Livin' on the run down South

Whew. Today has been crazy-busy.

Started with bus visitation, then came back to the church to change the sign for tomorrow's guest speaker. I forgot to bring my cell phone with me, which is apparently good, for it would surely have been ringing constantly on bus visitation.

A sort of distant cousin, by whom I really found out about Bible Baptist Church, pastors a small, but growing, church nearby (Victory Baptist in Holly Ridge). He has bronchitis and needed someone to come preach for him tomorrow morning. I also received a call reminding me that I was supposed to go visit some folk with a church member this afternoon.

So I dashed home after bus visitation and changing the sign, made a quick call about a situation at a writer's workshop I'm involved in, ate a quick lunch, and hauled my wife and daughter out to Moores Creek National Battlefield. They are doing their annual battle re-enactment stuff out there this weekend (neat battle, if you're into that sort of thing), and I had to take pics for the paper.

We weren't there long enough to get it all (I'll try to post some pics later), but home we had to dash, so I could head out to this other family's house. I got there with the other gentleman from the church, and they weren't home, so we decided to take a turn around the neighborhood and come back. We stopped at a church lady's house nearby (her husband passed away recently), and ended up staying there for nearly an hour.

When we went back to the folks' home, they were there, so we spent probably an hour talking to them. Then back home we dashed, where I met up with my wife and daughter again. Somewhere in here, I found out that I am needed tomorrow night out at Victory Baptist as well (not a big problem; if he's going to be sick and need help, he picked a great day for it, with this guest speaker covering both of my normal speaking slots at Bible Baptist).

My wife has been embroiled in a vicious battle with the family finances all day (when she wasn't on the national battlefield taking pictures), so I took her out to a local restaurant we haven't visited before.

And we discovered that we really are down South. With a very deliberate capital S. Not only were the french fries (of course), hushpuppies, mushrooms, shrimp, and fish fried -- we even got fried cheesecake. The only thing in the whole meal that wasn't fried was the cole slaw (ironically, I suppose, pretty much the only thing on my plate I didn't eat). I'll be tempted to check the menu next week to see if they've got that figured out too. By the way, the fried cheesecake was second only to the fried catfish -- both were terrific. I love living in the South.