One Year in Paradise...

Exactly one year ago, my family and I woke up in our new house. We arrived on the 29th, a little after suppertime, and spent that first evening just trying to get our bearings and all the usual stuff that goes with a new house: What rooms do the kids get, where's the master bedroom, why did it look so much bigger in the pictures we saw, why does the floor slant so much that the rooms look like villain lair sets from the old Adam West Batman TV show...like I said, the usual.

We were on day one of our mandatory 14-day quarantine, where we were treated like lepers forced to stay outside the walls of civilization. Fortunately, with nineteen acres of space, we weren't cramped together or bored. In fact, those two weeks provided us with some great family bonding time. Thankfully, however, once the two weeks were up we went back to ignoring each other like normal families do.

I kid, I kid. But now that we've been here for a full year, and we actually own the property that we bought...let me explain.

See, Prince Edward Island has this rule, more like a law, that states that if you are not a resident of Prince Edward Island, you cannot purchase more than five acres of land per adult on the premises. Well, there were two adults in our family; Ashton was still only seventeen, and a minor, so he didn't count. Therefore, by PEI law, we were limited to a maximum purchase of ten acres. And the property we bought is nineteen acres.

Now, here's where things get interesting. We dealt with two realtors before buying. Neither of them ever mentioned that rule, not even when we were negotiating on the purchase price with the third realtor, who also didn't mention this rule. Neither did the bank while we negotiated our mortgage. Nor did the lawyer who was writing up the contract and settling the affairs. It wasn't until the second lawyer that someone pointed out that what we were doing was actually illegal in PEI.

By the time he told us this startling tidbit of information, we had already sold our own house and closed the deal. We had already packed up everything, and the giant shipping crate was on the truck heading east. We were going to be officially homeless in less than a week, and we were six days from setting our GPSes to Prince Edward Island and leaving Ontario behind for good. And now we weren't legally allowed to own the property we had bought.

Fortunately, we had an understanding seller, who just wanted to be rid of the property anyway. And since the realtors and the bank had already cleared the sale, there wasn't anything to be done but let us come. The property is actually split into two parts; one is the house itself, which only covers about fifteen or so feet away from the actual building. The rest of the property was technically separate, including the garages and barn. So, we worked it out with the former owner that we would buy the house, and 'lease' the rest of the property for a year for the princely sum of one dollar.

And now, that year is up. We (or rather, the bank) officially own this whole property. We've added the chicken coop, we've grown some veggies, we're raising rabbits...we're doing the farm thing. And it's great.

Seriously, anyone who's never been to PEI before...what are you waiting for? There's more to this place than Anne of Green Gables. That's one tiny corner of the island. And while it's a small island by provincial standards, it's got a lot to do. It's a three-hour drive from the northern tip to the eastern tip. Charlottetown is a small city that acts big, but it's smaller than Chatham. And yet, they pack a lot of stuff to do there. Summerside is beautiful; the harbor is just gorgeous at any time of day. There are beaches galore, nature trails and ATV runs, and the area outside the two cities can basically be described as 'split' between farmland and forest. You've got acres of trees next to acres of potatoes and barley. There's still a lot to explore and enjoy.

I said when we first moved here that I could spend the rest of my life on this island and never leave. That's partly because I'm cheap, and don't really want to shell out fifty bucks to cross the Confederation Bridge. But it's also because there's literally nowhere else I would rather be than right here, on this island, on this farm, with my family.

Next week, I plan to work with Ashton to dig up the gardens we're going to be preparing for next spring. There will be a bunch of garlic going in before the snow falls, of course, and in the spring we're going to get some serious planting done. We dabbled this year, and it was a lot of work; next year, we're getting serious.

So, come on out to this little island and see what I'm talking about. You won't regret it.

The Crazy Chicken-Lady meets the Psycho Puppy-Girl

Well, that was...an experience.

I love my dogs. I really do. Raven is our puppy-girl, our beautiful black lab-Chow who jumps on me when I come home from work and drops dead raccoons on our front porch. She's seven years old, and her bark has always been worse than her bite, at least until we moved here.

However, today was not a good day, not by any stretch of the imagination. I mean, sure, the first chunk of the day was fine, with me doing the work-thing and my wife at home doing the homeschooling thing. Nothing unusual at all.

When I got home, Dexter, the beagle, was all over me. But Raven didn't make an appearance right away. That in itself should have clued me in that not all was well. But she did come downstairs eventually, and got her lovin' and petting like she always does.

Honey-Bunny was cooking supper, Tanner was playing NHL21. After a while, my wife asked me to go up and check on the baby chicks, up in Tanner's room. No problem; I started up the stairs.

And then the theme from Psycho started playing in my head. I saw the first torn up chick-carcass at the top of the stairs.

