I Just Bought A Backhoe

I just bought a backhoe. No really.

A sexy backhoe.

It was just delivered today.

So I spent most of my morning running around and flailing and yelling backhoe! Backhoe! BACKHOE! Like a totally mature adult would do. I also high fived the dog and told the delivery guy that this day was the happiest day of my life and that 'this is better then my wedding day.' And then Scott glared at me but it didn't matter because we have a goddamned backhoe and no one can take that away from me.

Now for someone who feels terrible about spending 75 bucks on an oil painting buying something that was nearing the 18 grand mark sent me into some sort of haunted money trance.

After spending almost half a year lurking on heavy equipment forums, driving around to look at backhoes, talking to backhoe owners, and complaining about our chronic lack of backhoe Scott found a backhoe on Craigslist. It was perfect. Four wheel drive (a must have) the right brand, priced right. It was in PA, but we said what the hell we'll go have a look.

Except it was snowing sideways that day with 50 mph winds.

It was an adventure. We drove to PA in the middle of a blizzard in our Oldsmobile Cutlass. At times the snow drifts were so deep that we almost slid into the ditch, other times the wind would whip up little snow devils and blind us completely. We ended up passing the street and had to double back for it, which meant that we had to play a mandatory game of find-a-place-to-turn-around-in-the-middle-of-nowheres-fucking-ville Blizzard addition.

We ended up buying it.

Now we didn't buy it just then, there was the sleeping on it* and getting the money from the bank and the obligatory freaking out. Spending this amount of money on something I go through the seven stages of grief. They are as follows.

Shock:

“There is no way we are going to do this.”

Denial:

“Maybe we can haggle the price lower”

Anger:

“If life were fair we would already have a backhoe by now.”

Bargaining

“Do you think we could just steal a backhoe?”

Guilt:

“Oh god, what have I done. That was a shit ton of money right there.”

Depression:

Have you ever just opened your bank account and just looked at it?

Acceptance:

“Backhoes are so fucking awesome.”

They are indeed. So. Fucking. Awesome. Now if you excuse me I need to go dig holes in the yard for no reason other then I mothering fucking can.

Awesome.

* I don't mean that we were literally sleeping on the backhoe during a snowstorm. Just thought I should clear that up. In case you were wondering.

So I May Have Bought a Haunted Painting

Okay. So I may have bought a haunted painting. Now I don't mean haunted in the sense that this painting is home to an angry ghost. I mean that I think the painting may be a magical door way to another world. I mean, well, look at it.

When I saw it, I stopped dead in my tracks. It was an arresting sight. It was like I wasn't just looking at a painting, but that I was looking into another world. You know how there's that scene in movies when the main charter sees the magical item in the thrift store and then the wind kicks up and the music does something that is both happy and ominous at the same time? Yeah that kind of happened.

So I bought the painting for 75 bucks. Then I had a minor panic attack because spending 75 dollars on something I want makes me feel like a failure at life for some reason.

It was about then that I realized that, well this was a big painting. It's about 2.5ft tall. The only place in the car it would fit was wedging it behind the seats where the ice scraper tried to defile it and I had to manually separate the two. On the drive home I kept twisting around in the car to look at the damn thing, like at any moment something was going to happen. I don't know what. But something. So I get the thing home and prop it up in my office while I try to look up the artist online. Which fails magnificently since I am fairly sure that this was painted BI (Before Internet*.)

Deciding that the best thing to do would be to mount it on the wall at this point because it's clearly not getting anymore magical sitting there on the floor. So I do my thing and mount it up on the wall. At this point something dawns on me.

It's right above my PS3.

You know that bit from the Narnia chronicles Voyage of the Dawn Treader where Edmund and Lucy see the painting of the ship in their aunt's house and think it looks like a Narnian ship and then the painting comes to life and floods the room? Yeah.

You see any insignia on that ship? You see any indication that this ship is from our world? Because I sure as hell don't. Why did I buy a possibly haunted painting and then hang it above one of my most valuable possessions? I don't fucking know. Why do I do these things to myself? Why am I asking so many motherfucking questions?

What's weird is that I don't like to have my back to it. Except my desk faces away from the painting and now I have to keep twisting around to check on it. Which I guess is bad planning on my part.

If I stop posting after this and you never hear from me again and it's like a just just dropped off the face of the world- the painting got me.

Avenge me.

