dragonlady7

a year, personal, farm life

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well it’s been an insane week, and of course the last day of June I spent ten hours of the afternoon helping M-L get the last of the shit out of her apartment, and I took two carloads of stuff over and she came with me with another carload in her jeep for the second one, and we had mcdonald’s for dinner at the house and then unloaded, and i went home and she went back and stayed until like 1am getting the last garbage out and cleaning the place– I had scrubbed the shower, earlier, which was probably the single filthiest bit of it and I did an amazing job I’ll have y’all know–

{cut for length and rambling}

and anyway, that was Thursday, so on Friday afternoon (after a morning spent absolutely consumed in weird tiny odd-job bullshit on the farm) I went over to the house and helped unicornduke trace the electric in the new house. She flipped all the circuit breakers and then I went upstairs and told her when things came on. We have a solid ten circuits that are total mysteries, nothing at all responds when you flip it. We did discover that the first-floor bedroom is labeled the “family room”, distinct from the living room, and there’s another room labeled “Fred’s bedroom” that is neither the front– what I would call back– bedroom or the back– what I would call front, it faces the road– bedroom, upstairs, so there’s some other room of the house that counts as a bedroom?? or did??? Anyway it was a fascinating voyage of discovery and mysteries, and also we discovered that the stairs are so flimsily constructed that if you stand in the basement stairwell you can be heard pretty much anywhere in the house, which did reduce the territory I had to cover in order to communicate.

The house conducts noise like it was designed to, which is not what you’d really expect from a log cabin, but, eh.

After that, unicornduke was finishing building shelves to go inside the cabinets so that the pots and pans and baking dishes and all could be put away neatly, so I went in the kitchen with her, and while she was working on that I was unpacking the last few boxes my sister had left sort of deposited in the middle of the kitchen floor. Unicornduke was willing to just work around them until such time as they could be gone through, not wanting to rummage through M-L’s stuff, but I was like listen I packed these boxes I can unpack them and since they say kitchen I can say with a reasonable degree of confidence that they can be gone through with impunity.

So I did, and found homes for a lot of things, and washed things that were grubby from general mishandling, and got the counter set up so there was more room to pile dishes in the sink. But I did not discover a can opener, despite us definitely having packed one.

Anyway. I spent a couple of hours unpacking those things, and then knocked my phone off the kitchen counter with my elbow, thought nothing of it, did it a second time, shoved it into my pocket, and then later went to look at it and the screen wouldn’t come on no matter what I did.

So that sucks.

Also I hadn’t brought any materials to make dinner (a thing I’d done at her apartment while we were packing on two or three occasions), so when M-L dragged herself home exhausted from a long day of work and car troubles, and had to lie down and then missed the deadline to order tacos from the only local place with stuff, I decided to come up with something, since I’d just unpacked so much goddamned food into the various cupboards. So I made quinoa, and Duke contributed some frozen diced sausage and frozen sweet corn and a bit of tomato paste, and I found a can of diced tomatoes and figured that’d do us, but then we still couldn’t find the fucking can opener but M-L had inherited Dad’s keychain and guess what Dad had as the decoration on his keychain for my whole life, why yes it was a P38 can opener, so she used that and got the diced tomatoes open and I made a perfectly reasonable uhhh there’s probably a word to describe the dish I made but IDK what it was. Oh we had three fresh onions that were still in usable condition so I diced one of those to start, which is how I make almost everything I make. And there’s a whole spice rack, so I put a bunch of slightly-stale herbs into it. Why not! It was pretty good if I do say so myself, though now that I think back, I never added salt and it probably needed it.

I hope that I can make it a regular thing when I’m in town that I go over there and cook dinner there, M-L knows how to cook but has forgotten how, and Duke doesn’t know how to cook as well as she’d like, and I just feel like that would be fun.

Anyway. now I am getting a ride back to Buffalo with BIL, who is enroute to Erie PA to pick up Farmkid after her sojourn among Midwestern relatives, and I have to pack and coordinate Dude meeting us at a park-n-ride so I can be handed off, and then I have to figure out how to navigate a holiday weekend sans phone, and figure out what to do with mine, and I am so sure it could be repaired and yet I’m also sure nobody can do that.

God I just looked it up and I got this phone in fucking November of last year, it was almost five hundred dollars and I’ve used it for eight months. Christ. No I didn’t get the accident protection plan on it because I’ve had such a good run with other phones. God damn it. I bought it new because I’d bought the previous one reconditioned and firstly reconditioned phones aren’t much cheaper and secondly I was feeling like I deserved a nice thing, and here we are. Anyway. Whatever.

Sighhhhhh time to go pack all my things and try not to freak out about stupid shit. Whee. (Your picture was not posted)