November is National Novel Writer's Month. November is also my wife's birthday, and she celebrates it by celebrating the entire month. For November 2015 that meant doing anything she liked from binge-watching early seasons of America's Next Top Model to trying out new restaurants to watching the final installment of Mockingjay (she's been waiting for a year) to reading Rick Riordan's Kane Chronicles to riding her eliptical while watching The Office (Andy Bernard is a mook) to

A few years ago, I wrote a few blogposts which has turned into a series of articles I've called My Year of Living Confederately. It was inspired by the almost 90-degree vertical learning curve I experienced when I decided to leave Suburbia for the more challenging lifestyle of the rural South. Even though we're surrounded by 800+ acres, we're only two miles from town. We landed in an 1847 antebellum that has several names: The James Davis Place, the Beal House, and (the one w