Country Livin'

Our new $267 riding mower, courtesy of the Sears Outlet website.



I was a little concerned when it wouldn't turn over last night, but I borrowed a battery charger today from my boss, and it turns out the battery was mostly drained. Charged it for awhile tonight, and it started up on the first try. I took it down the hill and back. It's been probably 20 years since I've last driven a riding mower, and our hilly, uneven ground was a little scary. But I managed not to tip over!

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Our story left off with Andy approaching the knocked-on door...

Chapter 6
Andy opens the door to a grizzled man wearing a work jumper and a hard hat that says, "ASPLUNDH." Andy climbs into his jacket and boots and leads Mr. Asplundh outside to see the fireflies.

Chapter 7
The next morning, Cabol is working at home and is still in her flannel froggie nightie when she notices a truck in the driveway up by the Craft Shack. A man is walking down the hill from the truck. Cabol shrieks and runs to get dressed. She goes back to the window and watches the man stand for a bit by the firefly home and then turn around and walk back to the truck. Cabol keeps an eye on the truck as she goes about her day. Eventually the one truck is replaced by another truck. With blinky lights on top. Hours, days, weeks go by and there is nothing to see but the blinky truck. Then a machine appears off in the distance, hidden by trees. Cabol waits.

Chapter 8
A low rumble pierces the air. The machine is on the move. Through the snow and ice, it crawls down the driveway to the firefly nest. Four men follow it. They stare up into the trees, point, and holler. Nearby, the scary snow sheep watch and wait. Cabol suddenly realizes the men and their machine are in danger! They don't stand a chance if the giant rams of doom should attack. She bravely gears up, grabs a shovel, and forges out into the snow to warn the men.

Chapter 9
Cabol approaches the men and machine, her eyes flickering back to the sheep every few moments, her hand clutching the shovel in case the sheep should follow. One man notices Cabol's approach and, with a cautious look at her shovel, yells at the machine to be quiet. Cabol speaks.

Cabol: "Hi!"
Man #1: "Um, hi. Why do you have a giant shovel?"
Cabol: "It is to protect me from the fearsome sheep with horns the size of winnebagos."
Man #1: "Oh."
Man #2: "Did you know your mumblemumble was fnurflebloopy????"
Cabol: "Yay!"

The men all stare at Cabol.

Cabol: "Soooooo. Um, there are big giant humungous sheep wandering around. They have pointy horns. But, um, don't worry. If they start to charge you, just put your hand up and tell them to stop. That works. Usually. Want to borrow my shovel?"
Man #3: "We are big, burly men wearing hard hats. We do not need a pesky shovel. We will keep the teeny lambies away with our big, burly machine!"

Chapter 10
Back at the house, Cabol keeps an eye on the men, the machine, and the sheep. After a while, the machine starts to wiggle and bobble and then stretches out its neck waaaaaaaaaaay up into the trees. One of the men is standing on its head. Cabol can't watch. An eternity passes, and Cabol hears a cheer explode from the group of men. She peers out the window but can't see anything that interesting. Just a bunch of tree branches on the ground.

Chapter 11
Cabol is diligently working when the internet connection drops. Cabol yelps. She calls Andy.

Cabol: "Help! HELP!! No internet! AIE! PANIC PANIC!"
Andy rambles on about technical things.
Cabol: "I am panicking! I have no internet! Stop asking me questions!"

Cabol: "Oh. Look. The power is out."

Epilogue
The power is back now, but the men and machine are gone. So are the fireflies. There are tree branches littering the ground under the power lines, and one power pole is wearing a brand new insulator. The electrical line running from the road to the house is no longer swinging in the trees, sparking and humming when it comes into contact with a branch.

The End

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Introduction:
Can you picture how pretty the glow of firefly butts would be in the winter with all the shiny snow?

Chapter 1:
A while back, Cabol notices little flickers of light out in the trees. At first she thinks it is fireflies, but it is too cold for fireflies. After a while of contemplation, she shrugs her shoulders and writes it off as the neighbors tromping about with a flashlight or telling ghost stories by a camp fire. She goes to eat pizza.

