~“The Blog That Watches Back”~

Monday, March 22

War.

Squirrels are nothing more than glorified tree rats. I hate tree rats, and I hate squirrels. If I was faster I'd kick all their asses.I also hate their cousin, the chipmunk. And I hate their big country cousin, Deer. Deer are good for one thing,- a lo n slow session in the oven with red wine, tomato paste, onions and garlic.I'd like to stuff a chipmunk inside a squirrel inside a deer, and stand that on my lawn. As a warning to all the other lil bastards out there.All these animals are Bastards, stuffed with ooey gooey Bastard goodness and coated in Bastardly coating.
All my tulips are gone.
This means war.
The Bastards.

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Sunday, March 21

Forsythia

Wow, it's Saturday already! I am trying to plan the plantings for the shack. I have an area for a veggie garden that will need to be fenced in, and I have 2 areas for herbs.
And now Sunday. What a GLORIOUS weekend! I hurt so good! Those bags of mulch have to go 40-50 lbs. At least most of the mulching is done in the front, and we have decided, in the side yard, to plant two trees.... dwarf fruit trees ! I am having the time of my life, and you'd think I'd be right here blogging my heart out. There is so much I want to say, but when I sit down, I forget. I'll have to think of some daily way to make notes...I'll have to make crib notes for my own blog!

We are loving it right now, the weekend weather was superb, so we got to grill dinner tonight, it just put the cherry on top of a lovely weekend.

Thank you for asking about me, that means the world to me! I am disgustingly healthy and happy. You know, everyone approaches their life to the best of their ability, or desire. In the old place, between it's geographical location and bitch of a landlord, I just felt that I could not live my fullest life, with some of the talents God gave me. I will never have a perfectly balanced checkbook, and due to my sweet Steve I have never once in my life pumped gas, but I do have some talents. Growing things. That is a big one for me. And in the whole of our married life, I was never in a place where I could flex that muscle.
Until Now.
And now, I find myself trying to plan it very well, I don't want to go bugshit and plant for plantings sake, but to have a thoughtful plan, so it's beautiful as well as functional. This weekend, with the last of the gift card my heart loop sisters gave to us, I bought the first shrub for the Shack. A forsythia. I associate that bush with spring, and the release from winter, and with my Mom and Grandmothers, as well as my family and my childhood, the second I saw it, I wanted it. But, did it fit into the plan? Well, I MADE it fit. As I look out onto the backyard from my kitchen window, I see the patio. I planted that forsythia right on the corner...along with a few red tulips, so it wouldn't be lonely....and mulched it. Now, everytime I work at the sink, I can see my first planting, and I can think of all the work we did to get here, and my heart loop sisters who wanted it so badly for us, and my family. It happens to be a very happy forsythia :o) Oh, you can rest assured, there will be more blogging! But for tonight, I will leave you with the pic of the forsythia....if you look in the backround, you'll see leaves on the ground. THAT is there the veggie garden will go, and I am almost beside myself planning THAT :o)




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Sunday, March 7

Stanley Pyrex

You know you do. Have a secret vice or two. You know it's bad for you, but you go right ahead and do it anyway.
My secret vice is

[well, no so secret, I think I've blogged about it before, in reference to telling people to shut the hell up about my beloved]

Cup o' soup. I love the chicken noodle, but I ADORE the tomato.Just gotta have it.
I am out of it.
I have looked in ShopRite, Stop n shop, Price Chopper, and A&P.
No one has it. Turns out it has been discontinued.
So I did it, I went to my beloved Amazon, and ordered a case...12 boxes....of my soup.
Now, I need Steve to make a shelf by the water cooler, which has hot water too, just perfect for sneaking a cup o soup while ironing. I will make a damn SHRINE to cup o soup, you just watch me. And if anyone has anything to say about it, I won't share my stash with them.

I LOVE LOVE Football!
Actually, I can't STAND it. But I LOVE what it does for me. For the Super Bowl for example, I retreated to the bedroom, with my laptop, and a pile of books. Aside from grabbing the remote instead of my mouse, things were very nice up there.
Steve and the kids had to wait on me hand and foot, as *I* was the one "kicked " out of the living room.

This week, it was some kind of racing thing for the guys. THAT was the life I tell you. Steve had already brought me a glass of wine, and I was feeling very virtuous catching up on things that require you to sit down [letters, gossiping with your heart loop, replying on the boards that mean something to me, clipping coupons...I've done that our whole married life, you want any pointers feel free to ask] I had the metal rock music channel on [I don't know why, but it's been a while since I visited that genre, so there ya go.....but I had to turn it off because my neck hurts from nodding to the beat]
[I was listening to Paradise Lost/Frailty when I gave up]

I did it, I got myself a pedometer. Since I've been out of work, I have to make sure I'm getting my 3 miles [10,00 steps, appx] a day. HA! I am here to tell you, pedometers lie worse than Tricky Dick Nixon ever could. Plus they have an annoying habit of jumping off of me, landing on the floor, and resetting themselves. Every day THAT happened I counted it as a sign from God that I did the full 10,000 already, to take it easy :o)

After Pics!! Of the library for sure:









I was putting away the bins that hold our Christmas decorations, and hidden up in the rafters of basement, I found a glass percolator [coffee pot, sans guts]. I scrubbed it up well, and it is now a a tiny fish tank. I have a before pic:




And an after.




