friday’s freehold
Last July, I blogged about moving into my new house, the first house I’ve ever owned. Also, the first place in the country I’ve ever lived. Since then, I’ve learned all sorts of new lessons, sometimes the comically hard way. I’ve lost some weight and gained some muscle. Haven’t had much time for blogging, since I’m generally either a) working b) mowing my ginormous lawn c) commuting (which now sucks up 1.5 hours a day) d) hauling my own garbage to the town dump or, most recently, e) battling snow.
Is it all worth it? Absolutely.
Here’s a smorgasbord of anecdotes from the past 6 months:
– My house has mice. Lots of them, judging by the scampering sounds often coming from the walls around me. My cats have spent their entire lives indoors, but hunting mice is clearly instinctual. What to do with them after *catching* them is more of a grey area. My cats don’t want to kill the mice so much as bat them, smash them, jump up and down on them, and prance around proudly with mouse limbs dangling out of their mouths. A couple of times, I’ve become so sympathetic to the living creature that has become a toy that I pick it up and take it outside. I’ve had to retrieve several corpses from the living room floor and provide burial services (i.e. open the door and fling them outside). One poor little guy was disemboweled and bleeding all over the place, but still alive. I bawled my head off, took him outside, and hoped for his sake he had a few moments to make his peace with the Mouse Lord before dying, hopefully quickly. Ah, nature red in tooth and claw, and dripping rodent blood on my hardwood floor…
– My house has a variety of heat sources, none of which I’m fully in control of. It has skylights and a greenhouse-style glass wall in the living room, which is great for natural light but turns the place into a sauna in the summertime. Also, I cleverly located my computer monitor in such a way that it’s rendered useless by glare for a certain period of time each day. I do, however, have more plants than in all the rest of my life put together, and they’re all doing quite well. It’s like a tiny tropical paradise inside while, outside, it’s currently below freezing and snowing.
– The primary heat source is an enormous, scary-looking furnace thing in the basement. I suddenly can relate to the kid in “Home Alone” and his desire to avoid going into the basement. At first, I couldn’t figure out how to turn the thing on. My dad came to visit and he couldn’t figure it out either. Some combination of pushing buttons and fiddling with the thermostat eventually worked, and everything was great, until the day it mysteriously stopped working. After several days of increasing chilliness, I opened an account with a local fuel service. I told the extremely nice lady on the phone that I was completely clueless as to the nature of my heating device; fortunately, she took it in stride. When she asked how much fuel was left in the tank, I said I had no idea… but a sneaking suspicion popped into my head: there was that gauge-looking thing on the top of the fuel tank. I never really looked at it, trying to avoid direct eye contact with the rusty behemoth in the basement. Sucking it up, I finally took a good look at it, and oh, hey, it was empty! Guess that explained why my feet were turning blue. The good news was, it was an easy problem to fix (put fuel in tank). The bad news was, I had absolutely no idea how much liquid heating fuel costs. Oh my fucking god.
– The house came with a riding mower. I was so proud of myself for figuring out how to drive it (I have yet to master a manual transmission car), and got about 10 minutes of mowing done before the thing died and refused to start up again. It then sat on my lawn for the rest of the summer as a sort of ornament. It wasn’t until late October I paid someone to come take a look at it and found out, hey, lawn tractors need fuel too! What’s with everything in the country needing fuel?? It actually needed some other fixing, too, though. Since the grass growing season was essentially over anyway, I got it repaired just in time to roll it back into the shed until next spring.
– Since the lawn tractor was no help at all, I went out and bought an electric mower. It worked well, but didn’t run for as long as the manufacturer’s writeup claimed it would on a battery charge. So I basically had to mow my lawn every single day, for as long as the battery would hold out, then plug it back in until the next day. The lawn became my own personal Boulder of Sisyphus. Every day I would mow, and every day there would be more grass and weeds. I dubbed an entire section of lawn “the back 40″ and decided it really didn’t need mowing after all; I would leave it as a small nature preserve. I managed to finally finish the portion of lawn that I felt really needed to be mowed, for aesthetic reasons, by the end of summer.
– One day, there was a swarm of ladybugs in the upstairs bathroom. I don’t know where they came from, how they got in, but months later, I’m still finding random ladybugs around the house.
– Thoughts of snow were never far from my mind, even in the heat of summer. About a month ago, it suddenly occurred to me that, because my driveway opens directly onto a highway (well, what passes for a highway in New Hampshire; it’s 2-lane blacktop), the highway snow plows were going to wall me off after every storm. So I would either need to make arrangements to have someone deal with that for me, or stay home during every snowstorm, because if I were out when a storm started, I’d be unable to get back to my own house. I’m still working on how exactly I’m going to communicate this fact to my employer.
