Mashup in my Head

For some reason I have a mashup of these two songs in my head.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hy4Y20dOlKs

Weezer: Island in the sun

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjMCaw4qzjg

Cheap Trick:  Dream Police

And in my head it works.

Up to...

...vermiculture.

That's composting with worms.  I got a worm compost kit for Christmas from J.  It's okay, that's what I asked for!

This is what a compost bin looks like...a commercial one anyway.	This is what you feed your worms; they like most compostable material with some exceptions like citrus.	This is what a sea of worms making compost looks like. Note that it's okay to use your shredded junk mail as fiber. Woot!

...making grape trellises.


This is a work in progress. I've got 3 more wine grape vines coming and 3 eating variety vines coming, so sometime I've got to have 9 complete trellises. Not for a while though...the first year is spent getting roots in the soil.

I planted 3 last year, and those trellises are my winter project this year, along with 4 more raised bed frames.


...playing nurse to my sick dog.

Maggie's got cancer. She's on a lot of pills right now, and they make her alternatively sleepy and thirsty. So there's a lot of sleep, get up and drink, sleep, get up and drink, pee, sleep. She doesn't eat much, so I've been making her absolute favorites, like chicken thighs and liver. I made her bacon rice even, trying to get some calories into her.

I think we've settled that we'll be making her comfortable until I can bear to walk by the dog food aisle at the grocery store without bursting into tears. Then we'll have to do the right thing by her. So sad, but she is old. All I can hope is all that time sleeping is full of her dreaming of catching bunnies.

That's what I've been up to.

Not Remembering, but Reliving

My dad has problems with his memory.  It's probably more severe than that, but it's not something you can explain in a few sentences.

He forgets people who have died, among other things, like the fact he's married to my mom or that he has lived in their house for 25 years.

I think that there's a certain place that the brain retreats to.  A place where there are memories about the happiness of youth. A place about a place where he felt useful and needed.  Those other memories....the unfortunate deaths we all see, the painful parts, the feeling of being useless; they are pushed away.  Dropped.  The brain decides to live in the now though the memories of the present.  Those happy memories push their way through and manifest themselves before their eyes.

This is why he asks about his sisters and his mother (long dead).  This is why he talks about work like he was just there. This is why he insists that he must go home.  There's a place he knows existed at one point and he's not there now.  He wants to go back to that place, even though it's just a memory.

The brain is a funny thing.

The Storm, Part 2.

Some part of me knew the power wouldn't come back in two hours.  Call it intuition.
I had a pot of stew to cook and no power.  I went out and tried to collect the grill
from the garage.  The garage door wouldn't open, because there was no power, and I didn't
remember (yet) how to get it open.  We tried to carry it outside in the swirling snow,
and the legs came off of it.

The wind was really howling now and we decided to reassemble it outside the back door of the
workshop, outside of the biting wind.  J held the main body as I guided the legs back into
place, cursing this wind, cursing winter, and cursing Wisconsin.

Slowly, we got everything situated, and got a fire started.  It was strange to watch snowflakes
melt on hot coals in the middle of a snowstorm.  The stew had been started in a cast iron
dutch oven, so we were able to place it right over the fire and let it continue cooking.

Inside, we pulled the curtains shut to conserve heat, and got out a board game.

We've had power outages before.  We had prepared for this; with buckets of fresh water in case
the pump stopped working, extra charcoal and boxes of camping food.  We were ready, but every
other outage we'd had was in the summer.  The result of a summer storm.  This was the middle
of a blizzard.

When we finished our game, and ate some pretty tasty stew, it was getting dark.  We had
flashlights galore, so we retreated to our respective spots to read, or to sleep, or to use up
what little battery power we had left on our respective devices.  Without the internet, it
was really weird.  I kept turning on power switches when I entered a room.

I read with a headlamp for a while; in retrospect, a book about a post-apocolyptic world
devasted by a virus where the main character had to forage to survive was probably not the
best choice.

