Last Sunday night after church, Bobby, Hannah, and Aaron came over, bringing birthday gifts for Larry. They gave him a big bag of soup and other food for his lunch, which he was pleased to get. From Lawrence and Norma he got a couple of pairs of jeans. Dorcas gave him two pairs of dress pants, along with a new doorknob set for the little bathroom, whose knob has been broken for eons--but she neglected to read the package, and got a non-locking set for hall and closet. Boys buy such things as doorknobs by reason of their brands or lock types; girls buy items solely on the basis of color, style, and whether or not it’s in vogue at the moment. (Larry later returned it and got the right kind. Non-locking doorknob sets are not good for bathroom doors.) From Keith and Esther there was a gift card to Menards--and you can be sure, that will come in handy--, and from Teddy and Amy, a warm red-and-black-check flannel shirt.
There was a beautiful sunrise Monday morning; we have had unseasonably warm weather all week long. Thursday, the temperature got up to 72°.
Bobby and Hannah went shopping at Nebraska Furniture Mart that evening for furniture for the new baby--a crib, dressing table, and bureau. When they got home, Larry went to help Bobby carry it in. They’ll be putting it to use, in only a couple of months!
Hannah brought Aaron over Tuesday evening so I could take his 1½-year pictures. She plans to put them into their Christmas cards.
We found out Wednesday that we were approved for a construction loan--but not as much as we’d asked for. So we must be very careful with every penny until the house is set onto its new basement and the loan can be converted to a conventional loan, when they will allow us 95% of its value.
Thursday, Aaron fell down Bobby and Hannah’s basement steps, winding up with carpet burns all over his face, poor little boy. Fortunately, carpet burns heal fairly quickly…but it was a jolly good thing I’d already taken his pictures!
I am now half done with Caleb and Aaron’s suits. I actually got the collar on Caleb’s suit perfectly, imagine that. Those have always been one of the major bugaboos with my sewing. That, and points--such as putting a pointed bodice onto a shaped skirt. If I ever do get the point right, you can be sure the center skirt seam will be off-kilter.
A couple more comet goldfish croaked. Whatever’s the matter?! The fish are perishing in droves! They are expiring at the rate of one or two a day. Did you know there is a fish called ‘croaker’? Maybe that’s what we bought by mistake.
Well…Joseph went with Dorcas to get more fish supplies at Wal-Mart: pH test kit…alkaline test kit…ammonia test kit… monoclonal antibody protein tracker…military test pilot school correspondence course[1] (seeing as how fish cruise about in schools anyway, and perhaps if they joined the military, they would learn some discipline and stop succumbing to the Deep Down Doldrums)… Oh! Look at this! »»
GOLDFISH are exceptionally long-lived and have been reported to reach an age of 70 years.[2]
Bah. Goes to show how much they know.
They have a poor little wrinkled hairless cat called a Sphynx…a wrinkled, almost-cute mutt named Shar-Pei that Chinese breeders originally cultivated with excess folds of skin to give him an advantage in dogfights…a small toy dog with soft skin and hair only on its head, face, tail, and feet, dubbed, appropriately enough, the hairless Chinese crested…a Chinese water deer[4], an excellent swimmer who, instead of antlers, has long upper canine teeth that extend like tusks up to three inches out of its mouth, and who runs with a leaping motion, probably to escape the wild boars, who don’t like other animals impersonating them. Why, the Chinese have even shrunk the alligator, which has made him so timid and retiring he must regularly visit a ’gator psychiatrist, so as to acquire enough self-confidence to catch a meal!
With such a sadistic sense of humor as that, it’s no small wonder that they should produce a blind, albino form of the poor goldfish.
After school, Hester brought me a big box with six large cartons of plain yogurt from Hy-Vee, compliments of a friend of mine who had come into possession of a ton or more [ton (tŭn') n. 1. more than a few ounces. 2. gobs and heaps.] of the stuff simply by happening to be in the right place at the right time. They’d been preparing to discard of it all, because it was set to expire in a couple of days, although, sealed as it is, it is supposed to stay fresh and good at least a week past the date printed on the carton.
Now what, I wondered, would I ever do with six large cartons of plain yogurt??! Yes, yes, I know one can add one’s own fruit to it, and it’s mighty tasty (maybe) (if it doesn’t curdle). But… would any of the members of this picky family eat it? Huh-uh, nosiree, NEVER!
Then I noticed that two of the Fujis in the big box of apples had gone bad, and I knew exactly what to do: I would make our favorite Dairy State Apple Pie--using yogurt instead of cream cheese. Hester peeled apples with the apple peeler while I made crust, filling, and topping. It took quite a bit of sugar to get it to taste just right, and I added lots of extra eggs to be sure it set up properly, too. Since the crust called for cream cheese, I put yogurt into that, too. We made seven or eight recipes; I lost track, since I wasn’t really following the recipe.