Chapter 2:
A few days ago, Andy has the pleasure of spending a lot of real quality time shoveling snow down by the barn near the trees where Cabol had seen the faux fireflies. He hears a creepy zzzzzzzzzzzzzzping sound from the power lines that follow a line of large pines down one side of our property. He makes Cabol go listen to the creepy sound. Cabol and Andy both say, "Hm. That's probably not good." They go eat pizza.

Chapter 3:
Last night, the three of us run errands and don't return until after dark. Cabol carries the flashlight and trudges along the driveway out front, her eyes fixed on the ground lest she end up in a giant snow pit. Apparently Andy has cat eyes and feet because as he follows he does some sightseeing. Peering up into the trees down there by the barn, he sees them. The fireflies. The cats go eat pizza.

Chapter 4:
Andy calls the power company, who is eating pizza.

Chapter 5:
Around 9pm, as Cabol sits on the couch in her flannel frog nightie catching up on work and Anya sleeps and Andy does whatever he does in his officey area...something goes thump thump thump.

Andy calls out, "Did you make a noise?"
Cabol says, "Huh?"

Thump thump thump.

Andy, "Did you make that noise?"
Cabol, "I like pizza!"

Andy answers the door. Because there is someone at the door. The door at the end of the quarter-mile-long driveway covered in mountains of ice and snow pits filled with giant roaming sheep. At night. Who could it be?

TO BE CONTINUED
Will our fearless heroes be robbed by marauding bandits? Will they be converted into Baptists? Will they buy a hundred boxes of Girl Scout cookies out of pity for the crazy little kid who knocked on the door? Or, will they get delivery pizza for the first time in four years?

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We enjoyed about a week of being able to drive all the way up to our house before we had to get out our hiking shoes again. Now, after several weeks, we've finally begun to see the ground again. Maybe we'll even find those two missing packets of Ramen.

Here's what's been going on around here:

+ Andy put in the threshold and replaced the under-the-door-thingy-jig on the cat room, and we've had no more mice sightings (dead or alive) since.
+ Our snow shovel broke last weekend. After visiting four stores, we finally found a new shovel yesterday.
+ The sheep have started escaping again. They just walk over the fence on the frozen snow drifts. (Andy dug the snow back some, but they still manage to climb over.)
+ Anya gets to test drive a preschool on Wednesday.
+ There is a snow drift about five feet tall crossing our driveway. It's sort of solid, so we can mostly scamper over it. Sometimes we sink.
+ Every day last week I asked Andy if the chickens were okay because from the house it looked like they had been buried.
+ I didn't leave the house for four days because of the scary snow drifts.
+ Anya uses a chair to turn on the bathroom light, change the thermostat, get cell phones, raid the pantry, and get the tv remotes.
+ We lost a bag of groceries in the snow. The next day we found a jar of adobo sauce (unfortunately) and three packets of ramen scattered in the snow across a quarter of the driveway.
+ Anya likes to lick playdoh. Especially the mint green.
+ I ripped apart the last square I was knitting and have only finished about 1/4 of a new one. My mom, however, has crocheted about 87.
+ We're looking at kitchen cabinets for The Great Kitchen Remodel of 2010, 2011....2094.
+ Walking the driveway today felt like walking through a giant slushie but wasn't anywhere near as tasty.
+ My left eye is twitching.

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Anya's new favorite song to sing is "Three Blind Mice." We don't sing it around here much; it's not really requested very often. Perhaps it's a daycare favorite?

This morning I walked into the living room and found a dead mouse on the floor. I mentioned it to Andy, and he told me how in the wee hours of the night he and the cats chased down three mice. I'm not sure if they were blind, but they must have been pretty stupid to come into a house with nine cats. Bob dropped the second dead mouse in the bed, and the third dead mouse was in the hallway.

That makes a total of five dead mice we've found in the last few weeks.

Okay, mice, listen up. I know it's cold out there. And there's all that snow in the way. But really...if you want any hope at survival, DO NOT enter this house. You don't stand a chance of making it through til dawn.