* The painting is oil, and as far as the store guy knew, about 15 years old. It is signed Jackson in the lower right corner. I tired using Google image match to find the painting, but nothing came up. There were some really close look a likes, but nothing that matched. (Looking at the angle the ship was leaning was the fasted way to tell if the paintings were the same.) So in the off chance that anybody knows anything, let me know. Preferably before the painting goes all crazy pants and I wind up trapped in it somehow.

Allegheny Power Hates Us.

I am fairly sure that Allegheny Power is spying on us. My theory is that they wait until we absolutely positively need power and then they shut it off. You probably think that sounds insane, but you should stop judging me like that. Besides after what happened a few days ago, I'm not so sure anymore.

We were going to collect rocks. Because I want to build my house out of rocks. This involves getting the rocks from the middle of the woods, swamp, field, bee nest, or brier patch where they happen to be and moving them to one central location. Now, in the past this has involved using the wheel barrow.

I need to take a moment to point out that the wheelbarrow hates me. Really Really hates me. It waits until I have a large load and I have to go down a hill, and then, without warning it would dig the front bar into the ground, which would accomplish two things.

     1. The wheelbarrow would keel over on it's side like a large whale filled with rocks thus spilling my hours  of goddamned labor all over the fucking lawn.

     2. Now according to physics, an object will remain in motion until a force, equal or greater, is applied to stop it. So my body was still moving, meaning that my shins would meet the metal back bar at a considerable  speed. Also, and unfortunately for me, this also meant that I would then need to use the rapidly descending back bar as a spring board to avoid the handles from sweeping me off my feet and smashing my face into a pile of rocks.*

So when Scott suggested we use the truck I enthusiastically seconded the motion. There was just one little problem. It wouldn't start. That's alright we said we'll just use the battery charger. We hooked up the battery charger and I went down to clean out the animal pens, because they just won't stop pooping.

Well I clean out the pens and spread the shit fertilizer on the garden. Then I gather the eggs and head inside to discover the power is out. Which means the truck hasn't been charging. I call the power company and then head outside to inform Scott that our ability to take a shower is just fucking gone, man. I was pretty sure I could here the wheelbarrow laughing at me as I went and got it out of the shed.

We did not move rocks with it however, and instead moved some dead leaves as mulch for the garden, but I could still feel it's smug sense of victory. Asshole wheelbarrow. 

Feeling like at least we had accomplished something we went back inside to discover the power was back on. But the Internet wasn't. The Internet would not work. Turns out the router had gone all crazy pants when the power went out.** Alright we said, we'll just find the disk and reconfigure it or whatever the hell it is that one does to make it work. (It should be pretty obvious that when I said 'we' I meant 'Scott.')

Except we couldn't find the disk. (And by 'we' I mean 'Scott')

We tore the house mobile home apart looking for that disk. Finally Scott announced that if he had put it somewhere he had put it into another dimension. We were just going to have to buy another router. It was the only way. So we bought another router and did the magic thing and it worked. Just like magic.

To recap, the power being out caused me to be subjected to the evil wheelbarrow and blew the Internet somehow so that we had to buy another router, and screwed me out of a day of rock collecting.

You win this round Allegheny Power. You win this round.


* Yes we checked the tire pressure. I still have no idea what causes this. Oh, wait yes I do, the wheel barrow hates me and everything I stand for.

** You know, I wonder if I had left the wheelbarrow near that window for any length of time.

I've Done a Bad Thing.

I have done a bad thing. I purchased a TV. For my office. An expensive TV. The conversation mainly went like this.

“Hey Scott, can you help me hook my PS3 up to the TV in my office?”

“Huh? What TV?”

“You know the one that's the size of our car. The shitty one.”

“Why would you want to do that? That TV sucks and your PS3 has an HDMI cable.”

“I know, but I can't hear my game when you are playing your music. It was all like ' the magic Urn of Ashes is BWAA-MOW-MOW-BWAAANNGG-your most important quest.' I ended up killing an entire village and I'm not even sure if I was supposed to.”

“I could have just turned it down. Why don't you just buy another TV?”

“I can do that. I have money! I'm an adult! But I really shouldn't.”

“Why not. You don't usually go out and buy anything.”

“Get in the car. Were going to Walmart.”

“There's a blizzard outside.”

“We are also out of cheese.”

“I'll warm up the car.”

Which is how I ended up wrestling a giant 32' inch TV into the shopping cart at the Walmart. I could have got the smaller one but it wasn't out which meant that I would have had to talk to the employees and almost nothing is worth that.

I also bought a bottle of red wine, because I wanted to forget how much I was going to be spending on this thing. This is retrospect, was a mistake.

