Life continues here on South Road.

The goose is history and life goes on around here.  I must confess that I was awakened by a strange sound in the night a couple times.  I wasn't afraid because the alarm system, the dogs, the moat around the outside and the solid core doors and deadbolts would slow an intruder down enough to give me time to jack a shell into the barrel of my 12 guage.  It was just something I had not heard before and I finally decided it was just a cougar and rolled over and went to sleep.  No sense poking a stick at something that can eat you, if you know what I mean.
So this morning I let the geese out and then packed my goodies and carried them out to the car to take to Hospice.  It was then I noticed a big horse standing in my yard.  I thought it was Ito who lives next door and eats all my carrots.  I started back to the house to get a carrot, thinking to lure him back to his pasture.  Whoops!  Ito was in his pen already.  I checked to see if his pen was secure and noticed the fence bent down in a couple places and the gate post bent.  Rascal was trying to lure Ito away!
So I drove down 2 doors since I already had the car running and would need it to get to town.  See out here 2 doors is not 2 doors.  It is more like an eighth of a mile by the time you figure my driveway, South Road and then their driveway.  Some kid answered the door and I told him his horse was over at my place and went back to my car and as I started for town I seen him picking his way across his driveway barefooted and I knew he was going to have  a long day if he didn't get his shoes on his feet.  Hell, we have goat heads out here bigger then McDonalds Big Mac.  Stickers are not our friends.
So, to the crux of the story, when I got home, the horse was once more behind his fence.  This made me remember the time when we first lived here and I planted Tulips out front.  I came home one afternoon to find a neighbors cow munching my Tulips.  It would have been their first year and as I stood looking down into the bitten off Tulip, I saw the colors they would have been had they not died an early death.  Red, Yellow, Orange and damn that cow.
Now this brings me to our lesson for the day which is "Good fences make good neighbors."  When Bill and Shirley lived next door, Bill had a bunch of banty chickens.  One rooster he prized very highly.  I had small part poodle, part something else named Sysnyck.  Sysnyck went over and brought the rooster to our yard to play with it.  Things got a little out of hand and Kenneth ended up beating the dog with the dead rooster to which Bill said, "The dog did not kill my rooster, you did!"  Things were tense, but if Bill had built a better fence my dog would not have been able to drag his rooster over here.  Right.
Clifford and Jacque moved in after they left and they had lots of dogs.  Cliff let his dogs run out back and one of my ducks managed to fly over the fence and right into the mouth of one of the dogs.  He should have built a higher fence.  Right?
The ducks were crawling through a hole in the fence and going up and playing in the ditch and upsetting Mr. Keys, so I had to re fence the whole place just to keep peace in the neighborhood.  That was right after Kenny passed away and the last thing I wanted to deal with at the time., but I know the rule about good fences and good neighbors.

The tomatoes are canned and cooling on the counter.  I visited 3 clients today and hopefully brightened their day. I took a walk earlier and walked up the ditch bank a little further then I thought and almost go stuck out in the dark, but now I am home, the dishwasher is running, the dogs have fresh water and hopefully all the fences are going to stay up and all the gates stay closed and I am going to sleep like a log.  Until next time....

Keep your powder dry!

When is the news not the news?

Sorry, just got to vent here a minute.  I do not get the newspaper.  Why, you ask?  Because first of all there is very little content worth reading in it.  Then there is the price which is completely out of reason.  But I stopped after the last big snow storm.  See, I live on a back acre and that means I have a very long walk up to the paper box.  I like to read it first thing in the morning so that would mean I would need to make the walk in the dark in my jammies.  That might be alright, but I worry a lot about the dogs that  people in the county let out at night and hope they be good.  Rabid dogs, marauding bears and stuff like that make the walk something that is not going to happen.  And I tried the old trick of getting Monday morning's paper out of the box Monday afternoon and laying it on the front porch and then being so happy to see it there, grabbing it and my coffee and opening it at the table to read.
I would first read the date.  Hmmm, Monday.  Glance at the calendar and I have nothing planned.  Now you should know that getting old is an astounding process in that you can fool yourself real easy.  So in order to make a Tuesday morning appointment, I had to write it on the calendar on Monday.  Course then when someone told me it was Tuesday and I remembered tricking myself with the paper thing, they thought I was insane.  So I gave that up.
Back to the paper.  Remember right before Christmas we had back to back snow storms?  Well, that long driveway sure came in as something I was not going to travel down.  So when I went to get the paper, I found it thrown on top of a snow drift.  Same thing the next day.  The third day came the second snow and so the paper was delivered to the drift again only now it was a little further down the road.  Well, finally the road by the paper box was cleared, but the delivery boy still continued to deliver it to the ditch.  Then the street under the ditch.  So, I just gave up.
Deciding to watch the news on television I learned another lesson; all 4 channels have a different concept of news.  Some are Liberal, some are conservative, some favor Colorado Springs,  some favor Pueblo, and one in particular favors God.  So let me do the online thing.  I can now know what one of the actresses wore on the runway back in 2001.  And did you know Dolly had a boob job?  And there are some who are actually up on the news, but a couple give new meaning to the word "news".  The one scrolling across the top of the screen now is very tiny.  If I tilt my head just right and get it in the center line on my trifocals, I am good to go.
But here is the biggest news flash of all...As I get older I am realizing that my sources of news really do not matter.  I don't care how much skin Demi showed ten years ago.  I can not do anything about the Middle East situation and that smiling little chickadee on the television is not too worried about it either.  If someone dies, surely some one will tell me in time that I can attend the service.  I put an ad in the classifieds and got one call so I am sure that $37.95 was well invested.  The social page just shows me there were a lot of parties that I was not invited to.  The Tuesday morning sale papers for the grocery stores are wasted on me cause I have Legree's right up the road a piece. 
That leaves the editor's page and opinions of the readers and dear Kenny taught me that opinions are just like the end of my digestive tract, everyone has one.  So rather than read the news, I may decide one of these days to just go out and make it! 
All this because the paper man chose not to drive up my drive way and leave the paper in my yard.  After all I was only a customer for 29 years, but in this day and age loyalty means jack!