jay-Z and Toby Maguire, my tie loosened and my suit jacket over one shoulder, having had some champagne and taken a hired car home, to find the front door covered an inch deep in a throbbing mass of insects that had been attracted to the porch light. I went around the back into the dark and used that door instead.

But that's behind me now. From here on out, it's all bugs.

Therefore, in the coming year, you might expect more stories about living in the region where we live, and how the economics of that lifestyle work out for a professional couple with two kids, and how bad air plays a role in that lifestyle, and how regional development and the expansion of our nearby airport and the scattered train service and increasingly congested roads and poor water planning and density planning affect that lifestyle. Since I've got a few readers in New York City (hi gang!), I'll always look for the amusing contrasts (none of you own these, do you?), and I'll never stop angling for my friends to move here and buy knee boots and keep us company (as long as you settle in established towns and don't build anything), so I'll continue to post pictures of how pretty it is.

Feed Me
I have one desire for this blog, and it is a lowly, base wish shared by 112 million of my pals, at last count: readership. (Quality? Usefulness? Beauty? Ha!) I would institute a badge program for the hundred or so people who check in here semi-regularly -- so that by recruiting readers you can become an Exurban Scout, Pioneer, Ranger, etc., and whoever gets me the largest number of readers could eventually have the URL and write the thing him or her self, sending me the royalty checks -- except that I can't afford badges and who would administer the program and there are no royalty checks. Why do I persist with the Google ads, way down there on the left side, you ask? Who knows? To date they've amassed something like nine dollars, but I don't see Penny One until I hit twenty. They're not elegant, more often than not they're off topic, and the likelihood that they'll reap riches one day is slim. But I could use twenty bucks.

So bring your friends! Put Exurbitude in your blogroll! Talk about my blog at cocktail parties! Use the little mail-to-a-friend link! And thanks for reading; I've had a good year writing for you and me both.

I Beg Your Indulgence: A Few Posts from Exurbitude's First Year That Deserve Greater Scrutiny

• I know I scoffed at the concept of usefulness before, but I do have some hope that the Ex-Urban Shopping List might actually prove useful to someone, somewhere. So lurkers, comment there! It'll be fun.
• My antlered shark painting hasn't had a nibble since I put it on eBay, where some Philistine asked "how much for just the frame," if you can believe that. I would HATE to throw that painting away. Please to buy it; we can talk price.
• If you know anyone who knows anyone who keeps goats, I'm curious about that.
• And if you're looking for the bio, here are some posts that'll give you the general idea. Going Small | Weight Watchers | Back on Track

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Impspulse Control

They say you should never go shopping when you're hungry, and I say you should never make large, hard-to-retract decisions during the holiday season. Or on a Sunday night. That's when the hunger is there, for me -- nothing but devils on my shoulders and an additional small one on my head having Cheetos, all of them suggesting new life paths, new detours, Big Changes. None of them looking at a spreadsheet with monthly expenses on it or this year's healthcare spending or the Ten Year Vision or any such thing.

No, they're more likely to be trading ideas about opening a brewery or visiting the Arctic or finishing a novel--and not just FINISHING a novel, but sitting down tomorrow and doing NOTHING ELSE until it's done. And I would believe them, it would be Art, it would be me following my passion, except that the devils only come visit when nothing else seems like a good idea. Where are they when I'm having my raisin bran before work, or while I'm paying the bills or getting the kids up in the morning? They're not around then, when convincing me would take effort, take commitment. They're the worst kind of foul-weather friends--the kind who goad you into breaking something the day after you get dumped and who drive away when the cops come, or who cheer you up with vodka but only till your money runs out.

So instead of listening to that kind of horseshit, I'm spending an hour a day before work assembling a glass sphere, copper tubing, electrodes, a bait pan and a bamboo cage hung from a silver wire to create a trap for the little fuckers. And every holiday season and every Sunday night I'm going to hang it near the cat box and put a few Deferred Hopes and Momentary Discomforts into the bait pan and wait. When one of the little red guys flits down onto that soggy mass, ZAP.

Once I've stunned a few and have the cage full, into the river they'll go, and I can go back to methodically finishing my writing projects.



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I Miss the Time to Read Magazines

Dropped my sister off at the ferry this morning so she could catch the train back to the city.



Enjoy that grinding sound!



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And the bells...

Are ringing out for Christmas Day. A celebrating atheist's best wishes of the season to you, friends.





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Finding Room

One enters our house into a 9' x 16' room we call the parlor, for it is where we keep the piano. We also keep the washer and dryer there, in a closet along one side. Because that's where they fit.

And although we both sort of sighed about that -- a house too small for a laundry room -- it is a very convenient location for laundry, not being stuck down in a cellar. The closet has a sliding door that hides the unsightliness, there are cabinets above, the machines are super-quiet, and you don't have to be sequestered to wash the clothes and can keep an eye on the kids, if they're about. So let's just shhh about the laundry, then. It's the parlor.

