Let There Be Fire!

This past winter happened to be the worst winter in a great many years, as many of you know. It also happened to be the year that I got the $357 electric bill. We had a propane stove, but it tended to cost a great deal too so we spent the winter using electric heat. Big No No in retrospect.
This winter also happened to bring about the worst ice storm I have personally ever heard about. I say heard about because when I heard about it I skipped town and packed up my entire family to the In-laws house in Winston-Salem. I am hard core but I hate ice. The ice storm was so bad that many of my neighbors lost power for over a week. we were lucky enough not to have any problems, but the storm left in its wake a veritable carnage of tree limbs. All over the county trees fell like Europeans with the plague.
For years, my husband had talked about putting in a wood stove. We did our research and looked over the news models and through the wanted ads in our local paper. We never found anything that seemed like a good deal.
This winter caused us to look around a bit more about the cost our electric space heaters were bringing on us.
My grandmothers house is next door to ours and it sits abandoned yet full of useful junk. I had known for awhile that my grandmothers cook stove, a giant, black, cast iron, behemoth, sat lodged into the floor of a back room, its feet sunk in where the wood had rotted out. It was entirely too big for our purposes.
I also knew that there was a smaller stove sitting behind it but every time I though to bring it up to my husband, a little bug in my ear (his name is Roger) kept telling me that this stove was broken so not to mention it.
After the devastation of a bad winter had begun to grow on us, my husband made the grand statement that we were going to switch to wood heat, and it would be this year. He wanted to know what the problems were with the small wood stove. I called my Mom to confirm that it was indeed broken.
"There is nothing wrong with that one" She replied whilst simultaneously popping my theory that my memory was perfect. "It's the big one that is broken". POP
So now we have a wood stove...




The Horrid winter that caused us so much pain and monetary suffering has now provided us with plenty of felled trees for fuel. And our country life continues.

Have I Lost My Mind?

Yes, friends, that is what you think it is. In an effort to save money and...well that's about all ( I could give a shit about the environment and because I live so green as a way of saving money, I'm allowed to say that), I have made the last of the major conversions in modern self sustaining parenting. The cloth diaper.
Years ago I would have said that I would use cloth over my own poor, dead carcass, but it appears that I have grown quite fond of the taste of my own words and in actuality, I must admit, I adore the damned things.
But as you can tell from the photo, these ain't your Grannies cloth diapers. Gone are the days of diaper pins and leaks. The new fangled things set me back $140 and will last until my daughter is out of diapers. The bells and whistles allow the diaper to grow with the baby and I could not be more in love.
So, as I sit here chewing on the bones of my words, I have to admit that making grandiose statements about what I will not ever do seems to be a lesson I need to take out of all this. No more saying that I will not do anything, even if its eating a grape out of a police officers butt crack. They might one day find that such actions are the cure for cancers and I'd be stuck eating more words...and grapes

On The line

This Mothers Day, instead of flowers and candies and other normal Mothers day fare, I asked my husband to put a clothes line up for me. As part of my country living fantasy, the idea of drying my clothes in a dryer seemed a little to easy and the only solution was to dry my clothes old school.
We went, family in tow, to our local hardware store (Lowe's is a brand started about 45 minutes from where we live, so much like buying Tyson chicken, we still get to count it as a local business and it's always important to buy local). They had several nifty devices for installing your own clothes line. One was a snappy line that pulled out all retractable like and was $13.00. We placed this in our cart and looked at the large octagonal varieties that my husband said looked trashy. I am not sure why that would look any more trashy than hanging your ripped undies from a tree, which is what I had been doing, but he was raised in a higher tax bracket than I and is much more "down" with what is proper.
When we came to the widget isle my husband found some pulleys and clothes line and decided that he was going to make me a clothes line himself. It would be twice as long and would have the pulleys so I could stand on the porch and pull the laundry to me. How exciting!
We got to the register and paid $19.00 for the parts to build the thing, costing more then the clothes line we were going to buy (making it yourself does not always save you money). It took us several hours to get the darn thing up, hanging one end from a tree and the other from my front porch. Finally it was done and I washed my first load of clothes giddily in anticipation. I set out my entire load of laundry and the weight of the wet clothes pulled my new clothesline down to the ground. I tried not to act disappointed, but my husband went to bed that night with promises to "fix it" so I carried on happily with my new clothes line.
Upon waking the next morning I found that the knot in the line had been weak and all my clean clothes were now resting on the ground. I picked them up and shook out the dirt and put them away (I don't like to repeat work after I have already done it once).
My husband retied the line and pulled the tree pulley higher so that the sag is gone but now I have to stand on a paint can to load the laundry on it.



This morning I woke up to find that the wind had blown and taken my pants with it up to the higher branches of a locust tree. My son happily got the ladder and pulled them down for me.
I am happy with my clothes line, even though it has its problems, it was made with love and good intentions. Hopefully it will last me many years and my laundry hanging skills will improve and well as my electric bill.

The Country Store

Every picturesque vision of country life includes the tiny local store where patrons get bags of feeds and sugar. My country tale is no different except the bags of feed are potato chips and the sugar has already been baked into a delicious good.
The Plan B is that country store. If Plan A fails you always have the Plan B. It is a tiny little store located at the end of a very notorious road. This road is said to encompass all the bad things about Tennessee into one little area of NC.
What I have often found about such areas is that the people who live there are usually quite nice, if somewhat...well, let's say...country. I'm OK with that. I was raised around it and it does not bother me. If fact I have been known to be a little bit country myself. If the people who live on said road want to call themselves country that's fine. If you do then you'll be in trouble. It's rude to judge, people.
Anyway, the Plan B happens to be the social center for the entire area. I met the owner a few years ago simply by hanging out inside. We started chatting and my visits got longer and longer. Soon the owner and I were good friends and she offered me the chance to work at the store.
I love my costumers. We have a great relationship. One gentleman who comes is has a long standing "cuss" war with me. We both love foul language and he and I are always trying to gross each other out, much to the enjoyment of his teenage son. Other costumers are people a few words. One simple says " Pack o' Durango" and hands you the exact amount with change for the tobacco. We get the good the bad and the trashy. The pregnant teenager. The construction worker or old man who hits on anything that walks. The Customers who think that all the women who work there are the same person. And we even get the joy of getting to call 911 for domestic disputes.
All in all the Plan B is the center of our country community, farmers, meth heads, Transplants and church goers. It laces together the different types of people into one group. People for whom Plan A failed.