always a surprise.

My older older brother (as opposed to my younger older brother) came over yesterday morning. We had a cuppa and a nice chat. Ripley T. Dog did her amazing fetch trick for him, not really a surprise since I believe it's pathological and she can't not do it.

No, the surprise, the first surprise was seeing a hummingbird at the feeder. Here we are, nigh into December, and yessiree bob, there's a pretty supping at the sipper. I had brought all the others down, and refreshed the nectar, but I really didn't think I'd see any till maybe March. So, a nice surprise for the morning. Revisited in the evening, so Flip and Wood were able to marvel as well. What a treat for us!

My older older brother lives here in town, and is, in fact, the reason we live here in this town. He invited us. We're not sure if he regrets it by now. Especially since the gas stove incident...

We lived in Arizona before coming here, and we had a house. We rented the house out for awhile when we first moved here, since it was a mutually beneficial situation. Then the renter bought his own house, and we convinced my sister to buy our house (now it's like an heirloom house, we'll just pass it around the family). My sister dolled the house up real pretty, new floors and paint, and she wanted a new stove in the kitchen. I said "Great! I'll take this one since mine in Vegas is electric and EVERYTHING else in the house is gas." I figured my brother, the former propane guru, could lend us a hand hooking it up, since there was no gas stub poking out of the wall behind the (ew) electric stove. So. This is like, hmm, let me think, a year ago? So this gas stove has been sitting in my garage (in my parking spot in my garage) for about a year, so I finally make the plan and tell the key players (Wood and my brother) that the great gas install is going to happen now. Well, by golly, did they come through for me. I am blessed with handy men because they cut a hole in the wall behind the stove and they ran pipe through the ceiling and made connections and I don't know what all but it ended up that I could now bring in the gas stove. Well..while they were doing that...

Seeing as how it had been sitting in the garage for about a year, I figured the gas stove needed a bit of a dust off and started, well, dusting it off and in my dusting off found rodent turds in my gas stove. We'd had a bit of mouse trouble previously, but bait and traps seemed to take care of it. So I thought, well, I'll just clean this really well and use lots of bleach and rinse and scrub and vacuum and it'll be just fine. So some vigorous scrubbing later, I manage the magic machine into the kitchen and the boys hook it up and now they are off doing other guy things (the nice thing about Wood working with my brother is the swearing is SO much less). So I turn the stove to "self clean", which involves locking the door and the temperature getting really hot for a period of time and supposedly, any spills in the oven are turned to ash and easily swept out with a damp sponge. That's what the pictures look like, anyway. Well, the oven got to maybe 200 degrees when the stench started. Kind of an ammonia-y stench, like, pee stenchy kinda smell. Twenty minutes of this an I'm starting to have an anaphylactic reaction and throw open the doors, windows, turn on the fans, cover my nose and evacuate the children. After thirty minutes I turn it off and admit defeat. Out goes the gas stove, to the curb, leaving a trail (after cleaning! acck!) of rodent turds all the way. Apparently little mousie didn't just explore the stovetop, he explored the oven, the broiler, the insulation, the whole damn thing. I came this close to running out for a brand new gas stove, but I resisted. The electric came back in, plugged back in, works just fine, for an electric stove. Sigh...

The garbage guy doesn't pick up rodent fece laden stoves on his regular run, so we took the thing to the recycling place, thinking at least we're not throwing this big chunk of metal in the landfill, and for our troubles we get, hmm, a dollar twenty?

And the presence of the electric stove in my kitchen was not overlooked by my older older brother.

As prolific Flip pointed out, we escaped the city for a few hours Friday. The Boy was out of school, and she's always out of school, so I took a day from work and we made a day of it. We went out to Bonnie Springs, just past Red Rock canyon, which is the closest scenic spot if it's nature you're wanting to look at.

I asked the Boy that morning if he wanted to go to Red Rock and go for a hike, and he looked right at me and very clearly stated "Old Nevada." Hmph. This guy, he is something else. This must have been percolating in his brain for I don't know, months I guess. His fascination with trains and his blossoming computer search skills and, I think, a previous school outing had led him to a website about Bonnie Springs and Old Nevada. But this had been a significantly long time ago, and I myself had forgotten about it. He hadn't. Boop! There it is, in perfectly understandable English-"Old Nevada". So, I ask him, find out the hours, see if it's open. And he Googles it. Right there in front of me. "Flip, look, look at what he's doing!" She turns, looks, and grins. "Cool!" Yes, I'm thinking "cool", too, but then the obsessive paranoid in my brain says "What!!?? Are you NUTS? He's GOOGLING and he's gonna wind up on porn sites and who knows what" and okay, he's just looking for train stuff. So far, he's just finding train stuff (he found an audio site that broadcasts the actual radio traffic from a station in Colorado, train stuff, real train stuff. Huh.). But I digress. He finds the site, we find out the hours and now we have a plan. I had to BEG Flip to go ("C'mon, it'll blow the stink off'n ya", to quote my late Grandpappy), she tends to be homebodyish like her dad.