Like most rooms in our house, it does triple duty, so it's also the entry foyer, with a rack of coathooks artfully hidden behind the door and a shoe rack underneath it, piled with thousands of boots, work shoes, running shoes, hats and gloves. The hooks periodically swell with an unsightly mass of coats; this week we instituted the If It Wasn't Worn this Week, Put It in the Back Closet Rule. There are two armchairs just inside, which, although designed to accommodate the human form, are typically occupied by briefcases, backpacks, coats and coat parts, purses, tote bags full of necessaries, and books. No different from your house, of course.

This room's primary characteristic is that it is not a space for socialization. You don't Go there; you either pass through or you do laundry. We do keep the stickers in a secretary bookcase there, as well, so you might stop in when you require an adhesive-backed Parasaurolophus to shut someone up reward someone for good behavior. Otherwise, it's a way station, despite the chairs, despite our sense that space is at such a premium that we should make this room usable, desirable, worthy of attention.

To add injury to the insult of the room's uselessness, in the fall we had an Incident. Back then I crowed in this space about the installation of new baseboard moldings, an event that had been awaited since we moved in a year earlier and removed the old ones to allow the laying of new floors. And more recently I alluded to the fact that, during that process, a contractor drove two really thin nails directly into one of the radiator pipes in the wall. No problem, until you add cold weather, the heat goes on all night, the pipe expands, radiator water pours out into the wall and seeps into the (new) floors and subfloor and sheet rock and insulation and eventually pours down the outside of the foundation, which is when you notice it.

Part of the process that followed involved removal of the lower half of the sheetrock wall and insulation in the parlor. The wall behind the piano, half gone. The wall you face as you enter. And so it will remain until we get the scratch together to fix it up. (The contractor's insurance will pay, but we'll pay first. And yes, I could learn, but it would be my first one, and it would be ugly, and it would be prominent.) We're not in despair over this, precisely, but there it is, half a wall missing, just as you enter, sigh.

This weekend we invited some locals over for afternoon eggnog, so we snugged the piano up against that wall, performed precise calculations to dim and redirect the lights, put two large portraits of our kids on the extant half of the wall, and assumed that the room's standard traffic flow would prevail and that no one would see the exposed studs and electrical conduit as they headed for the dining room.

What was funny, though, was that on entering, people subconsciously hesitated a second to process the two portraits...they slowed, and lingered in there, and even stepped back into the parlor after settling their coat and getting a drink...a switch had flipped, and the room's energy was now curiously social. As the party wound down a couple of hours later, it gravitated toward the parlor. A couple of people sat in the chairs (relieved of their household burdens for the occasion). Our friend and his daughter began playing the piano. We went in there. After the last guests left, we sat down in the chairs ourselves, until two other neighbors came over with a bottle of wine, and our smaller party found itself seated entirely in the parlor for another hour.

Maybe it was the exposed wall letting something in. Maybe we subconsciously steered people into our unused social space. Who knows? Our parlor made music and laughter last night. Missing sheet rock or no, we keep growing into this little place, finding that its modest boundaries hold more than we noticed at first glance.

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The Delightful Tension Between Leisure and Productivity

Today will be my last day of work for a week; the first Christmas week I've taken off in years, if ever. I know the cycle, of course, from my other vacations: three days to get used to it, two days to enjoy it, three days to fret, a final day to panic, and then--whew!--you're back. Made it!

Of course, like a night when you turn in early so you can feel refreshed--but which messes with your circadian rhythms so that you wake for two hours in the middle of it--you come back more tired than before and a little lost, as though you never learned how to properly vacate, and now you'll have to wait till March or July for one more chance to get it right.

(That sentence reminds me of "As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly when they meet with an obstacle mount to the sky so up to the house-top the coursers they flew, with the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too." But who cares? 'Tis the season!)

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She'll Need to Buy Some Doats, Though

There's a kid in my town who wants a goat (Capra aegagrus hircus). (A kid who wants a goat -- you see how that works? Comedy, that's how. Anyway.) There's a prohibition on livestock in the village, but she's petitioned the board and they've patted her on the head and commended her enthusiasm and so far said no. But in their relative wisdom, they've asked her to return with more research on the impact of goats on neighbors (as she reported in her initial letter to the village board, a goat is fairly quiet, emitting only the occasional "maa") and have floated the idea of licensing goats in the village--which I for one think is a capital idea. Despite the possibility of attracting coyotes and bears and wolverines and chupacabras.

I've wanted a goat for centuries, of course, and planned to get one as soon as I could ditch the job and build a fence. (Oh, I've got the fence in mind, and it is a doozy, let me tell you. I would be proud of that fence. Not like the last one. Nosir.) And then, I guess, sell pictures of the goat on eBay for a living.

Goats eat poison ivy. That there is enough reason, I think, to have one.

Anyway, the family? Of the kid who wants the goat? We're the rubes who bought their scrappy little floodable house when we moved to town. Day One, I thought -- but didn't tell the openminded but practical woman who bought it with me -- oh, right by the shed is a perfect spot for a goat pen. A house like this attracts that kind, I guess. And that's all right with me.

All you goatherds--can you help this young girl get her goat? What can a goat's neighbors expect? Besides the dread undead vampiric beasts that will come to feed on its "maa"-emitting corpse? The comments await.

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