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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Brett bought himself a ’98 Dodge Ram V10 last Friday.

Somehow he got Sean over at Central Valley to write him a loan (even with his non-existent credit), and we drove to Burlington to Deery Auto Outlet and we left with a new truck.

I’ve literally never seen my husband so unutterably happy! He was so excited he couldn’t eat his dinner, which was steak gorgonzola!

He spent most of the weekend showing people his new truck. Saturday we drove to Pella to show his sister (and to see her in her pregnant state; she’s due next month and we haven’t even seen her since she got knocked up). On the drive back home from Pella Saturday night, we hit a buck.

This is how it went: We were driving down a 4-lane. Neither of us saw a single thing. Then there was a sharp bump, as if we’d driven over a large brick in the road. The truck didn’t even swerve, I swear to God. Brett pulled over immediately – we’d been going about 70 – and got out.

A moment later, he re-opened his door and said, “I’ve just wrecked my truck.” Then he closed the door and walked off. His vibe was awful. I’ve never seen my hubby so crushed.

So I got out and looked and and indeed, all the plastic crap on the front of the truck was shattered off and there was a big dent in the side. I gathered pieces of truck into a little pile.

Brett came back carrying more pieces of truck and told me we’d hit a deer and that it was “vaporized.” He was really bummed so I just squeezed his arm and we got back in the truck and drove home.

“I’ve only had it ONE DAY!” he said. “Talk about the fucking LUCK.”

At home he called the cops – he had to try a few counties until he got the right one – and made a report, and the next morning he called the insurance agency and opened a claim. Whenever anyone asked for his license plate and he explained it was only a day old and he only had a trip permit they’d groan with sympathy.

There go our rates, I bet. I was already bummed about having to add a full-coverage vehicle (I’m cheap and only buy liability), but now we’ve got a truck that needs anywhere from $2k to $6k worth of work! Sigh. I hope they don’t ream us totally.

The truck’s damage is like this: we think the buck came up out of the ditch on the driver’s side of the road and immediately went under the driver’s side tire, and its body slammed the lower portion of the driver’s door and the door behind it. So the grille, headlights, and other details on the driver’s front corner are all shattered, and basically the entire cab is dented in on that side. Since this is an extra cab, that means two doors and the pole are dented. The driver’s door is dented so badly there’s a half-inch gap now and the breeze blows right in.

Brett went to see the bank and the insurance people today and while I haven’t heard from him, but I think it will all turn out all right. I think he was mostly wigged out because he’d been SO happy about getting the truck he wanted and then suddenly it was smashed… and he hadn’t even been doing anything silly.

Apparently the buck didn’t suffer, Brett said. And I think once his new baby’s fixed my hubby won’t be suffering either, so in the end it might be okay. (Thank God we didn’t hit it in the Jeep, ’cause it would have been much worse and the Jeep only has liability!)

I think this is proof, however, for my assertion that no one needs a new car. They’re expensive, they’re not more sound than an older vehicle, and they’re nothin’ but heartache. Ten years old or better, that’s the ticket! No attachment, no stress! Just drive the damn things. And when you hit stuff with ’em, it hardly matters.

I am SO not an early adopter. Let other bastards pay for R&D. Give me the tried and true – and reasonably priced – any day.

A tree next to our driveway died. It needed to be cut down – before it fell down into the power lines – and today Mr. Brett and Josus did just that.

This is a picture of Joe suspended from the crane arm in a swing, wielding a chainsaw:

He’s much higher up than it looks; the land slopes off sharply on that side of the driveway.

It took hours to cut the crown off and to finally get the tree down. When it finally fell, I felt the ‘thud!’ quite clearly through the floor. It was pretty heavy, to say the least.

Aren’t boys cool? They actually seemed to enjoy the whole process!

I fed them pork chops and frozen pizza and a giant salad with bleu cheese crumbled all over the top for dinner. After all, they’d made breakfast (scrambled eggs with veggies, hash browns, coffee with Bailey’s, corned beef hash, and veggie bacon strips) and cut down a whole tree, so cramps or not I owed ’em!

Yeah, so, Joe bought a bike after work last night, and brought it out here to play with.

He and Brett pushed it into Brett’s tool storage building thingy, and then the two of them absolutely geeked out on chopperdom until way past their bedtimes. Every time I wandered up there to see them, they were chattering about this or that possible change and how to accomplish it. So cute.

The stock dash was off before Joe even unloaded the bike. No more than an hour after I took the pics linked to above, they’d pulled off the rear fender and were experimenting with a stock Norton fender for line and length! They were in chopper heaven. They drank a couple pitchers of iced water and a few cans of Bud, and mostly squatted and looked at the bike and chattered. If they were any less butch, I suspect they’d’ve been giggling like girls!

I love it when my men have fun. (Especially when it’s in an outbuilding and not in the living room.) Brett’s been an automaton for a long while now; all he does is work or rest. He’s done very little socializing, hasn’t been shopping much, hasn’t been on a vacation for a couple of years… everyone needs to geek out on something they love with a like-minded friend every now and again.

Now our couch is covered in Brit parts catalogues and Brit bike magazines! Hah!