While the pies baked (thank goodness for convection ovens that bake everything evenly) (or at least they’re presumably supposed to), the clock edged closer…and closer…and closer to suppertime…and I discovered that I was hungry for the sausage patties I’d purchased from the Schwan man. But!--I don’t like them fried; I always grill them in the oven, so as to drain out as much grease as possible. And the oven was full. Sooo…I brought out the neat little counter grill my mother gave me several years ago.
I rarely use it, and keep it stored on a shelf in a closet. The younger children had forgotten all about it, and thought it was the niftiest thing ever. I had to keep a vigil on Victoria’s nose, which had a tendency to get itself nearer…and nearer…and nearer to the glowing red coil under the rack. She watched with fascination as golden drips landed in the tray at the bottom, sizzling for a moment before cooling.
“Mmmmm! Is that good?” she asked. She licked her chops with a loud slurrrrrp.
“No!” replied Caleb, rumpling his nose and shaking his head, “That’s fat!”
She turned quickly to look at her brother, and her own small nose rumpled in involuntary imitation. “Ewww. It looks yucky, doesn’t it?”
When the sausage patties were done, we put them on sesame-seed buns, plopped a piece of mozzarella cheese over the top quickly so as to melt it, gave it a squirt of ketchup and mustard, and then layered tomatoes and lettuce atop it. Yum, it was good.
The pies were taking much longer than my cookbook recommended, because
i) we were using Fuji apples, which are crispier to begin with,
ii) the baking pans were a whole lot fuller than the recipes realized, and
iii) we were all dying to eat them, and, as any cook knows, Desire to Devour (DTD) has a direct relationship to Length of Cooking Time (LCT). There is no scientific evidence to support this fact, but good chefs of all nations agree: ovens have a sixth sense about such things, and they contrarily slow baking time when they perceive impatience in the vicinity. Then, when someone resignedly sets the timer for yet another ten minutes and goes off to try to concentrate on a good book, the recalcitrant oven gleefully heats itself another 100° hotter and, quick as a wink, burns whatever is baking to a crisp.
When the pies were finally done, we took a pie to my friend who gave me the yogurt, whereupon she gave me a carton of vanilla yogurt, too.
We then timed the drive from the school and church to the site of the new house: It took about ten minutes. Five minutes for Larry and Joseph to get to work.
Friday night, Caleb got sicker and sicker till he could hardly breathe. I suddenly got very worried about him and rushed off to take him to David City. Larry followed me to Cubby’s to fill the Suburban for me, and while we were there, Teddy and Amy drove by, saw us, and stopped to see what we were doing. Upon learning of Caleb’s distress, Teddy drove quickly to their nearby house for an albuterol inhaler he had that always helped Caleb. He was back before Larry had even paid the bill. Caleb gave the inhaler a try. Sure enough, it did help him, right away. It helped him so much that we went home, instead of going to David City.
Once Caleb was ensconced in the recliner, I washed the last load of clothes--for the second time. They are stinky, moldy, mildewed…where in the world did those soaking wet towels come from?! They weren’t there, just two days ago! And they didn’t get smelly that fast. SomeBody has been storing them in the garage, I’ll betcha, and then found them and quietly threw them down the clothes chute and hoped I’d think it was my fault that there were mildewy towels down there, from not washing often enough. Ha! I don’t leave the wash unwashed longer than two days, so there so there so there! ’Twasn’t me.
I lavishly slathered them (the towels, not the perpetrators) with OxyClean (or maybe I slavishly lathered them; how would I know the difference?). When the wash cycles were done, I tossed them into the dryer with four dryer sheets and hoped they would be bearable when they were dry.
They were; they were as good as new.
I ate a piece of apple pie as a reward.
Saturday, Hannah and Aaron came visiting for a few minutes. She was making more of those little crocheted ‘sacks’ of fine thread with ruffled tops for putting soap into. Very pretty. She plans to give them to her friends for Christmas.
Then Larry came home from work all in a huge hurry to go to The House, remove chimney from roof, and collect collectibles from basement. The chimney had to come off so that the house was as low as possible for going under power lines. The less lines the power company has to raise or take down entirely, the less they will charge. And they charge a grand plenty, let me tell you. Anyway, Larry did not wish to be on the steep roof cutting down a heavy chimney in the dark. Joseph and Victoria went with us. Larry drove his pickup, pulling the cargo trailer.
As we traveled one of the highways northeast of Columbus, Victoria pointed at the high-voltage power lines swooping alongside the road. Between several of the lines were short spacer rods, with porcelain or glass attachments at either end. “Look!” she exclaimed in surprise, “There are dog bones on those phone wires!”
The first order of business at The House was to cut the square chimney off, not a job Larry relished, because the roof is quite steep. He’d brought along a cement cutter. He climbed the ladder and, with a bit of difficulty, got to the chimney, pulling up the saw with a big rope. He sawed his way around it, creating a huge cloud of dust.
