So Long Indian Summer

This weekend the reality of fall arrived. Cold, rainy, a low dark sky. For the most part my uncle and I hunkered in the living room watching DVDs. We watched the first season of Monarch of the Glen (which totally made me want to move to a castle in Scotland, until yesterday when I read this hilarious article about a family . . . who moved to a castle in Scotland), and when we ran out of that I introduced him to The West Wing. Can you believe he'd never even HEARD of The West Wing?!?! Well, I fixed that right quick.

But yesterday we did venture out for a short walk between rain storms. Isn't fall pretty?



[Sorry, for some reason blogger won't post my links, I'll try again later.]

In Which I Feel Like a Superhero for Braving a Little Mouse Poop

So remember when I said that my mom managed to get the insulation in half of the ceiling of the crawlspace beneath my dining room? You did all realize that meant that she'd left half of it for me to do, right?

A little background that I'm sure I've already mentioned, but it's easier to re-type then find a link. Originally there was a greenhouse attached to the cabin's kitchen. Due to harsh winters and complete neglect it sort of fell apart and a prior renter sort of turned it into a dining room on the cheap. I mean really cheap. The greenhouse had been dug into the ground a little bit, so to have the dining room floor match the kitchen floor, the renter left a fairly sizeable (though not sizeable enough to stand up in) storage space beneath the dining room. A storage space that is accessed by a door sawed in half. A storage space containing ZERO insulation. So, in our continuing effort to make this house more comfortable, we decided that a priority would be putting some insulation between the floor joists of the dining room. Which required spending time in the sort of storage space. Which is full of mouse poop and dust and spiders and ancient cobwebs and holy hell is it unpleasant down there. But I did it. Yesterday I donned full protective gear (including mask) and spent two hours squatting on mouse poop covered dirt floors and stapling insulation above my head.

Aren't you impressed?

I mean, I know there are worse tasks. In fact, I seem too remember my dad, about this time last year, spending a week emptying a septic tank with a shovel and a bucket in the 90 degree heat of Belize. So yes, all ickiness is relative. But this is the ickiest thing I've done in quite a while.

Just Busy-ish

Here's the short version of the past month during which I apparently decided I no longer loved my blog enough to write. Which is stupid, because I've missed it:

The spa owners spent three weeks rafting the grand canyon, leaving me nominally "in charge", which meant at one point I worked 11 days straight. For me, that was brutal.

I then started applying for real jobs. Yes. Really. I sent out letters of interest and resumes and everything. There is a causal connection between this activity and being left "in charge" of the spa. While they were gone, something just clicked and I realized that "No. I will not be happy working a mindless customer service job for the rest of my life. I have very little ambition, but what I have is not going to be satisfied by this for much longer." I only applied for two real jobs, but was quickly rejected (one post had already been filled, the other I just never heard back from). So then I was a bit depressed/discouraged. I'm hoping to apply for a few more jobs this week. I'm serious about it now, so if anyone has any leads for jobs in Idaho, let me know. My pay requirements are minimal. (I actually found the perfect job (the one that was already filled, damn it) and determined that I could actually live, just barely, on the low low sum of $35,000/year. So now I at least have a floor of what I need to survive. Good to know I guess.)

And then, last week, I had a bit of a home invasion. On Monday my mom, stepdad, and their two large dogs showed up. On Wednesday, a dear old friend of the family (Howdy) arrived to remove about 500 pounds of horseshoes and a couple of forges that he'd been storing in the chicken coop for about twenty years. Also on Wednesday, fabulously skilled Uncle George arrived to finish a few more projects. These four people have done a HUGE amount of work. Totally makes me embarrassed for all the work I have not been doing. Stepdad and Howdy split and stacked two cords of wood between them. Stepdad bushwacked all the weeds I'd let take over the property and cut down two dead trees. Mom cleaned and planted the flower beds, killed about a million yellow jacket and wasp nests, put insulation in the scary space beneath my dining room floor, and buttressed the woodshed so it will survive another winter. George built a funny little deck off my dining room so he could take out these horrible old windows and install new french doors! (They're doors to nowhere for now since there's a five foot drop from them to the ground, but eventually, someday, there will be a real deck.) Oh, and the neighbors totally regraded my driveway. Yeah. It's been quite a week.