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Today is, as Anya would say, a day for a happy cake. For the first time since we received all that snow the weekend BEFORE CHRISTMAS, we were able to drive the car all the way from the street to the house!

This will, of course, but a damper on the Loafkeeper Diet Plan. But it also means we can get the microwave we bought the other day from the Home Depot clearance section out of the car and into the house.

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Like most folks, I ate way too much over the holidays and gained a couple of pounds. It's okay, though, because I am following the (soon to be patented) Loafkeeper Post-Holiday Diet Plan. It's not quite as simple as my famous Snickers diet, but it still seems to be working.

Loafkeeper Post-Holiday Diet Plan
Step 1: Buy a house with a very long, winding, hilly driveway.
Step 2: Wait for tons of snow followed by several weeks of below freezing temperatures.
Step 3: Do not clear the snow from your driveway.

That's it! If you try it, let me know how it works for you!

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We received some snow yesterday. On the drive home I got stuck once on a hill, and while slowwwwwwly creeping up to the top, a pickup came zooming up, trying to keep enough momentum to avoid our predicament. I think their mirror missed ours by about 3 inches. But we made it home! We wisely left the car near the hay shack, although I had to push it up the little hill to get it there. Not that I expect us to move it again before at least Monday or Tuesday...

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We've got gravel, yes we do! We've got gravel, how 'bout you?!

Anyone who has ventured up our driveway during the last few years will understand the hugeness of this: "We got gravel." Four trips by the dump truck, and our driveway is no longer something we have to warn people about. At least we don't have to warn them in all capital letters. There are still a few rough spots, but most of the canyons are filled in.

Half of the last truck load was dropped in our "parking spot" Monday afternoon. It may come as a surprise to you, but dump trucks don't really dump all that accurately. They can do okay given enough room, but in the confines of our parking spot, the best the driver could do was get the gravel dumped out in two patches about 6-8 inches deep. It was up to us to get the extra moved from the center out to the sides. Monday is one of my work-at-home days, so at 5:00 I headed out with a shovel and a rake and tried to move stuff around. The light was fading fast, so I brought out our electric lantern and kept shifting it every few minutes. Do I need to say how hard it is to spread and level dark gravel in the dark? There was a lot of squinting and wishing for cat vision. I stopped when Andy got home, and he went out for a bit but gave up.

It rained yesterday and all day today. Now we have WET gravel to move. Whose idea was this anyway?

The worst part is we've had to park the truck on the hill since the parking spot is under construction. The parking brake on the truck has never really been 100% since we moved here. I worry a bit that we'll wake up in the morning, and the truck will have rolled down the hill into the barn or the pond or the sheep.

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We're working on constructing a new garden. It's the berry bed. My plan is to put all the (I bet you can't guess!) berries in this one garden, and then we (i.e., Andy) can build a little cage around it with pvc pipes and netting to keep the birds out. I may also put asparagus in there because of its perennial ways.

The garden started a few months ago when we bought some ginormous locust beams from craigslist. They became the border of the garden. And that was where it stopped (except for the four foot tall weeds that kept growing). Finally, when my folks were here a couple weeks back, Andy hacked down the weeds. He and my dad drove the twisty, hilly, backroads (aka everywhere around here) and got two loads of free horse poop. YUMMMMMM!

Of course I can never get enough horse poop or compost or soil or straw or leaves, so when a person nearby advertised MORE (composted!!) horse poop, we couldn't pass it up. Last night after picking up Anya, we went and got another truck load. To explain our detour (Anya is very big on telling us if we go the wrong way) we mentioned we were going to get horse poo. Anya thought this was really awesome and kept saying, "Poop! Poop! Poop!" What are we going to get? "POOP!" What is the tractor putting in the truck? "POOP!" What is your favorite color? "POOOOOP!"

This afternoon we went out to the berry garden to spread stuff around. "Poop!" Anya brought her kid-sized garden tools down, but mostly she sat in the poo and dug around and picked up big "rocks" to show me. My little poo baby! She had poo under her nails and in her socks and mixed with the snot running down her nose. When we came back to the house, she took off her shoes and clothes and the poo dust fell all over the floor like giant, brown dandruff. It was almost magical.

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