And then, at an embarrassing early time, I simply went to bed.  There isn't much to do
without power, and we'd worked all day to try to keep the snow at bay.  We simply went to
bed and listened to the wind howling against the house, and pulled more covers over us as
the temperatures in the rest of the house slowly fell.

The next morning, the thermostat read 58 degrees.  We'd gotten lucky it wasn't worse.  My
cell still had a charge, and I was able to email my work with my note saying I wouldn't be
in.  J was able to call in to his work, but no one answered; either they were deluged with
calls or no one was there.

We waited a bit, ate cold stew, and drank cold coffee, then walked out to see how bad it was.   The initial snowblowing had helped; there were areas nearly blown clear.  But there were also several 3 foot tall drifts.

We decided on a plan.  Get the truck out of the garage.  Drive as far as we could with it over whatever drifts there were, and when it got stuck, dig it out.  If we could get the truck out, we weren't stranded forever ...  just until we could get someone out here to plow us out.

The truck is an old Ford F150.  It's probably the least powerful truck in its series, but it is a truck and it has a high clearance for going over piles of snow.  It would have to do.

We'd start forward and J would gun it.  He'd go until he couldn't go any farther and then try backing up and ramming forward to see if he could do it.  It only got stuck in a couple places so badly that we had to dig it out.  Some of the drifts dissolved in a giant explosion of white.  And some just stopped us cold.  Our driveway is just gravel and the ruts are just our best guesses about where the driveway actually is; I'm sure we are driving on some grass here and there.   A couple of places were just masses of ruts as we had to keep backing up and trying to steer more left to stay on track.

At noon, we left the truck at the top of the driveway and traipsed in to make some food.  We dug out J's old camp stove, powered by kerosene, and made a giant vat of mac and cheese, and hot chocolate.  I noticed the battery on my cell was dying, and the people that I'd called for help weren't responding.

So I did a quick search on the yellowpages on my smartphone, and just started calling up snow removal people.  The first woman who answered laughed at me when I told her how long my driveway was.  The second guy agreed to some out and give it a shot.

Then, as if the clouds were lifting, the power came back on.   And shortly thereafter, the snowplow guy came and we got a good plowing to clear the driveway.  (But not after a couple of hours of waiting and some miscommunications...and an extra fee...).  It's done.

We went into town today, and got groceries, and breakfast and saw the Hobbit.  I feel almost normal again...

I still don't feel terribly happy about 14.5" inches of snow though, and I still don't like Wisconsin winters.   But I have power and a clear driveway, so I guess we just have to count our blessings.  We aren't so off the grid....but J and I will be moving forward in getting that generator hookup for future situations like this.

The Storm, Pt. 1.

J had been excited about the snow for days.   He is always cautious when it comes to these storms; there was no question we’d need to stay home.  There was no question that we’d need gas for the snowblower, that he’d be the one doing it, and that we’d get a lot.

And Wednesday night, he kept checking to see if it had started.  
Thursday morning, we awoke to the start of a winter wonderland.  And it was very pretty, except it was very heavy and pulled down on our pine trees.

J was out that night, at 3am, removing the snow, getting us clear.  I had slept in.  I tend to do that at 3am.

I walked downstairs at 6:30 or so, to let the dog out.  The first thing I noticed was how she was having problems standing up.  I ended up guiding her rear legs up by grabbing her around the chest and holding her while pulling upwards.  

Now, the dog has only been with us since April.  No snow to be experienced.  She's only dealt with the pitiful amount of snow that we've had thus far; a inch or two and she didn't seem to mind.    But this was different.  This was full blown snow; inches piled into drifts.  

I walked out with her into the few inches that we had and she just sat down.  Now, this is a dog that in order to sit down inside has to spend several minutes turning and sniffing and deciding exactly where to place her hindquarters.  Not when she's confronted by more than 6 inches, it seems.  Plunk.  I don't like this and I'm not going any farther.  I will do my business here.  And she did.  

