Road Kill Cafe

This time of year has always felt like some type of holding pattern. The holiday is over and there is just this limbo of time to pass through before the new year. It is just a period of time where you eat holiday left-overs, wishing they would somehow magically disappear. You begin the task of packing away the decorations, the tree and wonder just what is the appropriate thing to do with all those Christmas cards…………

At the end of this limbo time lurks New Years Eve. This is a holiday like no other. It is one that represents itself as something really special, but never really lives up to its’ reputation, despite all the hoop-la that accompanies it. People dress up and go to parties………to watch the clock tick to midnight. During the time that they are waiting for this, they drink too much and therefore don’t remember it anyway.

After the New Years Eve party, most people wake up with hang overs and regrets. With a major gap in memory, which their friends, that is IF the friends remember, will fill in the blanks. Usually this is stuff they don’t want to remember anyway, but you will have no choice because someone will have it on video. This is then used as blackmail for about the next six months.

New Years Day is filled with aspirin, football, parades, post-holiday and white sales. This is indeed an interesting combination if you really think about it. After the day begins with the customary awakening and wondering about what you did the night before, you stumble for the coffeepot, the aspirin and maybe a bloody mary or three. You then call your friends to see if they are still alive….err……to see if maybe they can fill in your memory gap. It is usually a good thing to be especially nice to whom ever hosted the party you attended, because they will be the ones with the video evidence of the festivities. This can be useful information, so you know who to apologise to, or just avoid for a while.

Here at the gulch I think we will just do what we normally do, quietly stay at home, go to bed at a decent hour and have no regrets or a hangover when we wake up the next morning.

Today began as most days do, with me sitting, drinking my morning coffee and watching for the first signs of daylight to peek down in our valley. I love the quiet stillness of the pre-dawn, for there is in it a source of peace and strength.

This morning the dawn revealed a heavy fog. A misty grey blanket that made the world disappear a few feet from my window. At one corner of the hayfield all I could see of the trees there were the dark tips of branches, barely recognisable in the heavy mist. Stepping out onto the back porch, the only sound I could hear was the water of the creek that gently swooshes over the rocks on its’ journey downstream.

Reluctantly I stepped back into the warmth of the kitchen, even though this grey misty world held much facination for me, the cool dampness was sinking in past my flannel pajamas. Back inside I was surrounded with warmth, the heady scent of freshly brewed coffee and the dogs contentedly snoring away, curled up on the kitchen rugs.

Every day I feel blessed to wake up in such a place, to be enveloped by a house and land that I love so much. While it is true that there is still more work to do both inside the house and out, this place is more home to me than any place else I have ever been. In the time that we have been here I feel that I have become as much a part of it as it has become part of me.

I went out and walked in the garden that was, remembering where I had planted what. In my minds eye I could see the garden green and growing. In reality it is brown and slumbering, patiently waiting for the warmth of spring. The remnants of the sunflowers, bare stalks, some not so straight now, still standing a silent vigil.

I am already doing some preliminary planning for next years garden. Some of this has been prompted by a couple of seed catalogs that have showed up in the mail. Some of it is just my nature of having to think and plan about stuff like this, taking into account what I have learned with the previous garden.

The pasture is still unwilling to give up my garden space. It was a constant battle to keep it from encroaching into the garden, mostly a losing battle. All it would take is a bit of rain and the grass and weeds would show up in amazing ferocity. Shortly after I had harvested the last of the vegetables the pasture reclaimed my garden space. I am going to have a battle to get it ready for planting in the spring, carving it out of the pasture once again. I am sure that as time goes by the pasture will come to terms with the fact that the garden will remain.

In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season. The Christians called it “Christmas” and went to church. The Jews called it “Hanukka” and went to synagogue. The atheists went to parties and drank.

These days, people say “Seasons Greetings”, which when you think about it, means nothing. It’s like walking up to someone and saying “Appropriate Remark” in a loud and cheerful voice.

Some of you may be unhappy with this dereligionizing of the Holiday Season and you may have decided that you’re going to celebrate the old fashioned way, with your family sitting around stringing cranberries and exchanging homemade gifts. Well, you can forget it. If everyone pulled a stunt like that, the economy would collapse overnight. The government would have to intervene, forming a cabinet level Department of Holiday Gifting, which would spend billions and billions of tax dollars to buy Barbie dolls and electronic games, which it would drop on the populace from Air Force jets, killing and maiming thousands. So, for the good of the nation, you should go along with the program. This means you should get a large sum of money and go to a mall.