We got said TV home and Scott both simultaneously made dinner and hooked up my TV. Which is why I love him. He handed me the remote and went to go ladle food onto plates. This was it. The moment of impulse buy glory. I flipped on the TV and turned on the PS3. Which is when I received the first error message stating that the PS3 had not been properly shut down (it had been) and needed to do a system restore.

I do not know what a system restore means but in my mind it meant this:

System restore = all your game saves and updates are shit gone.

This was followed immanently by the TV screen turning blue and an error message, this time from the TV itself telling me that it was not compatible with the PS3 because of the screen refresh rate. So let me recap here. My PS3 is trying to system restore and I can't help it because the TV won't let me see it anymore.

I. Freaked. The. Fuck. Out.

Have you ever wanted to see me lose my shit? Like really lose it? I was so close to having my brain synapses just start fucking exploding right that minute. I think I ate three whole bites of dinner while feverishly flipping through the TV manual. Scott assured me he would fix it. He got to enjoy dinner with a crazy person that night, as I kept muttering things about how ' the HDMI connection was a lie' and 'sweet Jesus what have I done' and 'why god why.'

Scott went into my office to try to fix the TV. Now often is these situations it's better that I am not in the room. It's better for everyone. But I could not stay away. I peeked around the door to see him fiddling with the remote. He asked me which HDMI port I was in and then hit two buttons and it worked.

The TV. The PS3. Like nothing had ever happened.

I still do not know how he did it. If he had not been in the room with me I would have thrown myself at my PS3 and held it in my arms until it was okay again. But I didn't I followed Scott back to kitchen where my eyes fell on that bottle of wine.

The bottle of wine that I ended up drinking most of. It was terrible. It was from the Walmart. But I did it anyway. Have you ever been at that tipping point of drinking, where you ask yourself if you want to get any drunker and you know you shouldn't? I did.

Which is how I ended up having to get vomit out of my nostrils at 2 am. 

The Door Was Open Again

So Scott left the door open again last night and when I got up this morning the dog was gone. I did what any self respecting wife would do is this situation, I woke up my god damned husband and told him that he was was going to go look for the god damned dog.

Now he swears he shut the door last night. I doubt that he did. Either that, or the cat has learned how to open doors. Luckily, as I was stepping out to feed the animals, I see the dog running out of the garden, where she had presumably been eating things out of the compost bin. Yummy.

So I catch her and bring her back inside, no harm no foul.

But why is the door still open in the mornings? There are three possibilities.

1. The door is not shutting properly and is popping back open when the wind hits it.

2. The cat has figured out how to open doors.

3. Scott is forgetting to shut the door at night after feeding our outdoor cats.

Now, if number one was true, I would expect the door would also be popping open during the day as well. Even if it was something weird like the cooler night air is causing the wood to shrink and the door comes open, I would doubt it. Today has been colder that the past two days combined, and the door is still shut.

My cat is pretty dumb.

I think number three is more likely. I'm thinking of setting up my web cam and aiming it at the door all night and seeing what the hell is going on. I'm not sure it will record for eight hours, but I'm willing to give it a shot.

All I can say is it had better not be motherfucking Mothman.

The Chicken Coup: A Saga In The Making

I am not winning. After missing a golden chance to build the new chicken coup, when the weather guys swore up and god damned down that it was going to rain and then it totally didn't, we realized that there was another string of nice days coming up.

All of my pent up frustration over the sunshine and warmth when there was supposed to rain and cold led us to decide to rebuild the coup during this supposed stretch of nice weather.* This, in retrospect, was a bad idea.

We have been working on this god damned thing for 4 fucking days and we haven't even got the plywood on the roof yet, let alone the metal roofing. It might rain tomorrow and that would be bad, also Scott has a doctors appointment at 2:30, meaning we are going to be stopping working at about 1pm. Meaning that I think we are fucked. Can you put metal roofing on in the rain? You know it's going to rain for two freaking days and then be balls fucking cold? Here is a breakdown of how our days went so far.

Day 1. Lots of optimism. Went to Lowes and got shafted on on a bunch of lumber for the framing. Got back and assembled the front wall (the hardest wall) before it got too cold. The sun sets at 4pm, so that is when we stop working. And by set we mean goes behind the god damned ridge and the temperature immediately drops by about 5 degrees like someone flipped a god damned switch.

