• goodbadi

    Snap

    December 7, 2011

    N has been waking up in the middle of the night and calling for me to take her to the bathroom. Often she walks in a sleepy fog to the toilet and sits there for a long time, with me nearby fretting that she’ll fall back to sleep and fall off.

    She has over the last couple months learned to snap her fingers, and she’s eager to show off her new skill as well as to use it nonchalantly and at random moments–like while conversing at the dinner table or even when she’s returning to her bedroom in the middle of the night, in her stupor. Last night she just reached that little wrist out, snapped her fingers, turned through her bedroom door, and stumbled into bed.

    Winter is coming, of course, making those bathroom trips shivery. But the still-warm days of our season entice flies out of hiding for last forays before winter immobilizes them; I find them when their reticence to return to their hideaways before the cool of night leaves them slowed to a measly grog and they sit dumbfounded until I pick them up only to flush them away forever, I hope.

    As the nights trend toward even colder cold, the mice outside are seeking warmer quarters in our scrabbling walls. Eleven mice have bit the cheesy dust already this fall; the first eight were snapped away in the first 48 hours of my eradication campaign.

    I even caught one at someone else’s house one afternoon over Thanksgiving. I kept glimpsing movement and then saw it for real, so I grabbed a toy net from the closet and with some help herded it into the blue plastic. I felt rather heroic, like a mighty hunter.

    At home, though, my technique is less exciting. In general accordance with expert marketers’ directions, I securely lace old-fashioned wooden traps with small bits of cheese, then place them at key locations where I’ve seen traffic signs in our attic and basement.

    I’m no expert, though, at setting the traps. I still get all shaky and clumsy when I place them, which sometimes trips them, which startles me to no end, which means I’m even more shaky when I try again.

    But it’s becoming more of a snap all the time.

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    Fat and Skinny Mashed Potatoes

    November 22, 2011

    Yesterday our church canceled the morning service and instead hosted an evening Thanksgiving feast preceded by a pinata for the kids and a hymn sing for everyone.

    When we tallied up the numbers a week ago, we figured about sixty people would attend–and so prepping food for seventy seemed reasonable. Considering our bumper potato crop, M and I offered to bring mashed potatoes to go along with the gravy, ham, turkey, sweet potatoes, green beans, rolls, cranberry salad, pies, and hot tea and coffee also on the menu.

    Saturday we scrubbed three quarters of a bushel of potatoes (someone had told us that half a bushel would feed around forty people), and Sunday morning I crammed them into our four largest cooking pots for boiling, and then mixed them, peels and all, with what sounds to me like a piddling two pounds of butter, lots of salt, and a gallon and a half of milk. We smashed them into waiting crock pots in our new kitchen, with the overflow two-thirds filling the smaller of our biggest kettles keeping warm on our current kitchen stove.

    The feast was a tremendous success, lavish, delicious and festive. M had spearheaded the decorations, and all was autumnal and warm; she also led the hymn sing most elegantly.

    And she helped me cart home the one empty, the one nearly empty, and the two filled crock pots–and the still untouched big kettle.

    Check out who is at the back of this beginning of the line–our western landowner neighbor and her husband:

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  • goodbadi

    Thanks, No Thanks, Thanksgiving

    November 11, 2011

    Long ago, after we sent a letter to our western neighbor saying that we planned to install our own water supply system and therefore remove the electric line that comes from our house and powers her barn along with the pump we share, the nice man from the electric company told me that our western neighbor would be happy to pay us twenty dollars per month–the minimum charge if she had her own hookup–for continued access to our electricity.

    Up unto that point–forever, I suppose–she had just used it for free; I contacted her and arranged that she would start paying us. And she did pay us, for four months at a time, albeit almost always about a month late and sometimes with a check written in pencil, for well over a year.

    Back in August, though, in a rush of wanting to build a spirit of goodwill with my neighbors, I called up the western neighbor and suggested that she cut that twenty dollars in half.

    “Oh, whatever,” she said. “I just do whatever people tell me, anymore.”

    “Well, if you want to lower it to ten dollars starting in September, that’s fine with us. You’re not using twenty dollars’ worth, I don’t think.”

    “Well alright,” she said, and then she said something she’d never before said to me: “Thank you.”

    (If that didn’t make me giddy enough, I immediately called the eastern land renter and offered that he make hay from our little field since I was going to have to pay someone to cut the grass, anyway. He said he wasn’t going to be bringing his equipment over anymore this fall, but–another new experience here–“thank you.”)

    Well.

    As September came and went and no check arrived from the western neighbor, I started to fret. As October, too, sneaked by, I considered our options. It wouldn’t do to call her and remind her that she hadn’t paid; simply because I would be asking her to do something, I was pretty sure that, as a matter of principle, she wouldn’t respond by sending a check. And I didn’t feel like spending our windows money on actually separating the power supply and water setups, so that wouldn’t work.

    Then, like any good, divinely inspired institution should, our church came to the rescue–by deciding to host a Thanksgiving feast and invite friends and acquaintances.

    Guess who received one of the invitations.

    Guess who put that check in the mail lickety-split.

    And guess who feels much better.

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    Snowy View

    October 31, 2011

    The snow storm stole our electricity partway through the afternoon Saturday, so we didn’t finish putting in the windows. But the big one on the south end, above where the kitchen sink will be, is making me want to just work my butt off until the whole kitchen is finished:

    Other wintry highlights:

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  • goodbadi

    Rats!

    August 3, 2011

    Well, not literally, other than the one yesterday that our cat chased out of the tree right beside our back deck into the menacing jaws of our lovely dog, who is apparently intent on losing her piz wat status.

    Nope, I just mean that exclamatorily, as for the first time I have had eBay auctions removed for “copyright violation.” It appears that I can’t legally sell the language-learning software I purchased dirt cheap from the maker of the software a decade ago (when I worked for the company), which is a bummer because I have level I (and some level II) editions for sixteen different languages just sitting in my closet.

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  • goodbadi

    Barking Fox

    August 2, 2011

    We’ve heard them barking before, lots of times, but while we figured they were foxes, we were never quite sure.

    Last night one sounded like it was just outside our window. I grabbed my trusty bludgeon…er, flashlight…and tried to shine it through the screen. All I could see were glowing eyes, so a bit later, when the sounds persisted, I sneaked down to the computer desk for my glasses and then out the back door.

    After the eyes ran to just outside a far corner of our property and then back up to their original sounding place above our fence line, I was finally able to see the barking animal. But in the shadowing light I still couldn’t tell what it was, so this morning after I put new batteries in my flashlight, I sat down at the computer and found exactly the sound:

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  • goodbadi

    Mmmm Peach

    July 30, 2011

    At this point I should recount that Thursday night during dinner, which our friends had brought and were enjoying with us, N started really searching for something in her nose. M quickly figured out that a pea had found its way in, and I took N to the bathroom. It was a simple removal, and N happily ate the pea.

    This summer N became an expert at making salads. Often without guidance, let alone permission, she would take some salad greens to the kitchen, get out the mayonnaise and Dijon mustard, and come up with a tasty mess. Yesterday, helped only with peeling the hard-boiled eggs and final stirring, she made dill-seasoned egg salad for our lunch:

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