The Excitement Never Ends...

 

Another storm, another tree down. This time the hybrid poplar clump in our front yard let go of one of its trunks across the front yard, not across our driveway or house. That's because the intense windstorm blew from the south, knocking out power to us and 41 other households in our area. It was night, farm chores were done, so we just went to bed and hoped for the best. 

Power was back on in the morning and all animals were alive and all but one building was still intact. I actually drove my EZ Go back and forth to the barns several times without noticing the tree lying in the front yard. It was cleverly shielded by the bushes it had crushed.

 

 I was always looking the other direction where the big trunk was still nestled between firs across the front driveway from the Christmas night storm.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 This latest victim was more noticeable from the front yard

 

 

In the back yard, we had watched, before dark, the intense wind blowing the Linden branches clear to the ground before they sprang back up. It was dramatic. But in the morning the Linden was intact. However, it had dumped all its dead twigs all over the ground

 

 

So I spent hours picking up twigs/branches, loading them in my EZ Go and taking them down to the burn pile in a lower field. It was a beautiful day so I didn't mind although my sciatica did

 

Goats were enjoying the unusual warmth and sunshine. 

 

Until they saw me driving by with a load of what they thought was tasty browse for them to chew on. Sorry, gang, it was just dead twigs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile I had noticed plastic blowing from the shed that held plywood, along with other stuff. That shed was the last remaining piece of the old barn that had been on this place when we moved here and where our goats lived for the first many years. Johnny spent the whole day trying to resurrect that roof.

 

 

 

Johnny is back on the roof today. You can't keep a good man down. 

As for me, I'm doing the documentary here. And taking a tip from this garden gnome...

 

 

 

Our 58th Anniversary

 It seems impossible that Johnny and I, young things that we think we are, have been married for 58 years but... we were married on Feb. 13 in 1967 so...  

I have told the story many times in these blog posts of how we happened to get married the day before Valentine's Day. 

Briefly: Johnny's Forest Service boss in Wyoming told him the Friday before that it was not acceptable to be living with a woman he was not married to. (Remember: This was 1967). So I had to move out. Instead, we got married the next Monday, when we figured the courthouse would be open. What we didn't realize was that Feb. 13 was a Federal Holiday (Lincoln's Birthday, I think) and courthouses in Wyoming and nearby Utah were closed. That's how we happened to get married in Paris. 

Paris, Idaho, that is. I guess Idaho did not observe federal holidays. 

Johnny always says Friday the 13th came on a Monday that year. And it does seem as though we have had some minor bad luck on most of our anniversaries. Those stories are in my blog posts, too. 

This year was no exception.

I have been sick for weeks with the coughing virus that's going around. Johnny gave it to me. Of course, he's well now. It's a good thing, too, because the weather has been challenging. I talked him into staying home on the 13th to celebrate our anniversary with me. All seemed to be going well at first. We watched a wonderful movie on the Roku TV that son Steve had given us and installed when they came here for the Christmas holidays. We had no clue how to use it, of course, so grandson Kestrel wrote out instructions in a little book and left it for us with the tv. Thank goodness for that little book. Johnny figured it out and we spent the afternoon watching The Greatest Showman. All was well until I went to the bathroom afterwards and discovered that we had no water. 

Johnny investigated the possibilities and discovered a broken pipe between well and house. Of course, he got stuck in his EZ Go in the snow and I was enlisted to pull him out with the tractor, which I have not driven in ages. That went well and I was able to take my coughing body back to the house while he gathered up all sorts of tools and, eventually, fixed the broken pipe. 

The only other still-unresolved problem is the bathroom tub drain doesn't drain and he's spending Valentine's Day working on that.

I guess it just shows if we can survive our Friday-the-13th-on-Monday anniversary each year, we can stick together for 58 years... and counting. 

A Bad Start to 2025

 

 

 There is no way to sugar coat the way this year has begun, both for us and for our nation.

 We don't usually get sick but we are. Johnny has had a coughing virus for a month. Now I have it. Just about everyone we know locally has or has had this bug. On top of that, I injured my back the first day Johnny was up in Seattle and have had painful sciatica down my right leg ever since. Fortunately, our electric EZ Go golf carts are very comfortable on my sore hip and so I've been doing chores via EZ Go for a month. But the relief is only while I'm in the cart so most of the time, I'm in pain. I don't do pain well. I do think it is slightly better... at least I'm not slathering it with pain relief salve constantly.

But worse is the state of our nation, now in the charge of a lunatic with a band of self-serving, wealthy lunatics carrying out their plans to gut the government of laws and any official that doesn't carry out their cruel directives. They have managed to buy the news media so most Americans apparently don't realize what's happening. That may change as soon as prices skyrocket, as they will have to do with the tariffs being imposed and all the seasonal workers being shipped out of the country. I doubt the fat cats in Washington will be picking produce in their places. Not that high prices mean anything but higher profits for them and their companies. It's only ordinary, non-billionaire Americans, who will pay the price. And, so far, they are mostly clueless.

So what's a person to do? I write letters to my congress folk, sign petitions, try to educate the people who are willing to listen (of whom there are precious few), and mostly just associate with and support our friends who are as outraged as are we. And that includes all of our left-leaning, progressive, college-educated friends... a group that includes nearly all our friends. If and when the tv addicts and Elon Musk worshipers will figure out there's a problem, I don't know.

Meanwhile, back on the farm, we just keep keeping on. This morning the ground is covered in snow. The world always looks so fresh and beautiful in snow. I am trying not to worry about how my hip-saving EZ Go will perform in deep snow. And what I will do if it won't. The goats should be worried, too, but they have the advantage of living in the present and trusting that their slave (me) will get to the barn to feed them. 

So I will take a clue from our supposedly less intelligent livestock and just enjoy the beauty of our newly-white world for a spell... and take photos... from inside my EZ Go, while it can still navigate this lovely, white world.