Sunday, October 16, 2011

Chicken Ranch progress report no. 3

Chicken Ranch brass token
What an astonishingly exhausting weekend. I had a wedding to shoot on Friday--a solo gig, rather than my usual role of backing up The Wife. And that meant much of Saturday was taken up with editing photos--that, and watching the Aggies whoop up on Baylor! We followed that up with another wedding today, one in which The Wife and I did the normal double-team operation. Add in there Monkey Girl's band performance at the halftime of Canyon's football game against Clemens (Canyon won!) and various other locations and events to shuttle the kids to and from... is it any wonder that I'm exhausted?

Considering that jam-packed schedule, it'd be expected that I didn't get any writing done this weekend. Heck, I certainly wouldn't expect me to get any done, that's for sure. But miracle of miracles, I did. Not a lot, granted, but several hundred words' worth that gets pretty much the last of the purely infodump material out of the way. And by "purely infodump" I mean stuff I've had to glean from books and elsewhere, as opposed to the first-hand, primary source background I've gathered on my own. Let me share with you the first direct quote to appear in the book:
"Most of the population was German or Czech," said Oliver Kitzman, a former District Attorney who served Fayette County. "If you look around the country, you’ll see when the Czechs came over they settled in the blackland prairies, and the Germans settled in the hills, the more rolling places. I don't know why that is, but it's true. They were a frugal, hard-working people."
Nothing Earth-shaking, I'll grant you that. But those Czechs and Germans are a big reason why the Chicken Ranch became the enduring institution that it did. And Kitzman has a lot of interesting things to say later on. Stay tuned.

Now Playing: Miles Davis Sketches of Spain
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