The fish is a blue Betta, and Steve named it [a classy fish, it has a last name] Stanley Pyrex. Pyrex, 'cause of the coffeepot, but Stanley. Well. I can only say, in his defense, that while the power was out and we were on generator, we watched a LOT of movies. Some of them blasts from the past. Including "The Adventures of Ford Fairlane", and Andrew Dice Clay classic :X The main character named his, er, appendage "Stanley" and that hit Steve right on his funny bone. I will note that it will probably be left up to me, to explain the name to family and friends. Thanks Honey!

And these fish...they are goldfish, but were meant to be feeder fish for other animals in the pet store, so we saved these fishies lives! No names yet, they are mine to name, and I'm still shook up over Stanley Pyrex.





March:

7th: National Crown Roast Of Pork Day
8th: Happy Birthday Dawn!
9th: Panic Day
10th: Festival Of Life In The Cracks Day


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Tuesday, March 2

A Tale of Two Storms

Yeah, I know. I promised pics of the redone library. Well, have *I* got a story to tell You.

We got hit with 2 snow storms.

The first, on Tuesday, dumped 6 inches, and took out our electricity, cable, phone, internet, everything. We got the elec back, and the second storm arrived.....a record breaking storm, by all accounts. We got 36 inches of snow in the first 24 hrs, and 3 inches more, last Thursday into Friday into Saturday. No power for days. We had to decide...lose all the food in both freezers and all my houseplants, plus pay for a hotel room to stay warm in and take out food for the duration of the blackout...or buy a generator. We bought a generator.[unfortunately, my iron sucks up 1200 watts, so ironing was out during the outage while on the gennie.] Our county was under a state of emergency, which means only first responders are allowed to drive......so of COURSE Steve went to work. I was LIVID. But I did get closure with a lovely Amazon order, that included a solar powered battery charger and a slew of rechargeable batteries.

It appears, the way this house is wired, that our bedroom and the dining room are on the same circuit as the library. Which is the only room heated with electric baseboard heat, as opposed to oil/boiler heat for the rest of this house [ I'd LOVE to grab the person who did that and shake them till the marbles they call brains fall out of their heads] We cannot run the library with the generator, so no light in the dining room or bed room, necessitating flashlights. Even with the electricity back, when I go on my night time ambles, I'm still grabbing for a flashlight.

We got our power back Sunday night. I was wide awake and decided to come out into the living room around 11:30 pm. I never bring my glasses, I know every little nook of this house, and glasses are useless in the dark. You have to pass the music room, which faces the street, to get to the livingroom. I realized something was weird, the room was MUCH brighter than a full moon would make it. That was because the street light came back on. Power! Power came back! I wasn't SURE, as I couldn't see the light, as I didn't have my glasses on. There is no one more cautious, than the blind person who is running for their glasses, hehehe. Steve woke up thinking something was wrong. I told him I thought the elec was back, but go back to sleep, we could deal with the gennie in the morning. His reply was Fuck That! We did a happy dance turning that noisy [but VERY welcome] thing off. Of course, Naked ninja putz neighbor left his on all night. He went and BOUGHT a friggin gennie, had someone hook it up for him [and THEY were not very on the ball, everything was hand-tightened....gennies vibrate, you need to wrench tighten the fittings... so Steve went over and fixed him up] and he NEGLECTED to ask how to return to main power. Monday morning, he turns the gennie off. 5 minutes later he turned it back on, and it stayed on until someone showed up to turn it off and switch him back to elec. That is the HEIGHT of irresponsibility, playing with a machine like that without knowing what you're doing. Even *I* can hook up the gennie and return to main power, and *I* am a chickenshit, I do NOT like to play with electricity.

[note: There are 2 ways to hook up a gennie. The Right way,[that would be Steve] and the wrong way...backfeeding your house by plugging the gennie into an outlet. I would have offered to help putz [do you know, I know what his moms name is, but I don't know his name, he is always putz to me?] but I don't know how his "expert", that didnt even tighten the thing up properly, hooked him up. So I kept my hands and good intentions to myself.]

Thank you God for sending me Steve, who appears to love nothing more than to make wires, hook things up to the breaker panel, and grunt in a Tim Taylor/ Home Improvement kinda way :)

We didn't get our tv and net back until Tues. morning [the eta for that was wed., so we are thrilled] I was JONESING for some net. I wound up in Steves office using the wifi his dealership offers customers Monday night, and Bam, tues the net was back.
Boo! Poor Boo! She lost power, and was told there was no ETA for it's return, so she came home to us. Her power was restored.....when she was snowed in here, with no heat or power, with us. Stevie lost power too, and he has elec heat, plus well water with an elec pump, so no water either.

It was about as tough as you can image. But. We are SO DAMN lucky, compared to most. No part of our home was hurt, and we are all fine.There was a gennie available when we needed one and we had the moolah to buy it. We had it better than most.

Of the 48,000 customers Central Hudson services in my county, 47,000of us lost power for an extended time. The local paper is vilifying a politician for wanting hearings about EXACTLY how C.H prepares the infrastructure for something like this, and how they maintain it. I APPLAUD him. There is NO WAY that friggin utility is doing it's job, when most of their customers are off line. The neighboring utility company did MUCH better.I wonder why that newspaper didn't compare percentages of customers off line between the two utilities [and the neighboring towns got 29 to 34 inches of snow, that is comparable to what we got for statistical purposes.

So there's my story. I'll take actual Camera pics of the library, as opposed to the cell pics that didn't turn out so well, and show you the newest arrivals at the Shack in the next bloggie :o)

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