Chapel Courtyard Great Hall Scriptorium Solarium Workshops

Come in and make yourself at home! This is the heart of the social life in the castle. Here you will meet my family and have a chance to sign the guest book or contact me if you wish.

Here is the Kovacs' real "castle," nestled in the hills of central Ohio. We are so remotely placed that you have to traverse three dirt roads to reach us. Our house, built in 1830 as a stagecoach stop, today cannot be seen from the road, and our nearest neighbor is in the next county! (An old joke around here -- the county line is our back property line. You can even see this neighbor in the winter when the woods between us are bare of leaves.) We have thirty-seven acres, raise vegetable, herb, and flower gardens, and I am trying to get a small orchard going. Of course, we have more blackberries, black raspberries, elderberries, and wild cherries than we could ever use, free of charge, along with black walnuts, beechnuts, hickory nuts, and some wild apples. We have two horses, two milk goats, a pair of geese, fifty chickens, four guineas, one German Shepherd who watches over it all, and one Yorkshire Terrier who fiercely believes we could never run the place without him. And presently, the goose and one hen are on nests and there are ten baby ducklings in the basement under a light, so the numbers on the farm will soon go up.

The king and queen themselves, in costume for a small event we had at our church one fall. You can see the real monarch of the place in this picture, Samwise Gamgee Snufflupagus Montgomery Himself the Elf (Sam), the five-pound Yorkie, who was rescued from a terrible past life and thinks the sun rises and sets in us. Les is usually to be found in his workshop and if Debbonnaire is not at her computer in the scriptorium she will probably be in the solarium.

The two hairy ones of the family! Here, holding Sam, is my firstborn son, Nathan Christopher, who lives and works in Florida, loves the Washington Redskins, knows all there is to know about football, and likes to discuss the thingness of things with anyone he can find to argue with him.

My second son, Robin Christopher, who can fix absolutely anything. Well, that's Mom speaking, and could be a little exaggerated . . . suffice it to say he installed our car radio unbeknownst to me at the age of eight, and at eleven rejuvenated an old vacuum cleaner I was going to throw away, making it run five more years! He's always been a detail person, and today does a professional and painstakingly perfect job of painting houses, both interiors and exteriors, in and around Columbus, Ohio. For more information, you may call his business number at 740-627-6117. Tell him Mom sent you!

She'd kill me if I told you she's the Baby of the family, so I won't! This is Sally (aka Andromeda) Christopher, the physics genius of the family. That's one reason I like this photo, because of the stars behind her head. It's actually a couple of years old, but she still looks pretty much the same. At the time, she was going into astrophysics, but now she has changed her mind. She's taking time off between high school and college while she decides what she really wants to do. In the meantime, she is writing fantasy, among other things, and doing it so well I'm jealous. Her interests, besides Einstein's special theory of relativity and string theory, include fencing, folk dancing, and her fat cat, Simba, who looks and acts just like Garfield.

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