Day 2. Wait for frost to kinda melt off before we start. Finish framing. Slightly less optimism, a lot of 'wait did I measure that right?' Decide we should pick up the OSB and sheathing for the walls. Off to Lowes again for some more price raping. Come back and it's dark.

Day 3. Decided lack of optimism. Realize we need an 8ft A frame ladder to reach the highest point on the roof. We no not have a 8ft A frame ladder. All we have are 2 sketchy as hell hand me down ladders that my father had. We put OSB on. Got the back wall completely sheathed inside and out, as well as most of the outside done. Congratulations are in order. Drive to town to buy food and ladder. Can't find a an 8ft ladder. Eat cheese cake.

Day 4. Everything goes to hell and optimism is buried at the crossroads in a shallow grave. Framed all the windows and the door. I can tell you right now, strait up, that cutting windows out of the motherfucking sonofabitch sheathing is harder than fuck all. There are not enough curse words in the whole of the English language to convey how much this sucked. Got all of the windows cut out, and one of the two vents done, but now we get to do it all over again with the OSB, which was not been fully done on the inside of the walls yet. Got the roof rafters up.

So tomorrow we have to:

Install plywood on roof, add roofing paper/tar paper/whatever the fuck it's called.

Place on the metal roofing.

Place and cut the OSB.

Sand down the areas around the doors and windows because our cuts are not perfect.

Install windows.

Paint Structure inside and out.

I think were fucked. Straight up fucked and we will be lucky to finish the roof plywood before he has to leave for the doctors. I don't think we are getting all that done in 4 hours. I think we are going to be putting the metal roofing on in 36 degree weather.

Yay.

* Nice weather meaning above 50 Degrees.

Looking for more Chicken Coup Adventures? Here's Part Two.

I Fixed The Furnace.

You read that right. Uh huh. I fixed the fuel oil furnace. 

Only after Scott spent 164 Motherfucking dollars on a new magic gray box. It turns out that the upper limit switch had been tripped and all I had to do was push it back down. However since neither one of us knew how to operate this god damned furnace, we had no idea upper limit switches even existed. 

The upper limit switch, as I learned though frantic googling of the problem, is a temperature gage that prevents the furnace from overheating and burning down your house mobile home. 

I also learned that the type of furnace I have is a piece of crap that is very likely to over heat and burn down my mobile home. Oh joy. Yet another thing to keep me up at night. 

So anyway I fixed it. 

I think I'm going to have to stop this entry here, though, because I can't think of anything to write that isn't a bitter diatribe against the universe for the seemingly endless amount of bad luck I have been having this year. 

I'm going to go eat cookies until the situation improves itself. 

Power Outage Fun Time.

So the power went out for two days. This event, while not unusual for this time of year, served to highlight that fact that we were totally unprepared for winter to a ridicules level. The power went out at about 5am Saturday morning, meaning that it got every very cold inside, rather quickly. Upon waking up I also realized that there was 7 inches of snow outside, and it was still snowing. 

Now the day before, we had just learned that the storm was due to show up on Saturday night, instead of Monday like they had been thinking. So we basically constructed an entire furnace shed in one afternoon, having spent all morning feverishly buying materials at the Lowes. It was very cold outside, as the temp was dropping during the day, and once we got the framing up, it started to snow. Picture the two of us, outside, frantically cutting sheathing in the pouring snow, cursing at each other and dropping screws on the ground because ours hands were too cold to hold them anymore. We hadn't eaten anything since early morning, and it was 5pm. 

We quickly realized that we were not going to get the roof on with out help, and had to make an emergency call to my Uncle Dale, who is the go to person now, since my dad is dead. He told us he could come out, but that it would be after dark, since he had a few things to do himself before the snow got too bad. Long story short, he showed up, and I told him we had made some bad decisions, but that it was okay because he was here now. He laughed. I also told him that just like every other kid in his life, I only called him when I needed something. Well in the dark and the cold and the snow the three of us (did I mention my husband still has a broken rib?) Wrestled the roof in place and tacked it down. We covered the roof in plastic sheeting as a temp cover* A congratulatory home brewed beer was had, and my uncle departed, and we ate crappy oven baked pizza and went to bed, tired but happy. That shed was up god damned it. 

At around five am, I woke up to a pitch black mobile home, and the sound of my battery back up for my PC beeping incessantly. Usually when this happens the power will kick back on in a few minutes. I lay there listening to the beeping, waiting, and waiting. Nothing happened. 

