Did you miss me? I have been too immersed in moving to write coherently, or at all actually! I have decided that possessions are an awful lot like mushrooms in their capacity to multiply in the dark. I have also decided that once you reach the age of 50 you should never have to move again, unless said move constitutes multiple individuals invading your home and in the space of half a day it is nothing but boxes. Then the next day or so other multiple strangers show up and load said boxes on a big truck and away they go. That was my last move - painless. This move - not so painless. Lots of pain, here.
Part of the problem is a lack of boxes, and my inherently cheap nature precluding just going out and buying some, and my rotten schedule precluding haunting the backsides of every WalMart and grocery store for 20 miles scoring freebies. So we have like 5 boxes, and we just keep filling the same five boxes with an ever-increasing amount of stuff, driving to the farm and unpacking them. Rinse and Repeat. OK, so it is really more than five, but you get the idea. If I had a ton of boxes I could just be really ORGANIZED, and pack everything up and mark the boxes as to which room they go in and be done. I could, say, go off to work tomorrow and it would all magically get transported in my absence. ALMOST painless, but for the packing.
But alas, pain is the name of the game.
Each of us has had the area of the house that was our personal nightmare, the one we have been afraid would never get done. My husband's was the garage. Mine is the TV room closet. These are areas where bad things lurk and in your absence they pull things out of closets, empty boxes so that you have a little electric pump box but no little electric pump, and games and their pieces parting company all over the room. If you have children, you are familiar with this scenario. Problem is, I can't blame my children as they are all of the age of reason and mostly living a few thousand miles away.
So this morning, to be nice (i.e., to stay married another 33 years) while my husband was unpacking things at the farm I DID THE GARAGE. All by my little lonesome. Sorted all that intimidating collection of crap peculiar to garages, packed boxes, threw out enough stuff to feel virtuous, and even loaded it all up in the back of Bubba. That was enough to wear me out for the rest of the day. So here it is 11:30PM and all I have accomplished today was that garage and my bedroom. I wanted to be DONE by the end of the weekend, and I still have my bathroom, that dreaded TV room closet (it's a big closet), and I have not packed a single thing from the kitchen. I think I may burst into a fit of outright weeping. The kind that really messes up your face.
But I have been through this before, and I know that it is always darkest before the dawn (whatever the hell THAT really means I have never been able to figure out) and that we WILL in fact cease occupancy of this house by Sunday July 31, that I WILL in fact have a garage sale on July 30, and that I will probably really really hate this coming weekend. For one thing, I have to leave my husband in charge of a garage sale because I am on call.
On a brighter note (and let's face it, we both know you are ready for a brighter note because you are tired of the whining), I learned an interesting thing about hay today. So my go-to-guy Bill (the one who let me down by not owning a tranquilizer gun, remember him?) usually hays his lower pasture and puts it up in nice normal rectangular bales which get stacked to the rafters in his barn. When I passed by there yesterday taking my daughter to her first day as a combine driver (THE coolest job for a teenager!) I noticed this assortment of large marshmallows in Bill's pasture. Now before you decide that I am as dumb as a rock, YES I know they are not really giant marshmallows, but they certainly look like it. I know it is hay. But I also knew this was not Bill's usual way of baling, so I stopped in and asked about it today. Turns out this particular method involves cutting the field wet and wrapping it up in the plastic and letting it sit like that and FERMENT.
Ferment? As in, a biochemical process that results in the production of carbon dioxide, water, and ETHANOL? Now THAT'S what I'm talkin' about! I want some of THAT hay! Supposedly, this hay is too "hot" for horses. I am in the dark as to (a) exactly what that means, or (b)who the lucky animals are that get to hang out in the pasture stoned out of their minds. I just think my bitchy mare could use a dose.
Same friend, Mr. Bill, is also my sheep source. He knows EVERYTHING about sheep. I, on the other hand, knew absolutely nothing about sheep until my daughter Kate started showing them last year. I have had the easy road - Bill hooked us up with a couple sheep, Kate handled them a bit, took them to fair, and won a few dollars. Fun and easy. We did not have to know much, did not have to shear the sheep, it just showed up at fair looking trim and tidy. But apparently there is a bit more to it than that (I do sense this as a recurring theme of late), things like feet problems that require marching the recalcitrant little boogers through a chlorine bath. Things like not eating goat food because there is some sort of metal in it. Things like - MATING.
So, the down-low is that one or more of Bill's rams got out and had a little party the other night, chasing the poor ewes around to the point of exhaustion then pushing them to their feet to chase them some more. If men did this the species would be extinct, because women simply would not put up with those shenanigans. But sheep, as we have noted before in this blog, are stupid. In this case, however, the upshot is pregnant ewes. This is a good thing. Now there will be babies in December.
So, we are going to purchase a few ewes, who are hopefully preggers. In theory, I want to do this. I am just the teeniest bit afraid of that recurring theme, and hoping I don't find myself in December wondering what idiot thought it was a good idea to raise sheep.
As a last note before I drop dead of exhaustion, remember the snakes? You are gonna love this. My dear Kate, who is an otherwise rational and loving child, is out to kill her momma. She has started catching the damn snakes. Bad enough, right? Remember about bad enough not being bad enough? She is COLLECTING them. In a trash can. Which is kept right by the garage door. You do not even want to know what it looks like, gazing into the dark brown depths of that can and seeing all these little reptilian heads rise on stalks and peer up at you, no you do not.
If that can gets knocked over, as in by ME, in the dark one night, there will be death and destruction in Evans Valley. If I survive the shock and ensuing heart attack, my daughter may not make it to her upcoming 18th birthday.
SNAKES ON A PLAIN. The new thriller, coming soon to a theater near you.