40 Acres and a Mule

This afternoon I will be cutting out of work early to dive the Shark River Inlet on the Jersey Shore. Ryan has set a meeting at the Cheesequake rest-stop on the Garden State Parkway at 5:30pm, too early in my opinion. The dive itself is only 18-24 feet deep and it is in a channel with quite a bit of boat traffic. Last year the dive was my first ever outside the quarry and it will be a good opportunity to get into some salt water. It is always a little strange to be at the shore during the work-week but I guess it beats watching tv.

Speaking of not watching television, I have been exploring the possibility of homesteading in either Pennsylvania, Maine or the Finger Lakes region of New York. The final location will depend on the job market of course but we are shooting for a target date of next October when I’ll be able to obtain my license to practice by waiving in on motion. In order to prepare for the rigors of country living I have been researching the art of making cheese and wine and reading about various utopian socialist communities from the 1800s. Books written about the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s have provided a few hours of amusing reading; most hyper-educated city kids who bought their 40 acres and a mulecame back from the woods after a few years when they realized how difficult it is to make a living from black land dirt. Land is much more expensive these days, now that the entire country is being inexorably turned into a collection of sub-divisions and malls. For very cheap land one has to go to the smallest corners of Maine and there aren’t too many opportunities to practice law up there. We’re going to head down to the southern Pennsylvania area this week-end to gauge the real estate market near York. That way we’d be close to Becky’s parents for child-care and within commuting distance of Harrisburg yet we would still be in farm country.