http://ronaldtanner.com/blog about DIY, old houses, writing, publishing, cats and dogs and city life Fri, 18 May 2012 22:50:26 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en In Birmingham, AL, yesterday I ate two pit-cooked pork barbecue sandwiches from Carlilse's and nearly passed out from the goodness. If you've never had Southern BBQ, you are missing something special. Right now, I'm curbside at a city park in Tuscaloosa. Cleo is sprawled in the grass and I'm trying ... http://ronaldtanner.com/blog/2012/05/deep-south-update-the-animal-house-book-tour/ I could have used another week to get ready for my 66-city book tour in my custom camper van. But, most likely, I would have said this no matter how much time I'd had to prepare. As it was, I got on the road after only a few hours' sleep. ... http://ronaldtanner.com/blog/2012/05/how-i-blew-up-the-water-tank-in-my-camper-van/ For two weeks I've been getting emails from a guy named Bob Chen in China. Bob works in the Asian Domain registration department, located in 8/F XiYu building No.52 JinDun Road,QingYang District,Chengdu City, China. In his first email, he wanted to know if I had authorized the "Roris Industrial Co. ... http://ronaldtanner.com/blog/2012/04/the-china-scam/ My photographer friend Vinny brought his Marathon cab over today. I've always liked the Marathon. It's a tank of a vehicle, the boxiest, most spacious car you'll ever find. It has big bench seats and enough leg room to accommodate a Great Dane. The dash is metal, of course, and ... http://ronaldtanner.com/blog/2012/04/vinnys-marathon-cab/ I solved a musical mystery today. The mystery was this: every time I visited a certain bathroom at my place of work, I would leave humming Black Cow by Steely Dan. About the third time it happened, I stopped dead in my tracks and said, What the hell? If it ... http://ronaldtanner.com/blog/2012/03/the-music-in-my-head/ It's a good word. By "good," I mean a word that does the work it's made for. If you believe in progress, you should conclude that f**k -- the expletive -- is the product of arduous field-testing and development. Centuries of testing. No other English word comes close to ... http://ronaldtanner.com/blog/2012/03/in-defense-of-fk/ I'm on the road this week, promoting From Animal House to Our House: A Love Story in North Carolina, my home state. But the camper van is not ready. It's so not ready that pots and pans are flying around in the back, cabinet doors are swinging open, latches are ... http://ronaldtanner.com/blog/2012/03/im-on-the-road-and-the-vans-not-ready/ In writing the story of how Jill and I bought a wrecked frat house and tried to bring it back to its original Victorian splendor and keep our then-early love alive at the same, I had a hell of a hard time. That book, From Animal House to Our House: ... http://ronaldtanner.com/blog/2012/02/why-this-love-story-was-so-hard-to-write/ The last time I had a problem with my web host, my blog had disappeared. Completely disappeared. That's 160+ entires that cover my weekly blogging for the last four years. Was I freaking out? Yes, I was freaking out. When I called tech support, I found myself talking to somebody ... http://ronaldtanner.com/blog/2012/02/apologies-to-my-web-host-and-its-eastern-european-tech-team/ I received another speeding ticket yesterday -- my third this month. These are tickets issued by the city's new robo speed-trap cameras, strategically placed along roads you'd never think would have speed traps. The offending speeds are 38 MPH in a 20 MPH zone or 41 in a 30 MPH ... http://ronaldtanner.com/blog/2012/01/speeding-tickets-the-quality-of-our-daily-life/