They've been pretty busy. Fiona started high school, Emmett started middle school, and Maeve started to read. The weather has changed seasons twice, or more often than that, if you include a few bizarre weeks in October.
GIRLYMAN
Planning for Girlyman's arrival and concert was a small-scale version of preparing for a wedding. You do a lot of shopping and organizing, you hope for good weather, and you breathe a sigh of relief when it isn't canceled at the last minute. Everything came off wonderfully.
The band stayed chez Stone for 3 nights. This required beds, and that required a trip to Ikea. When we discovered after the first trip that one of the beds wouldn't fit up the stairs, this necessitated Trip 2. Pillowcases and little sundries called for Trip 3. One of the advantages to commuting from NP to NYC is that I can head over to Ikea any weekday, never having to worry about going out of my way or hitting lots of traffic (or shoppers), but three trips in one week was still a bit trying. In the end, however, we made a great place for them to stay. The only important thing we couldn't get in advance was a shower curtain rod to fit in our oddly-shaped bathroom; it has two sloping ceilings. I thought that a trip to Lowe's with a photo of the bathroom would do the trick, but the salesman I spoke with said that the best I could do on short notice was to MacGyver something out of existing parts in their store. So the band did their best to keep the bathroom from getting soaked during their showers, and it all worked out fine. The rod's on order.
The concert was a hoot. The band warmed up (literally -- the sun was right in their faces until just before the show started) and then went on from 7:15 till 8:30. They played a great set that featured many (most!) of our favorite songs. One funny moment was during Doris's "Bird on the Wire" when she sang "There goes that damn bird" just as a huge heron flew overhead in wide circles. They dedicated a song to Jillian and Fiona, since they were indirectly responsible for bringing the concert together; it was Jillian who first played a Girlyman song for Fiona, who first played it for me. Before and after the concert, the group hobnobbed with our few guests and enjoyed food from our new grill (and the used one we'd just bought at a yard sale). After the show, we also ended up with many bottles of beer and hard lemonade, most of which is still around since neither of us likes beer.
One of the lovely things about the concert was that they performed right from the porch that we'd just had built a few months before. It was a lovely setting for a show.
GENERATOR (and BASEMENT)
After the ice storm that knocked out our power lines (taking our heat, water, and phones), we decided we needed a generator, but since the weather was fine and our funds weren't, this decision had to wait... until this week. Having finally saved enough to afford a nice outdoor battery, we headed over to that Lowe's again. The generator weighs in at over 300 pounds, so we're having it delivered next week, at which point our electrician will hook it up to a power grid. It's a gas-powered model, which saves on start-up costs and is quite easy to maintain. We're not happy about having to buy a generator, but it's money spent towards peace of mind, and it will probably come in handy a few times during its life.
Of course, with the generator comes the electrical panel that you want to connect the generator to. And with that panel comes the electrician. We found a great guy in the area who is also going to help us make the basement more useful by putting in a few outlets down there (currently there are only two!) so that we can move the laundry machines down there and make better use of that space. Right now the basement is sort of an insane storage area that must be navigated carefully, but in a few months, we're hoping to have a ping pong table, two sewing machines, and the treadmill all set up in there.
CHICKS
We quickly gave up on the chicken-rearing idea after we saw just how much work (and cost) these little birds were amounting to. We managed to get a chicken coop nearly for free, but then we'd also have to put up some fencing, and that could end up being pretty costly. Having your own eggs is rarely economical, it turns out -- I read somewhere that the typical store-bought organic-farm egg is about 50 cents while the typical home-grown egg is about $2.50 or so. And we really don't eat that many eggs. So with little ado, we gave the chicks to the folks we got the coop from -- a good trade. For pets, we still have the dog Jack, the two cats, and three of the guinea pigs. RIP Ambrose -- our beloved hedgehog -- who died just a day or two after the Girlyman show.
