Crooked Acres – Page 76

Behold, I have The Internets in my home!

Only for today, though. Fred’s taking the modem and router home with him tonight so that he and the spud won’t have to go without internet for two days.

Yes that would suck, going without internet for two days. I don’t know how anyone could possibly do that.

UNFAIR.

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I also have phone lines hooked up here, though because I’m a dummy I didn’t think to hook up the cordless phone and let it charge before the phone guy got here, so I’ll be using the corded phone for the next little while, ’til the cordless phone’s charged.

Also, I need to get a set of those cordless phones that come with an “extension” phone that you only need to plug into an electrical outlet to use, because there are no phone outlets upstairs at all. We talked about having them run a phone line up to the spud’s room, but as we see it, the child will only be living here another three months and once she’s living in Rhode Island we won’t need a phone line up there at all, because Fred doesn’t answer middle-of-the-night phone calls. I do, because he’s a light sleeper who has a hard time going back to sleep when awakened in the middle of the night, whereas I can usually turn over and go right back to sleep.

Speaking of, I am reminded of a story about this past weekend.

Saturday evening, the spud went into Huntsville to a friend’s school to see a play she (the friend) was in. I was coming out of the bathroom late Saturday evening when I heard my cell phone ring. I answered it, and it was the spud in quite a state of distress. She was somewhere in Huntsville, lost, and didn’t know how to get home. She told me the name of the street she was on, and while I’d heard of the street, I had no idea where it was located or how to direct her to get back home.

“Did you call Fred?” I asked.

“Yes, like five times! And he didn’t answer!” she said.

I thought for a moment. “Well, let me try calling him and I’ll tell him to call you.”

I hung up, and dialed the number for the Madison house. No answer. Again. No answer. I tried his cell phone. No answer. Altogether, I called his cell phone three or four times and the Madison phone about seven times.

After the seventh time, I was on the verge of getting dressed, driving to the Madison house and either beginning the mourning process (finding Fred dead in his bed) or the murdering process (finding Fred sound asleep in his bed with the phone ringing merrily down the hall). Although answering the phone in the middle of the night is my job, since I’ve moved to Crooked Acres he sleeps with the phone next to him in case there’s an emergency and I need to get hold of him.

I decided to call one last time, and that’s when he answered the phone. He sounded wide awake.

Apparently the phone was right on the bed next to him, but since it was face-down instead of face-up, he didn’t hear the phone ringing. Despite the fact that – he claimed – he wasn’t even sleeping, just laying there reading.

Eventually he decided that the sound he was hearing – a distant, ringing sound – was the phone, and he answered it.

He got the spud straightened out and on her way home pretty quickly, and then he and I talked until he heard her arrive home.

And I did not kill him.

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Things we are seriously discussing doing here in Crooked Acres:

Creating a worm farm. The worm farm would serve two purposes: (1) Did you know chickens like worms? I did not. Despite the fact that chickens are birds and birds like worms, it still surprised me to find that chickens like worms. They LOVE worms. They think worms are the finest thing on the face of the earth. We’d like to have a ready supply of worms with which to spoil our chickens. (2) The fertilizer. Worm poop is good fertilizer. Fertilizer is a good thing and would come in handy.

Having honey bees. The bees would serve two purposes: (1) Pollination of our fruit trees and bushes. (2) Honey!

Also, we are seriously considering filling in the pond because it’s always too low for fishies, and the pond is taking up prime real estate. I did convince Fred that we should have a much smaller pond (like, a koi pond) to attract frogs.

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It’s very squirrelly in our back yard today. There are two squirrels running back and forth between bird feeders, eating the nuts that have been knocked to the ground (the bird food I have is no-waste bird food I bought online somewhere, because I was tired of seeing all the sunflower seed shells piling up on the ground. This stuff is chock-full of yummy-looking nuts and I think that if we ran out of food, we could eat the bird food. As a bonus, it takes longer for the birds to empty out the bird feeders, which is a very good thing.) and just generally driving our cats crazy.

Mister Boogers briefly escaped when I went out to check on the chicks, but the squirrels were too fast for him, and they ran up a tree and scolded him soundly.

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I love my house.

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“Mutha, can it be time for the brushy-brushy now?”