When it was loose, not having a better way, he simply shoved it over and let it tumble down the roof in an area where he thought it wouldn’t damage anything when it landed.
“Look out!” yelled Larry, and Joseph did look out, scampering backwards out of the way. (One should not try catching 200-pound chimneys.)
Thud thud ka-BOOMITY WHAM BLOOOEY!!!--and there it was then, on the ground.
Trouble was, it bonked into a corner of the raised part of the roof, damaging some of the siding, and messing up a few shingles, too. Luckily, Joseph had shoved the air conditioner out of the way, or the chimney would have landed CRASH-BANG right on top of it. When it hit the turf, it shattered to smithereens. So much for reusing the chimney. Ah, well; it wasn’t the purtiest thing in the world anyway, and it won’t be hard to put on a better one, with new bricks.
And I was on the wrong side of the house when it happened, and didn’t get a bit of the action on videotape. I asked Larry to haul it back up onto the roof, piece it together, and then pitch it off again, but he politely declined. Or impolitely, as it were.
Next, he took off the TV antenna, a satellite SomethingOrOther, and the lightning rods. One of the glass balls on one rod had a hole melted--yes, melted--right through it. Sooo…it was a good thing it was up there, wasn’t it? We saved the lightning rods; we will reinstall them. Larry barely finished before it was totally dark.
Victoria and I walked inside to look at the house again…and we discovered that when the chimney went crashing over onto its side up there on the roof, the concussion had sent a hefty part of the plaster ceiling crashing down in chunks and pieces in one of the upstairs bedrooms. It made quite a mess…but the moving of the house will doubtless do similar things; plaster doesn’t hold up as well as Sheetrock. It’s too bad, because everything was finished off and freshly painted so nice…
While we were there, several people stopped to see what in the world we were doing. Country people around these parts look after each other and their various properties! When they learned who we were, they were friendly. The man who owned some of the appliances in the house, after telling us all about his week-old twin grandsons, told us that Walkers had done his father’s basement. He asked about David, offering his apologies. We are continuously surprised over all the people who knew him, liked him, and respected him.
The man told us he’d taken the water softener (I’d noticed it was missing), and was planning to take the water heater, too.
So much for acquiring a water softener. So much for not having to buy a water heater.
And when Larry started taking apart the furnace and got a good look at it--as good a look as he could get at it, anyway, with his generator-powered light, which wasn’t very big--we didn’t like the looks of the rusty ol’ thing. Do we want to run the risk of poisoning everyone with carbon monoxide? Besides; if we get a new furnace, it will be much more efficient. Further, this one runs on gas; we would have to get a propane tank. We’ll get an electric furnace instead.
In the last few months, several houses hereabouts have been blown to bits from gas leaks. There was a house--maybe north of Fremont--for which Larry and some of the other Walker Crew poured the basement. Some time later, there was a gas leak in the line outside the house. The fumes followed the line into the basement…the lady who lived there went downstairs to start her gas-powered dryer…and the minute she turned it on, a spark caused the place to blow up, ker-BOOOM. The entire house--and it was a big, nice one--was destroyed. The amazing thing was, the lady wasn’t hurt much at all. Several other people have been killed when their houses went up like a rocket.
Now, I realize that there are a million and one houses heated with gas that are totally fine and dandy; but… I think we’ll go electric. It’ll be better for the asthmatics, too.
Larry and Joseph carried the big, heavy woodburning stove out to the trailer (that dinosaur is actually coming in handy)…then pieces of ductwork (even I helped with that; ductwork isn’t very heavy)…water pipes…I took out a stray sawhorse that came galloping in from parts unknown. A nice trash can sat on one side of the basement; I lifted the lid to see if I should take it, too--and discovered that the thing was chock full of beer cans. Yuck. Ugh. Bleah.
I left it behind.
I found a little old-fashioned iron, heavy as can be. I took it…I’ll clean it up and use it for decoration. Only thing is, it’s missing a handle. Where shall I find an old-fashioned iron handle, do you suppose?
After dark, every time I walked around the house, I could hear little animals scurrying through the nearby woods. And I had no flashlight, so I couldn’t see what they were. Rats.
No, no! I didn’t mean the little animals were rats! I meant ‘rats’, as in ‘botheration,’ I didn’t have a flashlight. The little animals were probably raccoons. Or rabbits. Or opossums. Or skunks! Aaaaaa! Run!!!
When we quit for the night, it was 8:30. We had a lot of gravel road to traverse before coming to pavement. At the spot the pavement begins, as we are heading west, there is a road that goes south to Dead Timber State Recreation Area. We’ve gone fishing there once before, when we were on our way back from Ponca State Park. Shortly beyond the intersection there is a stop sign.
