Tuesday, October 06, 2009, 05:25
Merry Christmas!
It has been a long time since I have been this tickled with myself.
It all started Monday afternoon when I stopped at the farm supply store to get some horse feed. As I came around the corner, I saw that they had started to put out their Christmas items. I went a little farther, and there they were. The artificial Christmas trees on display.
I pushed my cart closer to the display. Ever since the power company cut down so many of the trees between our house and the road last summer, I have been thinking I wanted some artificial Christmas trees to put out there to provide some of screen until real trees have a chance to grow.
As I got closer to the display, my heart sank. All of the trees were priced at around $150 each. I wanted about six of them, and this was completely out of my price range.
I pushed my cart around the corner to the end of the display. . .
. . .and saw boxes of artificial trees from last year on close out.
At one-third of the price of the new ones.
I looked around and saw a store employee.
"Excuse me," I said to the lady. "You're going to think I'm nuts, but that's okay, other people do, too, sometimes. But, well, I want to buy all of your Christmas trees that you have on sale."
She looked at me and blinked. Once. Twice.
"What?"
"I want to buy all of your Christmas trees," I said.
I explained about the power company chopping down trees and how I wanted artificial trees to provide some screen from the road.
"Let me get some slips and write them out for you," she said.
The slips were so that I could drive around to the back to the loading dock to pick up my trees.
"Give me a couple of minutes, and I'll get a cart and load them and take them out back," she said.
"No problem," I said.
"This is wonderful!" she said. "Now I've got more room for other things!"
She could say that again. This WAS wonderful!
With my feet barely touching the floor, I made my way to the checkout. I paid for my horse feed and the trees and took the feed out to my little GMC truck. As soon as I got the feed loaded, I called Randy on my cell phone. Today was his first day back at work after his surgery. When he answered the phone, he sounded tired.
"Guess what! Guess what!" I said.
"What," he said.
"I found trees! Four of them! At a third of the regular price! And I'm going to the loading dock to pick them up!"
"Trees?" Randy said.
"Artificial Christmas trees. For the yard," I said.
"Oh," he said. "Well, are you sure they will fit in your truck?"
"I'll make them fit," I said.
I had already determined that there was no way I was going home without those trees.
"Well, okay," Randy said.
I asked him how he was feeling, and he said he was really tired and that the back of neck was painful. Completely understandable, of course.
A few minutes later, I drove out to the loading dock to get my trees.
"Four Christmas trees?" said the guy said who was going to load my trees.
I explained why I wanted them.
"Oh," he said. "What a great idea."
The trees actually fit quite well in the bed of my truck, and a few minutes later, I was headed for home. The boxes were not particularly heavy, about 40 pounds, so I knew I wouldn't have any trouble unloading them.
As soon as I got home and had carried the horse feed inside, I was ready to assemble my first tree. I lugged it up the hill from where I had unloaded them by the garage, opened the box and set to work trying to figure out how to put the thing together. Two of the trees are nine-footers and two are seven-footers. I picked one of the nine-footers for my first stab at planting an artificial tree.
I discovered, as soon as I had set the first section into the tree stand, what is so very tedious about artificial trees. I was going to have to twist each and every one of those branches out so that it actually looked like a tree.
It was while I was working on the second section that I was struck with a thought. How was I going to haul the thing out by the road once I had it put together?
So, I headed up the bank with only the bottom half of the tree. Since it is somewhat of a slope, I quickly discovered I would need to anchor the tree stand somehow. I went to the basement for the ball peen hammer, and then I looked around for a sturdy stick. I pounded the stick through the bottom of the stand and into the ground.
Much better. The tree was fairly sturdy then.
I had put the second section on and was pulling and twisting on the branches when Randy arrived home. It was about that time that I had another thought. How was I going to get the top section into the section I'd already put together? Randy wouldn't be able to lift the top up, not with where his incision is in the back of his neck. I was going to need a ladder.
"I KNEW I'd find you out here putting trees together," my husband said.
Just then it started to sprinkle. The sky had been cloudy for most of the afternoon, but it had not rained up to this point.
"Let's see if we can get this one where we want it before it really starts to rain," I said.
I pulled the stake out I had pounded in, and Randy reached for the bottom of the tree.
"No," I said, "let me do that. And also, I've thought of how we are going to make the most of the trees."
"Oh?" he said.
"We're not going to put them together in one big tree. Just when you drove in, I was thinking about how I was going to get the top half into the bottom. But the answer is, I'm not. We're going to split them up into smaller trees. Half here. Half somewhere else."
"Smaller trees?" Randy said.
"The road is a little higher than the yard, so we don't really need the full height of the trees to get the full effect. Besides, if they're not so tall, the wind won't bother them so much."
And that's what we did. We pulled the branches up as far as they would go on the bottom half of the one. Then we put together the top half and set it a few feet away. Randy rummaged around in the basement and found some tent stakes to help anchor the top half to the ground.
By that point, it had started to rain harder.
"Wouldn't you know it," I said. "I wanted to get more of the trees up."
"Well, at least we know it's going to work," Randy said. "And there's always tomorrow for the rest of them."
Oh, yes, indeed. Monday was a grand day.
Merry Christmas to me!
LeAnn R. Ralph
Monday, October 05, 2009, 05:36
Silver White
The world was pretty much white with frost Wednesday morning. A frost that blackened and withered many of my tomato plants and all of my little Jack Be Little pumpkins and the zucchini and the acorn squash vines and the lima beans that were really only getting started.
The limas sat there for most of the summer, even though I watered them with rain water that had drained off the barn roof, and they really did not start to grow until we got rain in August and some heat in September. They had quite a few green pods on them and lots of blossoms. They're done now. And none of the pods were even close to being ripe.
Already when I went out to check on the horses and the barn kitties before I went to bed Tuesday night, the grass down by Isabelle's pasture was crunchy with frost. And in the morning, the extra bucket of water I leave sitting down by Isabelle's pasture so I can give her more water at night if she needs it was covered with a skim of ice.
It seems much too soon for frost and ice. It seems as though it was only April just a few days ago. And now we've got frost and ice again. What happened to April, May, June, July, August and September? Where did they go? And how did they go so fast?
And yet, in that same length of time, it will be nearly April again, except the months between now and then will be cold and hard and will seem much longer than the amount of time that actually passes.
Doctor's appointment
I took Randy for his doctor's appointment on Tuesday, and it was as I suspected. The surgeon did not want to take the drain tube out just yet because he thought it was draining too much. On Tuesday, the surgical site drained 22 cc all together. On Wednesday, it drained 20cc and the same for Thursday.
I took Randy back to the doctor on Friday, and he finally got the drain out. I am supposed to keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn't collect too much fluid under the skin. By Sunday morning, I could tell there was definitely a fluid a build-up. When I tap on the skin between his shoulders, it's like tapping on a plastic bag full of water. You can just tell there's fluid in there. He might have to go back and have some of the fluid drained out of there. That's better than getting an infection, I should think.
Rain
The sky was cloudy Thursday morning, and all morning long, the clouds periodically thickened and the sky grew much darker. It did not rain, though, not until later Thursday afternoon. And then it started in with a cold and blustery rain. It rained Thursday and some on Friday and a few showers on Saturday. All together, we got an 1.8 inches!
Rain is good. It will help to soak up the topsoil, and if we get enough, to soak up the subsoil, and if we get more yet, to begin filling up the marshes. But that's a ways off yet. We need much more rain than we've gotten so far for that to occur. But, it's a start.
LeAnn R. Ralph