'Black Friday" in Parrott

As most Americans do, we cooked and ate a fabulous turkey, then took Thanksgiving Day off; just lazed around the house or walked the dog.
However, unlike most Americans we did not spend the next day with the bargain hunters; we battled a clog in the drain to the septic tank because water came out of the shower drains when the washing machine emptied. We fed a snake and then a garden hose down the former kitchen sink drain.  Mom finally told me (after I'd lived in the house 33 years) that they'd moved the kitchen because there wasn't enough pitch and the drain clogged up several times that first year. Their solution worked as this was the first time I'd had any problem with the drain clogging.  But WE were unsuccessful.  Our snake and hose couldn't go far enough.
The next day we decided to look for a clean out (or put one in), and found it after vacuuming a few gallons of fill dirt out from around the shut-off valve under the front porch, a brick patio.   Termites had eaten the plywood that held back the dirt. It didn't help at all that our stack of replacement doors rests against the wall over the hole.
'Finding' and 'getting into' are not the same thing.  None of our tools were big enough to fit the end plug.  We called Laing's Hardware in Dawson (still open as it was before noon) and Jim told us they had no tool too, and we may as well make our own.  Bond set to work designing and building the tool (upside down in the picture above) out of plastic 'wood' screwed to the ends of 2, 2x4's with a dowel handle.
We got the plug out but not the clog.
Until we rent a powered snake, we 'll put corks in the ground floor showers and keep laundry loads small.  Perhaps the clog will fix itself......
We are still puzzled why the darned thing backed up all of a sudden in this year of drought.  Water has come up in the lowest shower twice during heavy rains when the ground was too saturated for the drain field to work (BOTH ALSO DURING HOLIDAYS!)   And we'd had the tank pumped out one time, just six months ago.
In my research I found that the day after Thanksgiving is Roto-Rooter's biggest day of the year for emergency calls.  Looks like we WERE having the same kind of Black Friday as many Americans...or was that a "Brown Friday"?

Tonight I learned that if you put the kitten's medicine in canned catfood, inside a cat crate, with the door shut, (on accounta the kitten is busy playing on the floor with a Q-tip) the dog can still eat it!

Hidden Memory

I opened the mattress topper we'd purchased for the spare bedroom's double bed at my sister's house.

I'd slept alone on the bed for a week at a time amending the too firm mattress with the comforter under the fitted sheet (helped only a little).
After one long night following a plane ride jammed into the last row in seats with obnoxious head rests and no ability to recline, we gave in and got this 'bread and butter' present because the comforter wasn't big enough for two people.
Grateful to find the washable cotton cover in it's own little bag, I got that into the washing machine to wash out the 'sizing'.
Even before we read the inserted "Product Disclaimer" (also translated honestly into Spainish "Renuncia de Responsabilidad") we planned to open and air-out the unwashable foam pad.
I tore off the 3 strips of tape over plastic pallet wrap, unfolded the compressed pad, grabbed my camera phone to record the tiny handprints as their memories quickly faded away.
The image of many people surrounding the pad, smushing/folding/smushing it all at once and someone else wrapping it QUICK! before it could get away lingers in MY memory.

Cellphone Made Me Feel Like a Fool TWICE!

The screen went blank on Bond's third phone in a year. I'd run his first through the wash. The second one we found at the bottom of the pallet wood-scrap barrel was unreliable, probably why it wound up in the barrel without a Sim card, but with a charged battery (so we knew it worked). We found it a charger at Amazon for 3 cents plus shipping. #2 was also out-dated so we replaced it.

A blank screen made phone #3 almost useless; he could use speed dial or answer it. But If Bond missed a call he couldn't see who'd called and couldn't call them back. And forget about texts. But he'd never been able to turn off predictive text and refused to use that anyway. Most annoying was that he couldn't turn off the daily 6 AM alarm! He'd leave phone #3 in a far away room when he wanted to sleep in.

Phone #4 arrived via UPS on Friday. I unpacked it and put the battery in to charge the necessary (but very short) 4 1/2 hours. The other phone was still at work so I couldn't install the Sim card until later.

While Bond cooked our chicken dinner I read him the instructions and moved the Sim card. After a short break for a cocktail and chicken livers on toast, I returned to the instructions to learn how to turn the phone on. Instructions said to press and hold the "soft key". As I studied them, I noticed that the keys looked suspiciously smudged. I couldn't find one that looked like the picture so I pressed and held down the "disconnect" key and it started up, greeted me with "Hell-o Moto" and then told me there was no Sim card. At first I thought I'd installed the card wrong. Then I realized I'd picked up phone #3, FOOLISH ME! I changed to the other phone and continued the set up, including calling it with my phone and, later, calling my mom on speakerphone for a lovely family chat.

It wasn't until the next day I realized THE SCREEN WORKED! Bond had tried everything to make the phone work, EXCEPT taking out the battery.

I can predict the future.

I woke up this morning at 5:30. Thought it was too early to get up until I calculated (because I fell asleep on the new PBS Brit-drama) that I'd had about 7 hours of sleep. Worried a bit about the winds from the predicted ice storm bringing down the dead pine next to the house and then dragged myself out of bed because "this may be my only chance to get a hot cup of coffee before the power goes out." As I counted to five, filling the electric pot with just the minimum 2 cups of cold water, the power went out. RATS! too late!
SO DARK! Not even one tiny l.e.d. to guide me back to bed where we stayed comfortably snoozing until noon, too lazy to get up and start a fire in the wood stove in the next room. It probably helped us sleep to know we have 2 wood stoves and plenty of fuel to keep us warm in case the power stays out for days.