Work at the place in Virginia has been at a standstill recently, in spite of rapid moves earlier.

The rain was the first delay, but the last two weekends I haven't even had a worthwhile excuse. The weather has been nice, nearly perfect for working outside.

However, the motivation has been somewhat lacking.

I am not really in a hurry, because getting in a hurry would mean admitting that winter weather is coming on soon. I don't want the cold and snowy times to be here yet.

I appreciate all of the seasons, but I don't like being trapped inside the house during those long drawn-out times when it is too cold or messy to do anything.

So I decided Friday night to go enjoy myself, to kind of camp out on my own land and just watch nothing happening quickly.

This past Saturday I woke up early, looking around outside for a shady spot to sit down and wait for the coffee water to heat.

The water was slow to heat up on the Coleman stove, but I had plenty of time. The night before some friends stopped by for a cookout and we had shish kabobs (I looked that one up in the dictionary) and some grilled chicken, vegetables cooked in tin foil and cole slaw.

After the meal, we had a nice fire and just sat around watching nothing happen quickly.

There isn't anything that I like much more than sitting around a camp fire and watching the embers and sparks rise into the night sky as the cicadas call out their relentless song. At least I think they are cicadas, perhaps they are some other night critter. I don't suppose it really matters, I still like to hear them.

As I was waiting for the coffee water, a large toad hopped by the area where the fire was. I suspect he was too fat to hop far or fast, because he stopped every little bit to take a break. I felt kind of like the toad myself, just stopping to take a break after walking only a few feet. My brain doesn't open for business until I have been up for at least 30 minutes. I just usually find a nice place to sit and wake up. The plastic chair I had perched myself in was still damp with morning dew because it was in the shade, but elsewhere the sun had dried the grass.

Usually when I camp out on the river I sleep in a tent, but I haven't done that this year. My tent died an untimely death a couple of years ago during a wind storm. It had apparently seen the last of its good days — it was about 10 years old. Besides, a tent is really just a canvas oven on a sunny morning. Maybe that's what the Indians used for an alarm clock, like time to wake up the buffaloes.

There is nothing like a cup of coffee in the morning, especially when you can sit outside and enjoy it as the sun rises higher in the sky and starts peering over the tree tops.

The flowers of summer are still doing well. The hydrangea has one huge blue flower mass on it. I bought it last year and planted it. It was covered with blooms until I got ahold of it. I forgot to trim it down properly until later in the spring, so it had to try and recover. At least the one flower on it is very pretty, with a bright blue hue. On the other side of my new ‘moat' is the Black Knight butterfly bush. When I say moat, I am speaking of the large ditch that will soon be home to my new water lines, if I ever start working again. As for the bush, it is also doing well but requires pruning weekly to keep the blooms heavy and the direction going the way I want.

After the first frost I usually trim it back to just the little wooden stalks. After spring breaks, it takes off and grows long green shoots covered with spear-point purple blooms. I really like the scent of it, kind of a lilac smell.

As I sat in my plastic chair, now dry thanks to my clothes, I looked around at all the work I should be doing and sort of gave it all a mental shrug. It will be there next week and the week after, I suppose. I had put in about 10 consecutive working weekends and it was time for a break. I guess I will hit it again soon and try to get the place ready for whatever it turns out to be. Maybe I will rent it out to some unsuspecting person. When I say unsuspecting, I am speaking of the conditions of the private road, on which it is located, during the winter months.

It isn't cleaned up by the state, but luckily one of the fellows who also lives on the road owns his own bulldozer. I have bulldozer envy every time I see it.

At any rate, he cleans the road when the snow gets deep, but it still remains impassable during snowy times to anything other than a four-wheel drive with good ground clearance.

I am still debating whether or not I will rent it, since it is like a little get-away place for me. It is nice to be able to go somewhere and just ‘be.' It's a place where I am not a newspaper editor, I am not a member of any society, not anything but myself. That's really nice sometimes. But I wonder, where do you go to get away if your getaway gets away?

Perhaps you just live with the economics of the whole thing and find a new place to start working on. It might be a good thing for me to do anyway, since I don't seem to be doing much to finish this one off. Then again, maybe that's the plan.

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