Having a daughter that is a linguistics nerd and sending her to college in MS has been a great learning experience for our whole family. Aside from expressions, pronunciations also had some surprises.
Our son, who followed our daughter to MSU, found out that his name had two different Southern pronunciations.
Standard American: Ben
Southern: either Bin (like trash bin), or BEYenn (two syllables).
Sorry no great expressions are coming to mind right now.
I’d go with “Fixin’ to get ready”. Perfect description of a state of being where-
1. You’re not ready.
2. You’re not actively getting ready.
3. But you are preparing to do something.
Fixin to get ready can take 2 minutes, two hours, two days, two weeks, or two years. It depends. But the timescale is usually on the shorter side.
My wife was from Alabama and she generally pronounced all one syllable words as two syllables (or at least one and a half).