I wasn’t even surprised when late afternoon yesterday my power went out during the worst of the windy rain. What did surprise me was that it wasn’t the weather that caused the power outage – it was some guy up the road in an excavator who backed into a power pole. How he did that on 25 acres of flat farmland is a mystery to me, but then again, I’ve never driven an excavator.
Anyway, the pole went down across the road, and with it went our power. And my freedom! As I am at the end of a dead-end road, and there was a pole down across that road, I was trapped on my property, with no way to escape to, say Starbucks for a latte and some wifi, or the drugstore for candles! It was a long, and cold, 6 hours of pitch black silence, let me tell you.
Poor Wootie was freezing cold too, as we had been outside playing just before the power went out, and he’d been splashing about merrily in a ditch. I wrapped up the sad little orange sack of cold-wet in a blanket and sat him on my lap while he shivered. You never saw anything that pathetic in your life.
phhllbbb on crummy weather.
The finer points of living in the stix continue to elude me. I’m making real efforts to adapt, and yesterday somehow convinced my stepdad to drive all the way out here in the pouring rain to help me build a temporary fence. There are no photos of this fence for two reasons.
1) it’s invisible.Not really. What it it’s made of is deer netting, which is a thin black plastic mesh material that is supposed to keep hundreds of lbs of deer off your property. After lots of painstaking research, I chose deer netting because the temporary fence was going in a place where a fence would look stupid, so being almost invisible was a bonus. Also, it’s super inexpensive, and since this is just a temporary potty area, I didn’t want to sink any money into it. Real fencing goes in next Spring.
The other reason there are no photos of it:
2) Because it’s already gone! How the hell this stuff is supposed to keep a 400lb deer out of anything is a mystery to me, because 40lbs of Tweed didn’t see it (cuz, you know, it’s invisible), ran into it and split it right down the center. WTF?
The whole reason for putting up the temporary fencing was so that I had a semi-secure potty area to put the dogs in where they wouldn’t wander off. Because Wootie has a habit of just … leaving. And lately, he has started taking Dexter with him.
Who, me?
Yes, you, you little rat! In fact, if Dexter were grown up, the scene would probably look a little like this:
Wootie’s not leaving because he doesn’t like it here – on the contrary, he is in love. It’s just that since we settled in, he has adopted the entire neighborhood as HIS. He must pee on all the neighboring properties, chase other dogs down the road, hide bones in the horse paddock and generally make sure everyone in a 3 mile radius knows that Woo is in da hood.
He loves to go outside and patrol the perimeter of the property.
I’m your friendly neighborhood security patrol. Get that camera out of my face.
And Dexter has no qualms at all about strolling off when the mood strikes him. He is one brave little puppy.
Oh hai, I’m in your horse paddock, pretending I’m deaf.
His enormous ears give him away though! Those things don’t want to stand up, but they don’t want to lay flat either. They both point forward and fold in half. It makes him the absolute cutest puppy on the face of this earth! Although I might be biased.
No you’re not. I am really, really cute.
I thought *I* was the cutest puppy on earth?
Oh gosh, but you ARE Piper! Even with that divot of skin missing from your nose, where you ripped it off trying to “bury” your elk bone in the linoleum.
But also, Miss Piper is no puppy. Why tomorrow (or some time this month) she will be 7 years old! And Mr. Woo (ditto) will be 4 years old! Where on earth does the time go?
HAPPY BIRTHDAY PIPER AND WOO!!
Ha ha. You guys are getting older! I’m still 9.
I will assume you have some good reason for never celebrating my birthday.
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