Murder in the Kitchen

On Friday morning before Bryan left for work, he murdered an intruder in our kitchen.

For several days I found little clues (tiny, tapered, and black) on my counter tops (yuck!) left by the culprit. When you live on the frontier, you can expect wildlife of all kinds. Fortunately, most do not actually come into your house.

We put out some poison, a green cylinder of stuff that reminds me of dried out Play Dough. During the night I heard a racket, and discovered the next morning that the poison was missing.

While I was putting away clean dishes, I opened the door of the cabinet above the range. Much to my surprise, there was a furry little critter in a large glass mixing bowl, staring at me. If he'd been dressed in a chef's hat, I may have mistaken him for Ratatouli.

"Come quick!" I called to Bryan. I grabbed a round baking sheet and slapped it on top of the bowl, although I think at this point the prisoner was already trapped.

I won't go into detail about the execution, but it involved water. Considering the other alternatives, such as tossing the prisoner to the cat, I feel this was a humane method of disposal. I wonder if he was a relative of the one that chewed through our electric line to the pump.

Good-Bye, Michael

There will probably be more Michael Jackson music played today throughout the world than any other day in history. He left a large legacy and many memories for all of us. When I taught seventh grade English in a rural Indiana school in 1972, about half the girls in my class had crushes on Donny Osmond, and the other half on Michael Jackson. Both young entertainers were 14 that year.

When "Thriller" came out, we rented the video and shared it with Bryan's dad and mom. That proved to be a mistake; they thought it was "lewd". We thought it was remarkable.

When I remember Michael Jackson, I see him as he looked before the surgeries and the strange behavior that defined him in the later parts of his mysterious, complicated life. I focus on that wonderful voice and the moon walk, and the good that Michael Jackson did in the world, as I hope the Lord will do in my case when I leave this earthly life.

Yet More on the "Water Issue"

On the 9th day without water, I thought things were resolved. However, as Murphy's Law predicts, the solution was not as swift and easy as we'd anticipated. Eventually, after about six visits from the Pump Man and the enlistment of two Electrician$, the diagnosis was a break in the power supply. That may not sound so serious, but our well is a thousand feet from our house. And, the electric line is buried 3-4 feet in the ground. Were we faced with digging up the entire line to find the problem?

Fortunately, one of the Electrician$ had an expensive (just how expensive, we'll learn, I'm sure) device that, when stuck into the ground, detected EXACTLY where the line was leaking juice. When Bryan got home from work on Thursday afternoon, he used the front loader on his tractor to expose the wire. Friday morning the Electrician returned, spliced the line (that appeared to have been gnawed by a rodent--no doubt executed on the spot and justly so), and the Pump Man finished installing the new pump.

On the 19th day we had water, and it was good.

Big Yellow Taxi

Nine days ago, on May 31, 2009, water ceased to flow at our house. Oh, the canal water still surges past the front of our property and under the bridge, but there's no merry sound of water being sucked down the drain or the toilet flushing. True enough, Bryan had been watering the garden regularly, but we have two 1500 gallon reservoirs that should not have gone dry. Our well was commissioned only about three and a half years ago, and we are not in a drought.

On Saturday the well digger who dug our well came. The diagnosis was that the pump at the well head was not operating. Of course, since we didn't opt for the "extended 5-year warranty" at the time we purchased the pump, our warranty was for only three years--not three years, five months, and seventeen days. (The product information claims that it is not uncommon for this particular pump to work for twenty years. Yeah, right.) Today, at a cost to us of only $1385, the well man is installing a new pump.

Having taken sponge baths for days (and even more days for Bryan since he didn't have the privilege of escaping to a luxury hotel in Kansas City for a week), making a 30-mile round trip to a hot springs resort to take a real shower, spending hours in the laundry mat doing five loads of clothes, filling 2-liter soda bottles and plastic milk jugs with water from work and church to haul home, and flushing the johns with water from 5-gallon buckets hoisted out of the canal, I don't think I'd mind spending $5,000 to see water come out of my kitchen sink faucet!

So, in the words of Joni Mitchell: Don't it always seem to go--you don't know what you got 'til it's gone. Amen to that.