Before leaving for Germany, I had driven from Michigan back to my parents’ house on winter tires — I didn’t have a way to carry four more tires in my car at the time, and more important, I didn’t want to risk driving 1200 miles at the end of December on summer tires. But winter tires in Charleston? I put the quadruplets into bags and decided that I’d need to buy real bags for them “next” time.

A friend gave me a Unimog calendar as a going-away / “Xing has odd interests” gift. Conveniently, Miss January was a picture of a U300 clearing snow from the Großglockner Hochalpenstraße. Even the Austrian Alps weren’t going to make this easy for me.

Wandering around town, I stumbled repeatedly upon a curious, beautiful, earthen man-made object. I even saw mountaineers joggers on it sometimes. Though work made it impossible to see this spectacle at anything other than night, I made a mental note to summit it some free weekend.

After several weekends of trying to offset work-caused sleep deprivation, I made it out to the Lowcountry Oyster Roast where several million tourists and confused Charlestonians convene every January to drunkenly frustrate themselves by slicing their hands while attempting to eat slimy meats.

Oh — and when the website description for the event’s parking transportation says “tractor trailer,” it means quite literally a trailer pulled by a tractor. Not some benches pulled by an 18 wheeler.

But the event overall was pretty neat (I had never shucked oysters before) — and a confirmation that nearly everything delicious can be, or, well, is fried in the South.