We have really enjoyed looking at all of the photos from New Orleans, south Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida Panhandle of the “historic” snowfall last week. Personally, I would rather have been playing in the historic snowfall last week, and eating snow ice cream from the historic snowfall last week, but nothing historic happened around here so look is about all we could do.
That said, I’m done looking and ready to move on. It’s kind of like when we do get snow, and it is all wonderful for a day or so, and then it starts to melt and we wish it would hurry up and go away. I do appreciate everybody’s pretty pictures but they are all starting to look the same to me.
At our house we woke up back in the muddy zone on the old dirt road after Sunday’s rain, rain, and more rain. It was a cold rain too.
Now they say we are looking at temperatures pushing 70 again by the end of the week. I know, I know, this is Mississippi!
I think I burned up about $300 of Mississippi propane last week and who knows how much Mississippi electricity trying to ensure that our Mississippi water continued to run and to that effort we were successful.
Wife, Danny, and I split duties the first of the week with her manning the Ross Barnett Reservoir property making sure the drip, drip, drip, continued to drip, drip, drip, and I camped out at the Sebastopol house doing the exact same thing.
Reservoir water is much more expensive than Sebastopol water but there really isn’t much you can do about that. It isn’t as expensive as propane, though.
In addition we zipped over to Newton to do a little dripping at my late parents’ house. I cranked up the heat there too, so not only were we burning up the roadways we were burning up the energy at three different locales. It’s just money anyway, right?
This week, I fully expect, the air conditioner will be back on. The fans never got turned off, although there is an electric blanket on the bed at the Pool. That may seem a bit contradictory but neither one of us can sleep without circulation in the room. It is a drafty old house but not drafty enough at times I suppose one could say.
In addition to all that heating and dripping trying to keep things going, half the living room in Sebastopol is filled with plants from the front porch that I moved in there back around Christmas because, due to circumstances beyond our control, the greenhouse didn’t get taken out of the box and put together for the second year in a row. Maybe next year.
Those plants are looking a bit ragged and last week I gave up on the Boston Ferns altogether because they were making a bigger mess than I had ever anticipated and they got to ride in the back of the truck to the garbage dump. I don’t know why we even try to save ferns. It usually takes the ones that do live through the winter, half of the summer to come back out good and then it’s likely too hot or too dry and we take a vacation and they almost die from neglect. Then it is winter again and the whole cycle starts all over.
I’m vowing right here and now to snatch those baskets down from the front of the porch this year at the first sign of a frost and move on.
A check of the Weather Channel on the computer Monday morning forecasts 60s and 70s and rain, and more 60s and 70s and more rain. No freezing rain, no freezing temperatures, no snow, no ice, no Mississippi style fluctuations whatsoever. That was Monday, however, and as we all know, or should know, or if you don’t know, you know now, in Mississippi — as we have heard and seen many a time before — things can change real fast.
As for now, though, as for this coming weekend, I’m not doing a darn thing. I’m not raking leaves, I’m not blowing off leaves, I’m not picking up pine cones, I’m not cutting back hedges, I’m not picking up sticks, I’m not...
I probably will get those plants out of the living room, and I probably will blow off the front porch before I move them back out there, and I probably will pick up a few sticks just because I can be a little obsessive about that, but I might not, or, well, I might. We’ll see when that time comes!