We really did blow the stink off, driving on the scenic route with the windows down, enjoying the sunny day, guilt free. I told Flip to keep her eyes peeled for wild burros and horses, since they are frequently sighted in that area, but not by me. Sure enough, we saw 'em. Kinda hard to miss since tourists like to stop on the 65 mph road with no shoulder two-lane highway and pet the nice wild animals. Makes for a truly scenic trip.

But we made it there right after opening time, and yeah, the guy brandished his gun (not really pointing at anybody, but he did clear leather and it kinda pissed me off.) I asked the Boy the rhetorical question "What do you want to do?" and he said "Train", but it pulled out just as we walked up. In we go to see the sights of Old Nevada. Flip pretty much sums it up. Maybe it's better on Saturday, but on this November Friday it just seemed pretty sad, as attractions go. We went back to the train, where Flip declared her independence and went to the petting zoo and the Boy and I got on the tiny rattly twenty different coats of paint train with the sign posted "tips are appreciated". What his fascination is, I don't know. The scenery was pretty nice, though. The property is right at the the bottom and I mean bottom of the Spring Mountains, with the Red Rock canyon recreation area off to the side, the road to Pahrump on the other and a big ole mesa being mined for gypsum inbetween the city and us. I could see the high water mark in the creek bed from our recent rains, and that little dry creek was pretty busy then, probably five feet deep and twelve feet wide in spots. Enought to knock you off your feet. The little train makes a loop probably a half-mile in length down to a lower parking lot and past the motel/resort with theme rooms (with satellite!) and back to the main entrance. We tried to find Flip amongst the animals, but saw the wallaby and buffalo instead and went back out to wait. We're sitting on the train to ride again and she pops up all excited about the wolves and such, god she's so beautiful when she smiles. So is he. We ride the train together and see a big ole hawk take off from a tree real close. She gets to take a photo of the burros on our way out (not on the highway, I'm no tourist), and all in all, (except for the part where she wiped animal lick all over the car) it was a very pleasant afternoon. Thanks for the suggestion, buddy.

"Ah, but your friend here is only mostly dead....mostly dead is still somewhat alive."

The powerbook funeral has been delayed, due wholly to the exquisitely aligned gears in Wood's brain, constantly whirring whilst I lay comatose, even with the light on.

After I worked to save lives at the local hospital of last resort, we took the ailing #2 wife to the local Mac store (recently CLOSED on Saturdays-damn them), so then off to the local Apple Store at the local Mall on the Strip because we just had to have a diagnosis. While the boy and I tried to find a quiet place to hang out (hah) the local Genius at the local Genius bar blew the bellows of bad news and and asked what did Wood need her for and they both heard "hard drive" and well, into the black bag with the #2 wife and home we go. All the while Wood's just chattering away, his mouth going almost as fast as his exquisite brain, "Techno techno techno techno five hundred dollars techno techno only three hundred dollars installed techno techno" (imagine chipmunk speed). The man is panicked about his data.

We get home, have dinner, mope around, put the boy to bed, lounge around a bit, then I go off to bed. I seem to recall him climbing in beside me...but it may be I just dreamed it.

Turns out after I go to bed he happens to look in his bag and AHA! the #2 wife is softly blinking in her little black, um, bag. Rapture! Blazing hope! Fervent desire! (where can I get one of those blinky things?) He opens his powerbook and there's his desktop. Voy-la, as they say in France. So he scurries to his desk in the bedroom to back up, hook up, do whatever it is his exquisite brain tells him he must do to avoid the pain, even turning on the bedroom light on the ceiling fan. He tells me this in the morning, how he was frantic to get things hooked up, backed up etc etc, all the while darting glances over his shoulder at my comatose form, worried that I might wake at any moment. What a thoughtful obsessive man.

It was successful, at any rate. He cobbled together some kind of life support for the seductress and she does not die at this time. And I know just where to look for him...

General unhappiness and discontent at home and about.

Wood's laptop is in critical condition, and he seems to be coming down with whatever the Boy is getting over virus-wise.

No joy when dinner is Cracklin' Oat Bran. (But we've established that it is a popular food group in the household.) 'Course, I had the pleasure of having V8 juice and graham crackers for dinner, since I was scrubbed through dinner and forgot to put my peanut butter away last week and it got stolen and I already ate the tuna and tomato soup earlier this week (My locker is a veritable corner grocery of non-perishable emegency food items) and I haven't made a work-food shopping dash yet. Sigh. No one to blame but myself. Where's that darn goat when you need one....and just how does one "scape" it?

Went to AZ to see the folks and Pooh. All seem to be fine. Ma won at Scrabble, and Flip held her own pretty well, aside from the math errors, she made some good plays. Dad enjoyed watching Master and Commander (with subtitles on), and we made it through Shawshank redemption with some wincing and apologies (sorry Ma, I forgot it was so,um raw). Great stories, both. Made it home with seed pods from the Mexican bird-of-paradise, a few leaves from the christmas cactus, and plenty of roots of bearded iris (corms, I think they're called, gnarly shrimpy shaped things). Something to look forward to come spring.


So, anyway, let's go work in the garden, or prepare for the zombie apocolypse, whichever pleases you most.