When we got home last night, there wasn’t any power. No lights, no heat, nothing. We went out with the dogs and a flashlight and checked our wires; we own all the wiring on our property and are responsible for all of it. The power company will only work on it up to the transformer and after that, it’s our problem. (Oh, the joys of home ownership.)

When Brett had determined that all our lines were up, we went inside and I lit some candles and called Access Energy.

Amazingly, a woman answered the main number at eight o’clock at night. She said she knew there was some problem in Batavia, and that crews were working on it.
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I hitched a ride to town this morning with Mr. Brett, because it’s icy and snowy and shitty out and planning to get worse, and as he surfed his giant V10 Dodge Ram down the various blacktop, we listened to comedy on his XM radio.

Robin Williams! Bernie Mac! Dave Attel! Red Foxx! Right there inside the radio!

Comedy is fun. Laughing your ass of two or three times during your morning commute is good.

I think I approve of the satellite radio, and I definitely approve of my redneck beloved jealously carrying around little bits of geekdom!

Brett came home from work around 10:30 today, and aside from stapling plastic over the two living room windows did nothing but sleep on the couch. I’d given him two little honey-do items (remove the air conditioner from the bedroom window, and move the old mattress into another room) and he did neither, bless him. He seemed to feel kind of bad about it, but he works hard. He deserves to spend an occasional day off sleeping in front of the telly if he wants! I know I do it every once in awhile.

I did the usual Monday stuff: dishes, laundry, toilet cleaning, dusting, tidying, taking trash out, bill paying, etc. I also cooked an amazing meal for supper (broiled onion-covered salmon with a fantastic tomato salsa, stuffed green peppers with a sour cream and tomato sauce), but my baby wasn’t very hungry since he hadn’t really done anything all day. I, on the other hand, really enjoyed my dinner, and there’s monster left-overs for tomorrow.

My local propane and propane assessories dealer, Farmer’s Coop in Libertyville, pissed me off a great deal this afternoon. I called to pay my monthly budget payment, and they informed me that there’s now a charge for making credit card payments. The bastards! I know for a fact that the issue with MasterCard and debit cards is months resolved now, and essentially they have no real reason to tack a fee on other than they probably think it’s a payment method that requires more office administration than PHYSICALLY HANDLING AND PROCESSING CHECKS and so they’re adding a damned fee. This means that I now have two bills I must write checks for and drop off in rural Iowa every month. Bastards! What year do they think it IS, anyway?!

I spent a lot of time today dealing with dial-up and iTunes. *sigh* Brett’s been craving a listen to New Train, an album by Paul Pena, but hasn’t been able to find the disc, only the case. So I bought the tracks thru iTunes – along with about ten others – and have been reconnecting and reinstigating downloads every hour or two since yesterday afternoon. Yes, it is as much of a bitch as it sounds like it is. Tomorrow at work I’m a downloading FIEND in the background, {southern accent} and that’s all there are to it {/southern accent}.

You know how when someone you love is really tickled, it cracks you up? I moved a bunch of comedy onto my iPod and Brett found it and was listening to a Dennis Leary bit called “Fat Bitches.” I couldn’t hear it, of course, since he had headphones on, but he was laughing so hard that it just utterly charmed me. So cute, that laughing red headed man!

Okay, so the download of the 16th and final track from yesterday’s purchase just failed – again – so I restarted iTunes to restart the download. I hope the fucker downloads this time so I can make Mr. Brett his CD for work tomorrow! (I’m not even getting disco’d from the POP, the traffic just lags so much that the iTunes download times out. God. Damn. It.)

So I’m off to burn all the comedy skits I’ve got to CD for the merriment of Brett and his crew. Ciao, lovlies!

This morning when I came downstairs, Brett turned to me and said, “We need wood.”

I turned groggily to look at the wheelbarrow, which was full of logs and kindling, and looked sleepily back at him.

He smiled. “We don’t have enough to make it through the winter,” he explained.

My brain shuddered into motion. “Oh, yeah, we need wood. Definitely.”

Brett drove around the property this fall and pulled out all the fallen trees; so our woods don’t have much more to offer this year. We used to get screamin’ deals on wood from our friends’ parents, but the grandpa had a stroke this year and I don’t even know if his woods are even being managed. (I guess they have hundreds of acres, a very well husbanded plantation. They’d ring their trees and let them stand a year before cutting them down so they were all aged and dry. It was a really healthy, good looking forest. Brett would drive out there and they’d load his truck full of logs and he’d bring them home and split it all pretty much by hand. Have I mentioned my man’s my hero?)

It’s pretty expensive to buy those little loads of split wood you see advertised on pin boards around town; what we need is about a dozen entire trees to get us through the winter – wood heat is our primary heat source. I think we have about enough to get us through the next three weeks. Ugh. Trying to heat with propane would cost about a zillion dollars!

Dishes are done, laundry’s in, and dusting’s out of the way. Blazing fire in the woodstove.

A frozen cheese pizza, a couch, and three episodes of Farscape on TiVO.

Ah, happiness.
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