Penitence

I wore you out last week.  Which is too bad, because I really liked my large person last one, and only a very brave and patient die-hard few stuck around for the finale.  My bad.  So I am rounding up a few unrelated bits of chaos and offering them, a snack tray of minutiae (some day I will actually remember how you spell that word without mechanical help).

And here is the ugly truth: I set up a stat counter long, long ago when I published my Abbeville Equity Court abstract database on line.  This thing could probably count as a Life’s Work.  It took me five years in a dark basement in the BYU genealogical library, poring over the actual clerk-written records of over 3000 cases argued between 1770 and 1868 or so, and abstracting every name, and the main points out of every one of them.  I did this looking for my own ancestors – but figured, since I had to look under every flipping pebble, I might as well look for everybody else’s ancestors, too.

I put the thing up for free, and the stat counter was a joy to me, because it let me see that the tool was being used by LOTS of people from all over the world.  And I was happy.  Then, a couple of years later, I started this blog.  And ever since, I’ve had this little self-competition going: the big dream being that some day, I want my blog to so outnumber my database that I can rack up 200 whole hits before the database buries me again.  Which it inevitably does.  Do you understand what I’m telling you about myself?  That actually I hope the number of dear -to-me people who read my narcissistic  little Howdy-look-at-me piece of fluff in a week-and-half’s time will outnumber the number of productive and diligent strangers of all ages and creeds who are actually using this important,useful, serious tool in doing good.

I almost got my wish last week.  By accident.  I really had a mess of stuff to talk about.  Still.  The waters are running pre-tty shallow around here these days.

The Tray

• Why is it that when a bird dumps on my car, it’s ALWAYS on the very half a square inch of the windshield that ends up being RIGHT BETWEEN my EYES when I’m driving.  Unless I’m not driving.  Then it’s on the passenger side.  HOW DO THEY KNOW??? And why is the stuff made of some kind of highly adhesive acrylic that won’t come off, even when you spray it and then scrape it for hours with the windshield wipers? (There is no picture of this.  I know, I know – Rachel would probably post one, but only if there was a kid in the shot, too.)

• I haven’t been taking my camera anywhere in the last few months.  Too tired to lug it, and the world is too dreary outside.  Last year, I shot the fog.  This year, I just want the fog gone.  But this morning, camera-less, I saw something beautiful: I have two horses with long, lush, romantic black tails.  This morning, every black strand was rimed with frost.  If you had your hair frosted by a master dresser, you’d still be pitiful next to these elegant equine tails.  (No picture of this one, either. I took the camera the next day, but of course, the fog had vanished by then.)

• I got a cardinal in the mail today.



Chaz’ dear friend and fellow artist, Chelsea, sent this to me for the tree.  It’s actually ON the tree at this very moment, though it the only thing, save the lights, that still hangs there.  This shot is a little blue—sorry.  Between Snow Leopard and uploading to Mozy, we’re still techno-limping.  I’ll fix it and show you again later.

• Very early this morning, we found out that our aged collie is now incontinent.  We found this out in a most inconvenient manner.  So today, the house looks like this:

Puppies shut out of the upstairs and the kitchen.  Now, Skye shut out of everything else.  I am now the proud owner of three sets of these fences. Dog cubicles.  Or kids ones.

You always know this day is coming when you own an animal.  You just hope it never will.

• By my calculations, I have fed between three and fifteen horses between 400 and 6000 times each in the last eight and a half years.  If you’d told eight year old Kristen, “You will feed horses over 4000 times in your life,” her heart might easily have burst right out of her eyes.  If she then had  asked “When do I start?” And you’d told her, “When you’re about forty-nine years old,” it wouldn’t have gone over well.  No child can ever turn 49 years old.  Not in a lifetime.

• Back in 1984, when these children were very young—

Gin and Cam, waiting for the big truck to arrive, early one Saturday.

in an effort to slow Chaz down (she had a great desire to escape and do dangerous stuff all during her entire childhood), we bought a bunch of dirt to make a sort of barrier between the yard and the street.

Everyone helping.  Cam in a home-made jacket.

And we planted things on it.  Chief among the plantings, a few pine trees.

Note the pine tree, just behind the mailbox.  You will see this later, when it turns into the monster that ate the fence.

Two years later.  Notice the red arrow, pointing to the pine tree that has grown TREE-mendously in that two years.  Cam’s first ride on a bike, by the way.

They told us that we’d have to wait thirty years for those pines to grow up.  It didn’t take quite that long for the trees to look like decent mountain trees.  Here they are, twenty five years later.

Here is that same little pine tree.  Not the one in front.  The one in back.

Fence munching as promised.

Its brother on the far side of the mound.

And one we planted a couple of years later, on the far side of the driveway.  This is the one that sports bright red Virginia Creeper in the fall.

Bookends.

Back then, I couldn’t imagine ever waiting that long for anything.

But I guess that’s just what I did.