rattling around

One day the 'Dad-guy' came to me and said that he heard something rattling around in his head. It seemed to be a real source of distress for him. Several days later he came home with ear-waxing candles and asked me to light him up like a birthday cake. If you have ever used these, you know what I am talking about. The pointy end of the hollow 'candle' slides into your ear. You lay on your side with the candle upright and your helper lights it. As it burns, it creates a suction in your ear which pulls the wax out of said ear, and into the hollow chamber of the candle. For those who like to 'see' what came out, you just cut the candle open, as I did in the photo on the left and have a look. Yes indeed, there has been no more complaining about the rattling sound in this house.

well, well

Water, well, pump it up, clear, cold, useful.
Suddenly without, no doubt a hardship that strains the most patient one.
Count the days, when will he raise that precious cold fluid from the ground.
If I'm not around, I've gone to town to fetch it, pail, by pail.


You guessed it, we've been without water, off and on for over a week. It began with silt coming through our lines, blocking every screen on every hose, on every appliance. The big kid and I went out to our snow-infested front yard and began to dig out the well access. It took Kevin several days of replacing hardware, replumbing, reorganizing, repressurizing, but finally yesterday we had a reliable flow of water to the house again. It would seem though that the well is a wee bit short on water. Not entirely unusual right before the thaw, but this is lower than usual. After several heartfelt prayers, it began to rain last night and rained until about 3am. Yep, the well level is up for now. Hopefully that will be enough to hold us over until water flows free once again.

the size of it all

Here are a couple of photos to show you how much snow we have. The bottom right hand corner is the shed that collapsed. The shots of the dad-guy and the big-kid are taken in the front yard where dad-guy moved all the snow away with a bobcat.

too much of a good thing

I am feeling a slight twing of guilt as I sit here composing this post. The dad-guy is currently outside digging snow off of our shed which collapsed 2 days ago. We have had an incredible amount of snow! 2 days ago a small amount of white precipitation floated, lazily from the sky. It was that last flake, it caused the feat of engineering which formed our tent shed to finally collapse. Dad-guy has spent most of his weekends moving snow around, trying to prevent such a tragedy, even to the point of renting a bobcat to push the 8 feet high mounds of snow away from our house. Should spring come in like a lion, he reasoned, we could be floating away. How disappointing to now have to rescue and perform triage on the various pieces of equipment that were stored is the collapsed shed. Weather is a force that cannot be predicted or controlled, perhaps that is why it has been a popular topic of conversation for as far back as humans go.