And that was it for me; I was having Vietnam flashbacks, and I wasn't even born when that war started. I am not ashamed to say that I freaked out. I don't handle death well, even if it's natural death. Seeing a dead body just does not suit my mental well-being, especially one that died violently. I would make the world's worst homicide detective.

As I'm tearing back down the stairs, Raven runs down as well and jumps on the couch, licking her lips. This did not bode well.

My darling wife went up and surveyed the carnage. Out of forty baby chicks, eleven survived; one might not make it through the night. Raven killed nearly thirty of them, including nine of the ten egg-layers. We were angry enough to kill her ourselves.

Now, I suppose I can see things from her point of view; we were raising these birds to be slaughtered and eaten anyway, at least the meat-birds. She was just getting a head-start. But that excuse didn't fly with my wife.

So, my wife has decided to correct the problem by buying a hundred more meat-bird chicks. We'll be putting them in the garage, as we should have done in the first place. But it's starting to get cold, and they don't have their feathers yet. Well, three-quarters of them aren't going to get their feathers, now or ever.

Yeah, this was a rough day on the farm. Tanner's at least as traumatized as I am; I doubt he'll ever sleep in that room again. We're going to switch his bedroom to the spare room this week, and turn that one into a pantry/food storage room or something.

And no, I'm not posting any pictures of the slaughterhouse. In the first place, I didn't take any. In the second place, what kind of sick freak wants to see the torn-up carcasses of a bunch of baby chicks?

It's going to take a few days to get that image out of my head. Sometimes, having a near-photographic memory really sucks.

I Married a Crazy Chicken Lady

My wife is a wonderful woman. I love her beyond measure. But she's gone completely crazy since we moved here.

See, this spring we decided to get a few chickens. Not too many, just a few egg-layers that would provide us with some free eggs in exchange for being fed and kept in a decent coop. Well, the 'few' turned into twenty-one chickens: six roosters and fifteen hens. Well, that's not too bad. The coop gives them plenty of room, they've got some nice roosting spots, and they're laying eggs every day. Not all of them, but they are pretty regular.

Well, last week she decided that it was time to expand our chicken enterprise.

So, today she picked up thirty day-old chicks. These are meat birds; they'll be around for eight weeks, and then they're going to the processor and to the freezer. We'll probably sell some of them; they're supposed to be bigger birds, lots of meat. Sounds good to me. We might have gotten fifty due to the way the orders were processed at the seller, but we did end up with the thirty we had originally planned for.

She brought Garrett, our autistic youngest, with her. When he saw the little chicks, he asked the seller, "Where's their mother?" Which, for anyone who knows autistic children, is awesome. He kept asking the question, and he was pointing at another group of chicks. Ten of them. These ones were layers, not meat birds. And they were two dollars apiece. So, my wife came home with forty chicks.

Or so I thought.

While I was typing this post, I overheard her talking on the phone with her father. I didn't hear it all, but I did hear 'Glen doesn't know' and 'coop,' which set all kinds of alarms jangling. So, I ran downstairs and finally dragged it out of her.

She bought seven more laying hens. Hens, not chicks. There are now twenty-eight birds in the coop, and forty chicks in boxes. The boxes are in my son's bedroom to keep them warm for a couple of weeks. I've put two heat lamps in there for them as well. They're quite noisy; it's almost eleven o'clock, and they're still chirping away.

Well, we won't go hungry this winter.

Arabian Nights at the Gaming Table: Arabian Adventures

After the middling reaction (at best) to the Emirates of Ylaruam, TSR took their Arabian Nights interest into 2nd Edition AD&D with the first product of the Al-Qadim line, Arabian Adventures. The book makes it clear: Unlike GAZ2, this time we're going full-blown fantastic adventures, leaving the real-world comparisons to a minimum. Genies, sorcerers, desert scions with secret noble bloodlines...oh, yeah. Bring it all on. We even get the introductory scene from the Arabian Nights stories, with King Shahryar and Scheherazade and the start of the tales (not the Richard Burton version, of course; TSR was very much a PG company at this time).

After the introductory story, we are told that this book is about stories Scheherazade might have told if she'd gone on for another thousand nights. And there will be a fantastic setting filled with those magical wonders, with lots of fun stuff to explore, fight, and steal. Because the only difference between a hero and a grave-robber is whether or not the character is a PC, right?

They do pay some small homage to the historical Arabic Empire and culture, although there is no monotheistic religion here; even in a fantasy Arabia, TSR wasn't going to do 'Fantasy Islam,' especially in the wake of the first Gulf War (Arabian Adventures came out in 1992, one year after the first Iraq invasion). The Arabian Nights themselves, obviously, are a major influence, but not only in their literary form; Hollywood movies and North American perceptions of the Arabian Nights are also going to factor heavily. Sounds like a fun place to adventure to me.

