Less Than a Tour

Some of you may know that I have moved.


"Where...to Mars? Is that why you haven't blogged in 2 months??"


Hush you. I only moved to the country. It's kind of like Mars, only with more trees. And comparable numbers of human life. Statistics may vary.


So, I've had this plan in my mind, since moving day, to take you on a little virtual tour of what this area I call "the sticks" is like. You know, with lots of pictures and dialogue and stuff. "Over here is the, uh... tree... and there's some more trees... and if you'll look to your right, you'll see a bigger tree with a man wearing camo sitting in it."


It was surely going to go something like that.


And then I looked at all of the boxes in my living room and shuddered and got to work on everything but a virtual tour of my new world. And then Thanksgiving came. And then Christmas came. And New Year's came. And family came.



Whew!


And then, well... then came the cold.


You all know as well as I do that this has been one of the coldest winters in a long time. This area gets below freezing here and there during an average winter, but this has been no average winter. Weeks of temps in the 20s at night and 40s in the day have left otherwise prepared people to scraping ice off of their windshields with spatulas.


My outdoorsy tendencies have all but left me. The cold weather makes me a hermit. All of those intentions of going jogging in the morning through the national forest have become distant memories. Ideas for wandering around taking pictures have dwindled. However, living in the sticks has given me one new outdoor activity. I think I'll call it Pipe Tag. It's a little game I've had to play because there are water spigots, pipes and faucets all over the property. Two spigots are down the long drive to the house, one spigot at the house, one sink in front of the storage shed, and a partridge in a pear tree. Not to mention, the pipes in the house. Every night I run out in the freezing cold and turn them all on. (Okay, not every night. Some nights, Seth does it.) Then in the morning, I run around and turn them all off. Sometimes. Honestly, I don't remember to turn them off all the time. But I hate the idea of all that water being wasted, so I try. But then I have to remember to turn them back on again, and that usually doesn't happen until it's already REALLY cold and dark outside! But then, I'd REALLY hate to have busted pipes, so I do it. Sigh.



This morning, the spigot outside the house looked like this:

A perfect picture of my life lately. And my blog. Frozen! All I can say is, Wait for the thaw friends. I'll get there, and things will be running smoothly again.

But with more trees.