'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"?

Why I have to vacuum the hammock.

Empty Nest Illumination

I should not wear my 7 light headlamp when cleaning the house. It shows the fine white powder on the vertical surfaces of the furniture. I kept warm cleaning and polishing yesterday. Washing walls today? Empty rooms get musty; empty nest syndrome.

Bigger nest than necessary.

You DID want this wood in the cart, didn't you?

Sometimes Mother Nature is too cooperative!

I didn't have time before it started raining to burn the privet I'd cut out of the driveway, so I covered the load on our brand new cart and left it next to our burn spot. I didn't hesitate to leave the cart out in the rain because we'd painted the tubing (red) and added extra stain to the wood. The cover was to keep the load dry.

At 5:30 AM the wind dropped the thirty years old, two years dead tulip poplar. It was on our 'round tuit list to be removed as soon as we had funds to hire a tree crew with a bucket truck because it was next to the house. Luckily it missed the house, the fence, the car, and the many trees around it.

My foot and zebra pajama leg should give you an idea just how big the trunk is.

BUT it landed slap dab in the middle of our garden cart.

At least we won't have to move the leftover twigs. If we only had a cart to move the firewood.....

.

Get Ready 1,2,3.

If Pieface sniffs out another poisonous snake, we won't be wasting any time looking for the weapons of destruction. I only hope that our preparation will jinx the deal and these will not be needed.

But I don't expect for the bb gun to stay put. We have to pump that one to shut Pieface up if he starts nagging me for breakfast before dawn. OR the fly swatter. It's the only thing that keeps him from biting the vacuum wand/leaf blower. You know, because it moves. He can shout all he wants to then.

entomological protest

The annual cycle of oppression presses on!

First in the dry cat food on the floor; we placed the dishes in moats and change them daily or suffer the WORST SMELL IN THE WORLD - wet rotting pet food.

Next came forays to the kitchen sink, for water, even though they have hefty trails into the hoses out side AND a shallow fountain that oozes year 'round.

Now they insist that our bread counter must be scrubbed - repeatedly. They don't care.

They keep on coming.

On the plus side, these ARE sugar ants. We haven't seen a fire ant inside since we had the house walls drilled and treated for termites. Fire ants bite you when you scoop them up with a sponge.

Summer Kittens

Saturday I found out it is easier to get MamaKitty to accept an abandoned newborn if it looks like one in her current litter.

I had to interfere. I couldn't take the pitiful mewing sound in the bedroom patio.

At first I couldn't pick up the kitten. Literally, it's umbilical cord had wrapped around an English Ivy vine. After cutting the vines with scissors I freed it from the attached placenta before placing the tan kitten in the cage with MamaKitty and her very last litter.

Even though this one is about one third the size of her babies, she took it to her right away.

Turn the clock forward two hours.

I had to interfere. I couldn't take the pitiful mewing sound in the bedroom patio entrance. The cord had been severed but green flies buzzed all around. Time for a bath to remove the fly eggs.

Hydrogen peroxide on a washcloth wasn't enough. I had to comb through it's fur with my flea comb after adding soap to loosen the egg's glue.

Talk about Abundance! There must've been a tablespoon of eggs on this baby who easily fit in the palm of my hand; layers and layers of 'em. (Relatives featured in Primordial Soup?)

Dried it off and put it in with MamaKitty.

She looked at it in horror!

She looked at me "How dare you endanger my kittens!"

And then, so as to NOT endanger her kittens, I took out the first kitten to comb off it's fly eggs. So few, I could've counted them.

When I returned, MamaKitty had her 1 beige and 3 white kittens rounded up in the corner under the shelf with her body between them and the intruder.

I returned the newborn beige kitten into the pile and left the tiny grey baby where it was. I trust in the wisdom of MamaKitty. She's had lots more experience raising kittens. For all I know, these are her great great great great great great grands.

This morning, Monday, the two newbies were snuggled up together. They've been holding their own, getting in to nurse, even though the others are three and four times bigger.

All because of my flash of insight (with great relief) that although I'm not up to feeding newborns every two to four hours, maybe MamaKitty IS!

Recipe for Primordial Soup
Leave 20 lbs of sunflower seeds in a clear storage container (with sliding locks on the lid) on the patio so you won't forget to dole them out to the birds...for a year...in the wind and the sun and the rain.

Do you know ?

Pieface the dog will tag a box of maggots every day.

Flies can keep breeding in water...layer after layer...

Packing tape around the edges and over the latches keeps some smells in but NOT some flies out.

Pallet wrap keeps more smells in but lets some fluids out.

One garbage bag is not big enough.

Two garbage bags are no better.

Two people can put a stinkin' box on a pallet and only have to wash their hands.

We will drive the forklift four blocks from downtown Parrott to our home, but not to our woods to take a pallet OFF the pickup bed.

We'd really like to go back to 1979 to thank the prison-laborer at the Terrell County dump for telling Bond how to unload a pickup with a tire, rope and a tree, even if we didn't need the tire this time.

P.S. The jury's still out which smelled worse, the turtle or the box.
The turtle only smelled bad when INSIDE the car and left no scent trail. However even the EMPTIED truck bed reeked like the waste transfer station, on a bad day.