When you get to the mall, the first thing to remember is that you should not park in the mall parking lot and walk to the mall buildings, because you will probably get killed. Instead drive your car right up to and, if possible, right into the mall building. This is perfectly legal, people do it all the time. In almost every mall I’ve ever been to, the corridors were littered with cars, RVs, snowmobiles and boats left by smart parkers.

Now you are ready for the actual shopping. Your goal should be to get it over with as quickly as possible.

Here is a very efficient shopping method: Divide the amount of money you have by the number of people on your gift list. So if you have $160 and you have 10 people on your list, your average is $16 per person. Now find something that costs $16 and buy 10 of whatever it is. You’ll find many useful gifts in this price range; for example, you could get 10 bottles of Vitamin B. Everyone can use Vitamin B and your children are sure to shriek with delight when they find it under the tree.

If you want to buy gifts that are a little more personal, here are some guidelines:

Gifts for Men

Men are amused by almost any idiot thing, that is why professional ice hockey is so popular. So buying gifts for them is easy. But you should never buy them clothes. Men believe that they already have all the clothes they will ever need and new ones make them nervous. If you give him something even as simple as a new tie, he will pretend to like it, but deep inside he will hate you. If you want to give a man something practical, consider tires.

Gifts for Women

Again, you should avoid buying clothes. Not because women don’t like clothes, the problem here is sizes. Women’s clothing sizes don’t mean anything,they vary from store to store, from manufacturer to manufacturer depending on the day of the week or the time of year. Trying to buy clothes will give you migraine headaches or cause you to spend time in the nearest bar. This means you will drink too much and end up having to go to AA meetings. Plus it really cuts into your available shopping time.

The safest gifts for women are expensive little bottles of scented liquids. These are sold at cosmetic counters under names such as “Eau De Water” and “Endless Nights of Heavy Petting”.

Gifts for Children

This is really easy, you never have to figure out what to buy for kids because they will tell you, over and over and over……………… Just make sure that you get them exactly what they ask for, even if you disapprove of their choices. If the child thinks that they want Murderous Bob, the toy with the face that you can rip right off, you’d better get it. Now you may be worried that it might help to encourage the childs’ anti-social tendencies, but you have not seen anti-social tendencies until you have witnessed a child who is convinced that they have not been given the right gift.

It began snowing earlier today. At first it was just fitful flurries, fat flakes that fell lazily to be caught on the grass and the bushes. A puff of breeze would send the flakes swirling into mini snow devil type swirls, fascinating to watch as they made their way across the hayfield.

It has been snowing long enough now that the skyward facing parts of the trees have a coating of white. I have always loved the snow. Unlike rain it falls silently and blankets everything in its path. Even the most mundane objects take on a surreal beauty as bit by bit they are transformed by the softly falling flakes.

I had to go out and walk in this noiseless waltz. To become a part of it and welcome its quiet serenity in my soul, to feel the gentle flakes softly brush against my face like the breath of a sleeping baby. To stand beneath the grove of leafless trees at the end of the pasture and have the wind swirl a riot of white around me, camouflaging the world from me and me from the world.

I listened to the delicate babbling from the creek as it welcomed the falling snow, and watched as they instantly became one and playfully tumbled away together. They wooshed around the rocks and fallen branches wishing a fond farewll to their bretheren who had chosen to remain.

Reluctantly I made my way back to the house and to more mundane things. However I will carry a bit of that peacefulness along with me and continue the day with a more joyful heart.

After dealing with slow dial up and a noisy phone line for over a year, we now have satellite internet!

The last time I posted to the blog it took almost 30 min……….the increasing noise on the phone line didn’t help. Couple that with the best we could get for dial up was less than 28.8, it made for some long sessions.  But no more!

The phone company kept promising DSL, but never came through. They also promised to fix the noise on the line, but anything they did was temporary at best. Sometimes the noise was so bad I could barely hear who I was trying to talk to, or for them to hear me. We still have the phone line, but now cut down to basic service only. I can get better long distance rates using a phone card.