Howdy left on Friday, Mom, Stepdad and the dogs headed out this morning, so now it's just me, George, and the cats. The house seems really empty. As much as I'd kind of been dreading having such a full house, (have I mentioned lately what a hermit I am?) I miss them already.

Family

One of my college roommates, M, got married in Lake Tahoe on Saturday. To be honest, I had been dreading the trip. It was a long drive, and M and I are very very bad at keeping in touch. In fact, part of me was sure that somewhere along the way I had mortally offended her and she hated me now. Because we simply don't talk anymore. But at one time we were close. We lived together for four formative years, and for three of those years we shared a bedroom. Can you even imagine? Actually, it's even better. There were three of us in that bedroom. Our third roommate, C, is a master at keeping in touch, truly skilled. And I felt like I had to go to this wedding for her. So I went. And the three of us came together at the reception, laughing and chatting, and grinning like fools. Like no time had passed. Like no time ever would. Because no matter what happens now, for four years we shared everything. For four years we did almost nothing alone. None of us had a typical college experience. As C and I discussed, we sort of failed at college. We got excellent grades, but we didn't form the sort of memories most people share of those years. We were shy and we were insular, and the three of us just leaned on each other and kept our eyes forward and waited for it to end. Anyway, we're family now. And I no longer worry when M doesn't call me back. Because I just saw her get married on a beautiful day. And I know she's very happy. And I know, for sure, that we're family.

Magnet

That's the only thing I can come up with. Some joker at a Subaru plant thought it would be funny to embed a high-powered magnet in the rear driver's side wheel of my car. How else to possibly explain the fact that I've had three punctures, leading to three completely destroyed tires, in a little over a year? And every single one of them was the rear driver's side tire. I just don't get it!

In Which I Totally Succeed at Summer

Maybe you don't think of summer as something you can fail at, but a person can absolutely fail at a season by not taking advantage of it (for instance, ahem, a winter without skiing. Sigh.). If one's summer is distinguishable from winter only by the number of layers one wears: fail. And I have been determined not to fail this summer. I go hiking almost every day I have off and spend hours and hours basking in the sun (while wearing a hat and spf 30 of course). I've gone swimming in the river (quickly, it was very cold), and, most importantly, I've searched, high and low, for huckleberries.

Huckleberries had become my nemeisis this summer. The thing standing between me and a successful season. I could rationalize away not going rafting (too expensive), and not swimming in the lake (too cold) but not finding huckleberries? That was failure I could not live with. Yesterday I even climbed over a gate, prominently posted "NO TRESPASSING" and with three locks reinforcing the sign's intent, to look for a patch that my mom remembered as a gold mine 20+ years ago. A patch where we'd seen a black bear sharing our harvest. I didn't find it. I called my mom and she told me told me all I had to do to find them was drive over to West Mountain, slow down, open the windows, and stop when I smelled their unforgettable tart sweetness filling the air. So, I did. (But first I went home and baked a loaf of bread and made black cherry jam from a recipe in my Grandma Ann's ancient Boston Cooking School Cookbook. Another thing to tick off my checklist for summer. I made jam!) I crossed the valley, pointed my car up the mountain, followed a terrifying one-lane twisty dirt road with no guard rails, slowly, and stopped when I found a wide spot to park near the top of the mountain. I sniffed. Nothing. I was about to get back in the car to drive a little further, when I spotted it. A small bush about three feet away. Covered in those small purple berries that look so much like blueberries and taste so much better. I spent the next hour moving from bush to bush, slapping mosquitoes and eating about twice as many as I kept. I ended up with just a cup of berries. I may try and go back next week and see if any more have ripened, but for now. Summer: you did NOT beat me.

The Bats of August

I don't like it, but I have no problem understanding why and how mice get into my house. Crawlspaces, foundations, vents . . . there are ways. And while I do my best to keep my house clean there are crumbs. There are incentives. But bats? How the HELL do they find their way in? Certainly not through the crawlspace, and last summer we sealed up all the holes we thought they might fit through. But, more importantly, WHY? There is nothing for them here but panic and death and perhaps a little torture if Freckles catches them before their little hearts give out.

For whatever reason, bat season officially began yesterday when I came home from the spa to find two bats. One already dead, the other flitting, panicked through the loft. I've already shared too many horror stories here, so I'll spare you the details of what happened when Freckles caught the second bat. If last summer is any guide, this is only the first wave of a months-long invasion. I will be pulling my mosquito netting out of storage before bed tonight.