– The first real snowfall of the season occurred last weekend. Although I was working 6-7 days a week, I made an executive decision and tore myself away from the computer long enough to drive to Lowe’s (what in the name of all that is holy did homeowners do before Lowe’s was invented?) to buy a snowblower. Actually, I bought the snowblower online, then went to Lowe’s to pick it up. And no, I had never laid eyes on, let alone handled, a snowblower before. I bought a big one. It’s shiny and red, and its web description sounded like it can blow lots of snow. When I asked the nice man in the store if he could help me load it into the back of my Subaru, there was surprisingly little hesitation when he said “No!” Hmmmm. Apparently, snowblowers are larger than I had imagined. Fortunately, Lowe’s rents trucks! I’ve driven a truck before. Twice, in fact!! Never a flatbed with a cage, though. With a very big, shiny, red snowblower rolling back and forth and repeatedly smashing into the back of the cab because I scoffed at the nice man’s suggestion of tying the snowblower down. Also, my timing was impeccable: the snow started while I was driving the truck. I found that the possibility of imminent death via driving accident/braining by snowblower added an air of real excitement to the day! I was having a great time!! I found some random radio station playing classic 70’s and 80’s heavy metal, and roared across the New Hampshire countryside, screaming like a banshee, in the driving snow, with my snowblower trying its darnedest to join me in the truck cab and enter the back of my skull. Woohoo!!!!!
– Four days ago, we got the first real snowstorm of the season; my town supposedly got 8.5 inches. I had planned ahead, and stopped at Lowe’s (a different one this time; fortunately, every New Hampshire city has a Lowes) the night before and bought a gas can. I had never actually handled a gas can before, or attempted to put gas into one. I hope no one at the Shell station flung a match on the ground after my first attempt at filling said gas can, what with all the splashing around of highly combustible fluid. The day of the storm, I didn’t even bother trying to drive to work, I just worked from home, nonstop, from dawn to midnightish. So there wasn’t a lot of wiggle room in there to try out the snowblower.
– Three days ago, I got up at dawn (well, I do that anyway, but it sounds more dramatic to say “got up at dawn”), hoping to get my driveway cleared before my first conference call of the day. I knew that the gasoline I had managed to get into the gas can (mostly) needed to go into the snowblower somehow. And there was a place for a key, and a string to pull, and an electric starter option. The nice man at Lowe’s had said a LOT of other stuff about “priming”, “augurs”, “choke”, “shear pins”, etc., but about the only thing I retained was that I should under no circumstances stick my hand into the snow chute; I should use the plastic stick thingie to clear clogs. So I read the user manual over my morning coffee. Then I went outside and circled the snowblower warily, sort of letting it know who’s boss without actually engaging in direct contact with it. Then I went inside for more coffee. After a hopeful but pathetic attempt to avoid the necessity of actually using the snowblower at all by just smashing down almost a foot of fluffy snow with my car by trying to drive through it to the road (I did make it a good three feet before getting stuck!), I eventually did succeed in starting my snow blower (after once again splashing quite a bit of gasoline around). I was so pleased with myself, I really wanted to go inside and rest for a while, but the manual said I should not leave my snowblower unattended with the engine running. So there was nothing left to do but actually start plowing, which turned out to not be all that bad. I wore my gunowner’s hearing protection, pictured myself in the flannel shirt I do not own, and manfully plowed my quarter-mile driveway. It took three freakin’ HOURS (two in the morning, and one more on my lunch break), and my palms were bruised and my nails broke and my arms still ache three days later, but dag nabbit, I did it!! I took a little victory lap in my car to nowhere in particular, just because I could.
During the break between hours 2 and 3 of snowblowing, I got a friendly call from PSNH (the New Hampshire gas and electric provider) informing me that my bill (which I had already noticed was late) had been returned to them by the post office, marked “mailbox down”. It wasn’t until I plowed all the way up to the highway that I discovered that the road plows had buried my mailbox in an ice wall and knocked it askew. My next door neighbor was even worse off; you could barely even see his mailbox anymore. I had neither the time nor the upper body strength left to even start to deal with that, so I just left it until the weekend.
Yesterday I trudged up my driveway, heavily bundled against a bitter-cold, windy day, with a snow shovel in my hand, on a mailbox rescue mission. I didn’t have the heart to fire up the snowblower again and figured I’d do it the old-fashioned way. I scrambled up the ice wall created by the highway plows and started digging around my mailbox. Parts of the ice wall could support my weight; the parts that couldn’t left me knee-deep in snow and in serious dangerous of leaving my boot behind when I managed to retrieve my foot. This floundering, scrabbling and sinking went on for some time, until I finally managed to unbury my mailbox enough to discover that its post wasn’t actually broken, just tipped over. The post was embedded in a block of cement. Now maybe if I hadn’t exhausted my arms two days previously, and/or could get any sort of traction on the ice wall, I could have managed to move my mailbox, but as it was, I might as well have been attempting to drag my car. I managed to maneuver and slide it in such a way that it was sort of hanging at the edge of the ice wall, horizontally, and decided that that would just have to be good enough for the mailman. It was at this moment that a crusty old New Hampshire gentleman in an enormous pickup truck with a plow on the front pulled off the highway, rolled down his window, and gallantly asked “Need some help?” Throwing self-respect to the wind, I practically squealed “Yes, please!!!” Sixty seconds later, the mailman drove up and pulled over, directly in front of my knight in shining armor (who *did* have a flannel shirt, by the way). He handed me my mail, and I asked about this business of apparently needing to break down the ice wall created by the highway plow in order to receive mail service. He seemed quite apologetic but said yes. But he also said that he generally holds onto people’s mail after storms, figuring they need some time to dig out, and just brings it back the next day. It must have been a substitute who returned my PSNH bill the other day. So, all’s well that ends well! I got my mail, a total stranger plowed away the ice wall in front of my mailbox, and I went to Starbucks for a mocha.
And today, it started snowing again. The adventure continues…
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