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Sunday, June 28, 2009
silence: broken. More's the pity.
Summer at our house means being careful about running the sprinkler for too long, because the water level in our well drops off enough that the pump ends up gasping for water and only coming up with air. This hadn't been tested yet this year... until now. (I am always handy when laws of physics or things like this need to be tested. Everybody has a special skill. This is mine.) I turned the sprinkler on the lawn well after sunset but before dark, sternly reminding myself that I needed to shut it off in half an hour, and then I completely forgot we even had a sprinkler until I flushed the toilet at 3 AM and it did that funny "hey, there's no water to fill me back up in here" kind of panicked sort of choking sound, at which point I instantly remembered the sprinkler and the well and dashed out in my bare feet to turn off the faucet.
And T's not here -- he is coming home in about six hours from a two-week work trip to Hawaii -- so I had to handle this all on my own like a big girl, by calling him in the middle of the night on his cell phone, which he had graciously left on as he slept in a hotel room in San Francisco. I'm sure he is glad that his wife can hold down the fort while he's gone like Ma did when Pa took off for town 40 miles away. I'm sure he's contemplating this *exact* parallel as he lies in a hotel bed trying desperately to fall back asleep for 45 minutes before he has to get up anyway.
And the pump recovered so quickly that I have a sneaking suspicion that it hadn't actually gone into full-bore RED ALERT mode and was still thinking more along the lines of, "Hey. People? People? Did you forget about me? ...hey... hello?" Three in the morning is not a time for subtlety in problem assessment, though. Not for me, anyway.
Oh my goodness. I just opened the door to let in the cat and Venus was rising so beautifully next to a tree that stands in our yard that I went straight past an Anne-ish thrill to an Emily-like "flash". I did have time to notice, while I scurried around outside checking to make sure that I hadn't also left water on in the garden or elsewhere, that the stars looked amazing. Everyone should live at least for a while in a place where going outside in the middle of a clear night and looking up means having your breath taken clean away.
Anyway. Back to the STORY. The crisis was past by 3:30 and I came in the house all hyped up on adrenaline and decided that I would get a head start on dinner by setting up the crock-pot now, instead of trying to do it between getting up at 6 and leaving at 7. And then I couldn't go to bed, because I had to cook the giblets for the cats. It is against my household rules to a) give raw meat to pets b) throw away usable food or c) have chicken innards just sitting there in a bowl in my refrigerator, so what else could I do? And while my hands were performing the rather unpleasant tasks involved in getting a chicken ready to be cooked, my brain was thinking, "Hey. I should write a blog post. Maybe while the giblets cook."
So there it is. A month of blog silence broken by a water emergency-or-not and chicken liver.
I know I say this every time but I really have been thinking how I need to post more. For one thing, if you don't see me on Facebook you have NO IDEA how my garden is doing right now, none at ALL, and that's all my fault and I'm sorry. I know it's hard on you, the wondering. And you don't know that I've been sick or what I thought of Atlas Shrugged (well, nobody knows that; I'm not even sure I know yet) or how the summer reading program is going for the kids or what our chickens look like now or how C did at State Presentation Day or how tall LT is or anything important.
But also, I'm discovering a major flaw in my "I'll put off blogging and just use twitter or Facebook or both to express myself about this thought that's in my head" plan, and that is that the archiving at twitter and Facebook simply stinks. You can't call something up by date or topic and search is pretty much useless or nonexistent; you have to sit there and click "more" 300 times to get to something you wrote six months ago and for some reason now want to remember. So one of the pleasant byproducts I've enjoyed since I began communicating with people via the Internet, first via email and then through archivable chats and then through this blog and then finally through social networking sites, is eliminated: I can't easily use my own writings as a diary. I can't go back and find that link to a knitting pattern, or laugh at my own jokes or at people's comments, or even remember what I'd done on a certain day.
(Also, T can't access Facebook -- not that he'd want to; he wants a T-shirt he saw that proclaims REAL MEN DON'T FACEBOOK -- or Twitter, or even read the little Twitter snippets in my blog sidebar, from his work computer, due to network regulations meant to keep government employees from spending all day socializing instead of working. [This would be the web 2.0 version of "the entire workforce of the state of Virginia had to have Solitaire removed from their computers because they hadn't done any work in six weeks.… You know what this is, you know what we're seeing here? We're seeing the end of Western civilization as we know it.." Name that quote!] But he can read my blog, and we both used to like it, that he could peek in on our day at home while he was away.)
So I'm going to try to make a conscious effort to document stuff here again. Don't bother thanking me. I know you're all grateful.
Comments
I'm sorry about the sprinkler situation, but yay for more blogging! And seriously, would it kill Twitter to have a decent search interface??
Posted by: Kat with a K at June 29, 2009 03:16 AM
Glad to see you're gonna blog more. I deleted my Twittter - I just didn't get it. Bebo was rubbish and Facebook - I go in fits and starts. Fewer and fewer, actually.
Anyway - my comment. We had a (city)friend of Ger's round for the weekend. When we were driving back he was going on and on about 'how far is it?' because he really needed to empty himself. However, when he got out of the car, he was SO totally blown away by the stars (that he had never seen!) that he pee'd in the garden and refused to come in the house for ages.
Posted by: Carol at June 30, 2009 12:10 PM
Kat: I dunno -- sometimes it seems like a light breeze kills Twitter temporarily, so a search interface might mean a permanent failwhale. :)
Carol: I took the night sky for granted until I met my friend Jenn, who moved here from LA in junior high. She was blown away because had *never* seen the stars away from city lights. It never occurred to me that everybody didn't see them like I did every night.
And next time a guy's going to pee in your garden have him do it in your compost. Great source of nitrogen. :)
Posted by: Rachel at June 30, 2009 12:35 PM
Real Men Don't Facebook! LMBO! I'm not too hot on Facebook either--it can be a time-waster if you don't stick to just looking at people's posts you WANT to see. So glad nothing bad happened to the well and you got dinner started early. Frank leaves the water on here all night in the pasture to try to keep it green before the animals nibble it down. I think I just got used to having that kind of water since our move 3 years ago.
Posted by: Sherry at July 1, 2009 08:04 AM