We got up sometime the next morning, brewed some tea, and began to talk about ways to heat the trailer. I soon discovered that my Dad's back up generator was a 300 pound behemoth that neither of us could move out of shed or, indeed anywhere near the trailer and also hadn't been serviced in about two years. That's okay, we said, We'll just go over to the newer trailer (my Dad's trailer when he was alive, where the newly built furnace shed is residing) and use the back up propane heater. We came to conclusion, after about a good twenty minutes of fighting the controls, that A: we had no idea how this thing worked, and that B: it was out of fuel. Two Propane tanks sit out back and feed it, and they were both empty. 

Okay then. Our only option now, was to buy a generator to run the blowers on the wood stove.** This involved going to town, which meant that we first needed to shovel the driveway. Which we did. The snow was heavy and wet and my back and arm still hurt from heaving shovel full after shovel full over the bank. Finally we make it to town, and purchased a 200$ motherfucking generator. We bring it back, only to discover that we don't have any gas for it. Scott goes into town AGAIN while I built a platform for said generator from an old pallet and a few boards. He gets back, and we fire it up. 

We manage to fight the temperature inside back up to a balmy 60 degrees. However this involves getting up in the middle of the night at 3am to refill the wood stove and the generator. This meant that I spent the better part of an hour laying awake in bed, listing to the generator, terrified that it would die prematurely and the heat from the stove would melt the extension cord, which could totally really happen. I'm not kidding. 

Needless to say I didn't get a whole lot of sleep that night. 

The next day was grim repetition of the first, keeping the generator going, and trying to get whatever chores we could get done accomplished. Finally the power came back on at exactly 4pm. YES! I could take a SHOWER. I had Internet! I could microwave shit! I could wash my clothes! 

Except now the fuel oil furnace isn't working, and we have to go to town AGAIN to blow money on a new magic gray box that will hopefully make it work. 

This, right here people, is life in country. This negates any idea I had every had about going out this Halloween either. Then my friend sent me a text Saturday night, unaware of my struggles to survive, about how she didn't feel like going to any parties that night, and I wanted to strangle her. I guess it was just cosmic payback for the time I called her because my pet rat was dead and she told me her sister had just died. 

I'm still sorry about that one, Heather. 

* Note: if you think you would like to live in the country and buy a place to build a house on and homestead, the second thing you should do is go out and buy a roll of thick plastic from the store. It is not a tarp, it will not last all winter, but by god when you need temporary cover for something RIGHT NOW this stuff in in-fucking-valuable.

** Now to explain, our furnace shed is located behind our mobile home, contains our wood stove and is fully functional. My Dad's trailer needed a furnace shed to house his wood stove, as the original shed he had built needed to be torn down. That is what we were building on Friday so we can move into his place, since his is the newer mobile home.

The Driveway Is A Venus Fly Trap

I got back from work at 5:35 am this morning. I feel like I've been run over by a truck. A big truck. Speaking of trucks guess what happened when I ordered gravel? 

If you guessed the gravel truck got stuck in my driveway, you'd be right. Like really stuck. This was unexpected as it was like 4:30 in the afternoon. The driver got out, and we stood looking at his truck. It had slid off the road, and the right rear wheel was just chilling in the ditch. We tried shoveling gravel under the tires to give him some traction. 

It didn't work. 

 It was getting dark. I offered him some shots, he declined. I kept apologizing for my road that had just eaten one of his trucks. I really had no idea what to talk about in that situation. The weather? 

He called someone, who showed up with a skid steer and a flat bed truck. He made the mistake of pulling in behind the gravel truck, which you should never ever do. Ever. We almost didn't get the flat bed back out again. Then the skid steer got stuck. 

This is sadness, also expensive.

 At that point they told me that would have to come back in the morning with a bulldozer. They climbed into the only vehicle that was not stuck in the mud and drove off. I went inside, intending to have a god damned drink, only to discover that the dog had eaten a shit ton of fresh made-from-scratch- cookies off the table in my absence. 

It was not a good day. 

Of course Scott was in DC though all of this so he missed almost all of the fun, arriving home just in time to see them victoriously dump what was left of the gravel in the lawn. He wasn't here when the fuel oil tank started to go when they were filling it either. I'm beginning to get tired of apologizing to various delivery people for things. 

I had asked the man with a bulldozer what to do about the driveway and he told me that we had to scrape it back down to the clay, add shale, and then add gravel. In a way it's fortune that this happened, because we were both unsure as to how to really go about fixing the damn thing. I was working under the assumption that the previous owners had done that step, but he assured us that, no they hadn't. The road was a lie. 

So all in all, not one of the better days of my life.