So, Chapter 1 is an overview of Zakhara, the Land of Fate, where this fantasy Arabia is located. It's officially set in the Forgotten Realms (because everything had to be about the Realms in the early 1990s), but it doesn't have to be there. It's placed south of the main FR setting, Faerun, and west of the Kara-Tur, the land of the Oriental Adventures setting, so you can have a whole Marco Polo thing going on if you really want.

Needless to say, Zakhara's primary terrain feature is...desert. Two of them, in fact: The High Desert and the Haunted Lands. It's not all desert, of course; there's lush jungle to the northeast, and coastal lowlands where the cities are across the southern parts of the land. Lots of islands, too. Because you can't do Sinbad without lots of islands. Most of these islands are in the Crowded Sea, which is the sea to the south. On the north coast are the Corsair Domains, where lots of pirates hang out. Because if there aren't any pirates, what's the point of being on the water in the first place?

Arabian Adventures took a very different view on race in D&D; tolerance is the name of the game, and everyone in Zakhara gets along regardless of their race. So, elves and dwarves hang out at the bazaar, gnomes and half-orcs swap humorous stories at the coffee houses, and ogres give halflings piggyback rides on religious holidays. The reason for this is that everyone is so enlightened thanks to the amazing laws produced by the Loregiver (a woman who takes Mohammed's place in history), which convinced everyone to hold hands and sing Kumbaya across the desert. Okay, then. However, racial level limits and class restrictions still apply, so your half-orc isn't going to be a mighty sorcerer no matter how pious he might be. That wouldn't happen until 3rd edition eight years later.

Instead, culture in Zakhara is cut across two basic lines: the Al-Badia, or nomads, who hang out in the deserts, and the Al-Hadhar, who live in the cities and villages of the Land of Fate. The Al-Badia hold the city-dwellers in contempt as soft, money-grubbing effete snobs; the Al-Hadhar consider the nomads to be smelly, uncivilized, and poor. They don't go to war with each other; that would be uncivilized, after all. They just don't hang out at the pub on Sundays.

Honor gets a big writeup, because it's pretty darn important in this setting. I find it interesting that both the Oriental and Arabian Adventures books put an emphasis on honor, to the point where an OA character whose honor score drops below zero is literally removed from the game with their character sheet torn up. Meanwhile, the standard medieval fantasy setting that is generic D&D, complete with knights in shining armor, hardly ever mentions the word. Now, I realize that D&D's pulp roots focused more on barbarians and rugged individualist adventurers rather than Camelot and Roland, but still. Honor mattered in Europe, too.

Still, in today's touchy cultural setting, the honor section of AA isn't going to sit well with too many people; there's a section on honor killings and how people who dishonor their families will be killed by their own family members, and everyone's fine with it. Yeah, that hasn't aged very well.

Let's move on to family instead. Assuming your character doesn't give your family a reason to murder you in cold blood, family bonds are important. Families will consist of children, parents, grandparents, even great-grandparents if they're still around. Now, that could get awkward as you get back a few generations and end up with eight sets of great-grandparents, but things get simplified as married women end up as part of their husband's families. Cousins, uncles and aunts are still a thing, but families are maintained on the male side.

Next up is 'purity.' Coming from a traditional Catholic perspective, the Zakharan idea of purity doesn't quite square. Right in the first paragraph, polygamy is justified as the man being legally married to his entire harem. Divorce is totally fine, and nobody seems to care about it. I particularly like the last two sentences: "The fact that a sheikh or king is married to a particular woman for only few weeks or even days implies no impropriety for him or for her. Long or short, a marriage is sacred in the Land of Fate."

I'm not really sure that a Britney Spears-style marriage would count as 'sacred.' Maybe that's just me.

This is where the Islamic influence comes in; women don't touch other men in case they become 'violently tempted' by their charms. Even flirting is considered a sin. And yes, the burqa makes an appearance, although it isn't actually named. And women tend to spend a lot of time in the house, be it a tent or a palace, so as to avoid the risk of impurity. I doubt that too many gamers followed these rules. I certainly wouldn't want to play in a group that did.

Hospitality and piety are the next concepts; the Bond of Salt is discussed (as it was in GAZ2), wherein if you take salt in someone's home, you're considered a guest. And while the religion in question isn't Islam (being polytheistic), there is still a lot of the Islamic mindset going on (as we saw above). Mind you, the Arabian Nights stories were the same, so it's not surprising.

The last part of this chapter is a brief discussion of Fate (personified as a female being who is superior to the gods and goddesses of the realm) and the Loregiver, the woman who in ancient times gave the Law that got everyone to be nice to each other. it's been five centuries since the Laws were discovered, and they were just so darn awesome that everyone agreed to follow them.

So, that's the introduction and first chapter of the book. There's lots more to come, of course; it's a 160-page book, and we're just hitting page 20. This should keep me busy, assuming I remember to post more than once every other week.