I grabbed her midsection and hauled her up and half-carried, half-dragged her back to the porch.  She's remarkably placid about this.  I wondered if this is why the former owners had abandoned her last March.  I tried to remember any snowstorms we had last March.

She managed to be guided back in then sat down on a mat near the middle of the room.  There she sat for hours.  

I posted on FB; probably the weather, I was told.   I gave her another aspirin.  She just didn't want to move.  I started to get worried.  What was wrong with my dog?  Should I call the vet?

Meanwhile, as I dithered about the dog, J went out for a second try with the snowblower.   And in a bit, he came in and asked for help.  It wasn't working right, but he couldn't run it and see what was the problem.  I threw on some winter clothes and headed out with him.

There, in the garage, we discovered our next problem; a giant rock had cracked the main support of our snowblower.  The thing that holds the spinning helixes in place.  Cracked.  Useless.  
Oh, and the blizzard had just started in earnest, blowing snow everywhere.

Sighing, we went inside to talk this over.   I started a stew on the stove and as I did....the power went out.  Then it flickered on again.

The wind was picking up and they had warned us this might happen.  I'd charged up my phone in case I needed it.

And then there was a *pop*, somewhere in the distance and then the power went out again.  This time it didn't come back.  It was 1pm and we had no electricity in the middle of the blizzard.   The electric company automated phone line assured us it would be back in 2 hours.  They lied.

Smarter than your Average Cat

On Monday, I returned home after an appointment.

There, I learned that there was a semi-dead bird that had hit the house and now couldn't fly.

So, I did what every house owner wishes they could do to the stupid birds that fly into the windows and scare the crap out of you.

I let out the cat.

We have only one cat that has any bona fide hunting skills, and even he is too well fed to actually rely on his kills for his dinner.

I'm reminded of the funniest Oatmeal comic that I've just about ever seen. If you haven't seen this, do so now.  I'll wait.

Yes, we are easily amused.

Anyway, so Georgy got to attack and put the dumb morning dove out of its misery.

He was carrying it around when I checked on him a few minutes later.  He looked so proud of himself.   I petted him on the head and let him be.

About 30 minutes later, I thought, I'd better check on him.

And as I opened the door, I saw the biggest damn bird I've ever seen about 10 feet from me.

It had a bird carcass in its mouth and it was quick to fly away.

Now, the cat was nowhere in sight.

That bird was enormous!

I immediately searched for Georgy and found him not too far away.  A couple of things might have happened.

1)  He grew bored with his toy and left it lay for the Giant Birdosaurus to come and clean up.

2)  Giant Birdasaurus came and he ran away.

In either case, everyone won.

I didn't have to clean up a dead bird, Georgy got his alloted kill, and Giant Birdasaurus got fed.

Triumph of Holiday Spirit

It's been a bad couple of weeks.

I signed J and myself up for a 5K in a neighboring town to benefit a local food coop a couple of weeks ago, and found myself hacking and coughing that morning. I did the run anyway; my worst time in quite some time. The scenery was beautiful, the costumes great, but I was simply not up to it.

As such, my holiday spirit has been lagging. I had wanted a tree, and I had wanted to make treats, but for the next couple of weeks, all I wanted to do was lay on the sofa and blow my nose.

I'm still not 100%, but I needed to get my holiday plans in motion. Yesterday was the day.

I'd been driving past a stand of Boy Scout sponsored Christmas trees for the last couple of weeks, and yesterday, day of rain and cold, I drove the old pickup over there, and got a couple of Boy Scouts to help me get my tree, cut a fresh end and toss it in the back.

And after collecting a stand from Walgreens (on sale!), I got it home and appropriately decorated.  Silver and gold ornaments this year.



And then there was the holiday baking.

The candied pecans.

I'd forgotten how long you need to tend the caramel for my homemade caramels. I took a series of pictures.

I



Maggie came and waited with me while I stirred.





This process took about 90 minutes.

But in the end, there were caramels!

Holiday spirit is finally triumphing over phelgm!