As we slowed to a stop, Larry looked in his side-view mirrors and howled, “Oh, NO!”
“WHAT?!?” I cried, knowing Larry doesn’t get alarmed without something alarming to be alarmed over.
I looked into my own mirror and saw it: the trailer’s back doors were swinging open.
As expected, things were missing: Larry’s drill, a box of bits, a pipe wrench…
“Shall we go back and look for them?” I queried.
Larry shook his head. “No, it’s getting too late, and besides, they probably bounced into the ditch”--the ditches alongside that road were quite deep--“and we’d never see them in the dark.”
I was more of the notion that they were probably lying right smack-dab in the middle of the road, and if we didn’t hurry back to get them, someone else would… but Larry was right; it was getting late. So off we went again.
We turned north to nearby West Point, where we stopped at a Dairy Queen: I got a crispy chicken salad (nobody told me it was crispy because the chicken was breaded and fried); Victoria got a grilled chicken sandwich and a butterscotch shake, which she thought was the best thing she’d ever tasted in her life. Larry got a meal with chicken, macaroni salad, French fries (bleah), and … SomethingOrOther. And a Snickers blizzard. I, feeling extremely healthful and frugal, got nothing to drink, nor anything for dessert, because we had a jug of milk in the pickup.
I regretted that later, when my salad was all gone and I was dying for something on the order of a Snickers blizzard.
Home again, curling hair and helping the kiddos get ready for bed, I tried discussing Plans For The New House with Larry, but it’s difficult to discuss things with people who insist on nodding off in the middle of one’s Very Important Commentary and Critique. I wondered where we would hang our clothes; there are very few rods in closets, and if there are rods, they don’t run the length of the closet, but rather just across one end, only about a foot and a half long. And there is no coat closet.
Since Larry wasn’t making very many Helpful Observations and Declarations, I compensated by stewing and fretting in increasingly louder decibels, until he finally opened both eyes at the same time and said something.
“Well, I just won’t make any bedrooms in the basement; we’ll have one big clothes room down there,” he snorted.
I decided I’d better let the poor bloke sleep.
Sunday, Larry and I took turns staying home with sick kids. Larry made French toast--and then he ran out of bread, so he finished with sourdough muffins. Sooo…even though I was full after one piece of French toast, I had to try one of those muffins. I love sourdough muffins. I put lots of butter on it…then jelly…and then syrup. Mmmmm…it was scrumptious.
Dorcas finished eating and headed for Mama’s house, and I sent some apple pie with her. Mama likes pie, and they turned out really good.
“We have to keep it refrigerated,” I told everyone, “because of all the yogurt in it.”
“That means you have to sit in the refrigerator to eat it,” Larry explained to Lydia.
“You’re full of baloney,” Lydia informed her father.
“No, apple pie,” Larry corrected his daughter.
When dinner was over, we drove out to look at the lot we are buying in the daylight--I mean, we went out to look in the daylight at the lot we are buying (doesn’t matter when you buy it, whether dark or light; but does matter when you look at it)--so that Larry can get some sort of idea just how he wants to position The House.
Then we went to Wilkinson’s Land Management area expecting to see a lot of geese and ducks. Hundreds and hundreds had been flying overhead, but there was nary a one on the water. Guess they were all in the sky.
We continued on to Platte Center and then east to see some of the basements Walkers have done, especially looking for the ones with walk-out basements. I found out, just as I expected, that I don’t at all like the plain ones--the ones left with bare cement showing on basement and retaining walls. But we saw a few that had been bricked, and one or two that had siding on them, and one that they had used the brick-face forms on. I very much like the bricked ones best, and I was surprised when Larry told me, contrary to what I’d thought, that brick is not too so very awfully expensive. It’s the labor that makes it expensive. But Larry can do it himself; that was his first job upon arriving in Columbus in 1973, and he’s good at it. He’s good at anything like that. Actually, I don’t know of anything he’s not good at. Except maybe -- -- -- nope. Can’t think of anything.
Today when Larry gets home from work we are going to go get some more done in the basement of The House--disconnecting more water pipes, electrical wiring, and such like. And I am going to take buckets and shovels and gardening gloves and dig up a bunch of lilies I found in the front yard.
For now…back to the boys’ suits!
[1]"Astrofish," Microfish® Encarpa® Encyclosalmon 99. © 1993-1998 Micromullet Hatchery. All cod preserved.
[2]"Goldfish," Microsturgeon® Encatfish® Encycloflounder 99. © 1993-1998 Microtrout Mackerel. Red herring preserved.
[3]"Goldfish," Microminnow® Encroaker® Encyclopike 99. © 1993-1998 Tallywag Corporation. All skipjacks preserved.
[4]"Chinese Water Deer," Microstag® Antelope® EncycloElk 99. © 1993-1998 Micromoose Caribou. All reindeer reserved.
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