Stuff Happens

After all the attention Mars has paid to keep the water lines from freezing, leave it to me to not pay any attention last Sunday night.  I didn't drain the water out (which was my only job to handle at the time) of the pipes from the house and of course it froze.  Heck, we were down to about 15 degrees that night. Not that we don't/didn't have stored water but to have the water into the house froze solid was no fun.  It was only three days (right during the ice storm) but it opened up yet another thing we'll need to address more closely.  Water.  Gotta have more stored water.  Easy enough to work on AND it's not like it costs anything to do either. One of the highlights of our Christmas, for me anyway, was when the water finally thawed and I could wash the pile of dirty dishes without heating up water!  It's the little things in life that can sure make your day!

   I didn't really cook anything fancy for Christmas Dinner.  A baked chicken with carrots and onions, black-eyed peas from the garden,  a salad and homemade bread and I called it done.  Since we don't really like turkey much we'll usually have chicken in it's place. We've been known to frequently have Non-Traditional holiday dinners.  Before the BP oil spill many times we'd have a nice seafood dinner.  Shrimp, oysters, scallops etc. These days we've given up on seafood.  It's just not worth risking eating tainted seafood.  Being raised around Galveston Bay we would have seafood pretty regularly.  Not these days.  We've also stopped buying canned tuna for fear of contamination.  I've still got a couple of cases of tuna in our food storage but once that's gone I'm not sure we'll try and replace it.

My mom is something else I tell ya. Last year she sent Mars a Kindle Fire for his birthday.  Being a "real" book lover he wasn't really sure he was going to like e-books.  Let's just say that I "borrowed" his Kindle A LOT and I just loved it.  After a bit he slowly started using the Kindle more and more often.  There are just tons of free books available.  I was spending less and less time on his Kindle because he was slowly using it more and more.  Well, my mom (being the great gift giver that she is) called a couple of weeks before Christmas and told me that there were packages coming in the mail.  Once they got here I was instructed to wrap them both and stick them under my imaginary Christmas tree!  When I opened it up I had to just start laughing.  In  the box was my very own Kindle Fire!  She's cool like that ya know! lol

And in other news..... When we first moved out here to the homeplace there were piles and piles of debris from the house fire that needed to be disposed of. We took several truckloads of scrap metal (lots of siding too) to the recycling center.  Now, most of that is all gone but there is still lots of things like brick, firebrick and cinder-block that need to be removed from where the old house stood.  Much of the cinder-block isn't any good.  For the most part they pretty much break into smaller pieces when picked up.  Mars has used some for the parking area for the car, He also crushed up a bunch of it with a sledge hammer and used it to make walkways so we weren't walking in mud.  The newest thing to do with the old cinder-block pieces is to use them to build up the corner at the front of the property.  There's a pretty good slope there and that part of the land is mostly huge sandstone boulders with just a little bit of dirt and grass growing over it.  So the idea is to use the cinder-blocks to build up the corner.  Once that is done Mars wants to dig out the top few inches of dirt from where the old house was sitting and cover up the cinder-blocks with it.  Eventually there might even be grass or something covering up that little corner.