City slicker: Your wife was telling me that she could only find three kinds of apples where you live.
Hayseed: Yeah, that sounds about right.
City slicker: I can bring along some stuff from the city with me when I come out next week. Just let me know what you need.
Hayseed: Costco.
City slicker: It probably won’t all fit in one trip. I may have to break it up into several.
Hayseed: What, you mean you can’t tow it?
What the hell is the point of buying an SUV if you can’t fit an entire department store into it? Thanks for nuthin’, Ray.
The carpets in the trailer were allegedly cleaned by Sears just prior to our taken taking possession of it. I use the word ‘allegedly’, because I’d be surprised if they did more than just wave the steam cleaner wand at the rug.
We spent four hours on the living room alone yesterday, and we repeatedly emptied some of the blackest, dirtiest water we’d ever seen out of the carpet cleaning unit. The good news is that the carpet looks like new. The bad news is that I managed to put my back out again. But, hey, if I pass out from the pain, at least I’ll fall on a clean floor now. Yay.
I was awakened at 2:30 AM this morning by my wife, who was freaking out. “There’s a mouse in the trailer. I saw it go in behind the dog food and your winter boots by the back door.”
“What do you want me to do about it?”
“Kill it!”
The thing to understand about my wife is that she absolutely can’t stand mice, almost to the point where she has the stereotypical female reaction that so much has been made of over the years. She’s tough as nails in just about every other area (she can easily take me in a fight if we ever have one), so I guess you’d have to think of mice as her Achilles Heel.
I crawled out of bed, put on a minimum of clothes, and investigated the situation. We put towels under the doors around the porch and blocked off the hallway leading to the kitchen with a large board. I also blocked off the heat vent so the mouse couldn’t skitter down there. My wife had the presence of mind to call our dog over (we let him sleep inside at night), and the mouse, sensing his presence, decided that discretion was the better part of survival and stayed hidden behind my boots.
Once everything was blocked off, I started removing objects from the porch that the mouse could hide behind, and passed them to my wife. She took them with one hand while holding a broom with the other, just in case a mouse needed to be whacked. When I cleared enough space I found the mouse. I slammed an empty ice cream pail over it, but only managed to trap it’s front half. I lifted the pail for an instant to try and get the pail over the entire mouse, but it rocketed out of the porch…
…and straight into the jaws of the dog. Ouch. He didn’t bite it hard enough to kill it, but the mouse decided then and there to start playing dead. I slammed the bucket over it again. I slid a piece of cardboard under it, and then fired both, with the mouse, out the back door. No more mouse, for now.
People are welcome to refer to me as The Great White Hunter from now on.
When we were looking to buy property I had this overzealous realtor show us what can only be described as a totally worn-out old farm. I mean the land had just been worked to death. The weeds were hardly even growing.
The smiling super salesman said, “Now really, all this land needs is a little
water, a nice cool breeze and some good people.”
I replied, “Yeah, I agree, but couldn’t the same be said of Hell?”
A fire started on some grassland near a farm. The county fire department was called to put out the fire. The fire was more than the county fire department could handle. Someone suggested that a nearby volunteer bunch be called. Despite some doubt that the volunteer outfit would be of any assistance, the call was made.
The volunteers arrived in a dilapidated old fire truck. They rumbled straight towards the fire, drove right into the middle of the flames and stopped! The firemen jumped off the truck and frantically started spraying water in all directions. Soon they had snuffed out the center of the fire, breaking the blaze into two easily controlled parts.
Watching all this, the farmer was so impressed with the volunteer fire department’s work and was so grateful that his farm had been spared, that right there on the spot he presented the volunteers with a check for $1,000. A local news reporter asked the volunteer fire captain what the department planned to do with the funds. “That ought to be obvious,” he responded, wiping ashes off his coat. “The first thing we’re gonna do is get the brakes fixed on our fire truck!”
Okay, fall has officially arrived, and it’s already making way for winter. The dog’s water dish was covered with ice this morning and everything else had a healthy layer of frost on it. I’m not liking this.
I just received word back from the president of the Alberta Professional Photographers Association (APPA). My two accreditation submissions of ten photos apiece to the Professional Photographers of Canada (PPOC) were accepted, and I am now an accredited Pictorial/Scenic and Fine Art/Photo Decor photographer. This is a big deal as the submissions are peer reviewed by Master Photographers and are held to very high standards. I’m still a long way from earning a Craftsman of the Photographic Arts (CPA) or a Master of the Photographic Arts (MPA) designation, but this is a good place to start.
Next spring I will have entries ready for the Wedding Photography, Portrait, and Night Photography categories. I will also be entering the print competitions next year as well (I had to pass on that this fall because our finances were strained from the move). Inspiration, motivation, and perspiration will all take me to where I want to be.
It was early in 2002 when I realized how deep my passion for photography ran, and I made the decision that it would eventually become my career. It’s taken me almost four years of hard work, but I can now claim to have achieved a basic level of proficiency with the craft. Even better, I know that greatness is within my reach if I continue to throw my heart and soul into what I’m doing.
I’m getting there.
When I was a little kid, my grandfather would take me along with him to the butcher shop on the main street of Innisfail. The shop had that spicy meat spell, and the old refrigerated display cases loaded up with the butcher’s wares. Everything you selected was weighed and wrapped in brown paper. Instead of using a cash register, the man at the counter would simply add everything up on the side of one of your packages of meat with a marker and then take your money.
In the intervening years of shopping at Safeway and Superstore in the big city, I forgot all about this. Meat came on little sytrofoam trays, always under clear wrap, and always sitting on that little absorbent diaper. You picked your meat out and took it to the till, and that’s the way it’s been for me since leaving Innisfail.
We shopped at Bouma’s meat market in Provost last week. It had that smell I remembered from my childhood. It had those big display cases full of the butcher’s wares. It had big rolls of brown paper for wrapping up the customers’ selections. And yesterday, when I pulled a package of pork chops out of the fridge to barbeque them, I discovered that the girl at Bouma’s had tallied up the figure for my order on the side of the pork chops.
For a very brief moment, I was a little kid again last night.
Back in city, the parking in front of our home was limited, and it was normal to find one of the neighbors or their friends parking in our spot. Murphy’s Law being what it is, we could usually count on the vehicle that leaked the most oil on the block being the one that parked in front of our home.
Here on the acreage there is more than ample room for parking. However, that hasn’t stopped the father-in-law from parking his tractors in front of our new home so they can leak oil where the small patch of mowed lawn (not grass for haying) will go. Sure, the parking spots are bigger, but now so are the vehicles and the oil stains.
The old saying is true. The more things change, the more they really do stay the same.
I’m not exactly sure what these ‘cow chip’ things are, but I’ve been told to watch out for them several times now while living out here. The problem is, I don’t know what to watch out for. Are they a brand of chip (e.g. Pringles, Frito-Lay, Hostess, etc.) or a flavour (e.g. dill pickle)? And can someone tell me why I need to watch out for them? Are they high in trans-fats, or something like that?