Now we have water!!!

  Yes, for a time we did not. That was ever-so-NOT-pleasant. It started as a slow leak and we couldn't use our well-water for drinking, cooking, tooth-brushing, etc. Then it got worse.

  It is, technically, my summer vacation. I am still working, but my work is done at home and no one really cares that I usually do it starting at about 10:00 a.m. until late, late, late at night. Then I read a little and go to sleep. So, you see, I had only been asleep for about three hours when the pounding started on the door at 7:45 a.m. All boys were with their Dads. I was snuggled away in a room that nobody needed to enter. I did this on purpose. On purpose, I say!!

  Again, with the pounding!!

  Then, my father's voice: "Get up and get dressed and meet me on the porch. I want to talk to you."

  Why is it that this sentence can still strike fear deep in my soul even when I have done nothing and am thirty-eight years old? Why, I ask you??!! He does this just about every other day and I've almost decided to start doing guilt-worthy things so that at least I can have enjoyed myself a little for the terror I feel.

  I dressed, bleary-eyed, and stumbled out onto the porch to find a giant trench dug from the pump house to the driveway and another all the way from the front of the pump house to the back of the pump house. And we had no water in the house. No one told me that part, I just flushed the toilet and watched the last of it go down. Lovely. The disaster looked like this:

  My whole day flashed before my eyes and my body spasmed in pain as if to predict how I would be feeling after this was all over. Dad and I are the only drivers, so I had been kicked out of bed to go to the hardware store and get all the PVC parts we needed to fix a cracked pipe in our water well system.

  The hardware store didn't open until 9:00 and he got me up at 7:45 and there was no water for a shower, so I'm not certain what the lead time was for, but nevertheless I was up and out of there and back by 11:00. The store is NOT close. Then there was one little, tiny, but crucial piece that I got wrong so I got to go back to the hardware store...yay.

  In my absence, Dad discovered this:

  Yes, that would be the main electrical wire coming into the pump house buried directly OVER the water pipe itself. Can you say "STOOPID?" Dad nicked it with a shovel and it blew him onto his butt a couple feet away. THEN Clanpaw remembered that he buried it there with no conduit. Geez. OH-and-by-the-way they share the SAME conduit underneath the driveway and down underneath the house. There, I have recorded it for posterity.

  By 3:00 p.m. we had cut out all the bad pipe and created a bypass with several valves:

 And saved ourselves who knows how many hundreds of dollars that the well services guy would no doubt have charged us on a holiday. Sheesh. And he wouldn't have done the bypass with the valves for easier repair next time around. They always figure there won't be a next time around, but there are at least two "next times" every year with a well buried in clay that experiences a drought. In fact, just about everyone in the terrace has been repairing their buried pipes within the last week. 'Course...none of them seem to have been buried straight. Then the ground dries and puts more strain on the pipe...eventually it breaks. Seems like you'd bury them straight, but they didn't/don't. I can't figure that one out at all. And perhaps it doesn't matter.
  The "little" electrocution event turned Mimi into a screaming lunatic for a bit. She is...well...an invalid to sum it up nicely. She is also my mother, so I try to respect her authority.  Her greatest fear is being without my father--as though I would go hang her by her toenails from a tree?  I think her greatest fear is that no one would care for her if my father was no longer around. This is, well, a silly notion to say the least. Attrition and I would never think of not caring for her, but there you have it...it is a mystery.
 I have no illusions about what it would be like to care for her without Dad, though.  I wish I knew where the joyful parts of her have gone and why she sometimes chooses sadness and depression. Her life consists of watching House episodes on DVD ad nauseum and sleeping. No music. No music for her is like no water for fish.

  We didn't rush right in and tell her that Dad had gotten shocked and she took that personally. However, whenever you enter her room she doesn't like it and takes that  personally. Catch 22, you see. Dad was fine, so I thought I'd let it go. Tell her later. Well, later was when she threw the fit. My bad. Dad wasn't going to tell her at all.  I wasn't either, but Clanpaw wanted to discuss scenarios for repairing the nicked power cable over lunch, so the truth outed itself right there. Ooops.

  I still ardently advocate living together as a family! I just don't know how to live through this season of aging we are in. It is new to me. I've lost members of my family, but it has been to freak accidents and one drug overdose--tragic, but not slow, progressive deaths. Life has been kind to us in the aging department as a whole. Not to my mother, but my grandparents are 83 and only this last year did they encounter their cancers. My grandmother is in remission (and the new pair is on its way, BTW--lots of skin-stretching to be done), my grandfather is losing ground. My mother is, perhaps, altered in a way  that is not recoverable. Admittedly, my father is 61. Not old, but older. My greatest fear, if I have any fear (which I really don't), is that I will lose them all in close proximity to one another...like within ten years of each other.

  It is silly to fear. I always remember Dune when I think about fear. Yes, I am a geek. In Dune, Paul Atreides quotes a saying when he encounters things he fears: "Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration." That isn't the entire quote, but it is the part that I use to remind myself of what fear can do to me if I allow it to eat me up. I shall look that one up and quote it in full here at some point...

Good afternoon, good evening, and good night!
Scat

"Fundamentally"

I have been working alongside my father in one form or another since I was about fourteen. At first, I was merely transcribing his scribbles into typed manuscript. As I became more confident, I began to correct the glaring spelling and grammatical errors. Later, I would flag him down to correct errors that were further outside my knowledge base and then I was well on my way to being his personal scribe and writer-of-all-things-written. Later he figured out that I was a rememberer of names-and-faces, phone numbers, ettiquette, and other useful tricks and we became a fast pair.

I took a little time off to go to college and graduate from same. I volunteered in a lab or two to gain some valuable expertise and then began teaching. Then two things happened. First, I needed to earn more money. Second, my father stared in a low-budget Wiltel Advanced Technology Group film entitled "Fundamentally."

Evidently he had gotten into a bit of a speech and presentation-writing rut. He started to ignore my first and most basic rule: never say the same thing the same way twice. He got so lazy about it that he began to overuse the word "fundamentally." So, the AV guys took copies of all the videos they had (we're talking years of video here...like from 1989 through 1999) and took out every clip that included the word "fundamentally." They then spliced them all together and what resulted was the most hysterical twenty-three minutes of film you have ever seen. Dad must have said "fundamentally" every day, in every suit, in every state of the Union, in every sales convention, and even once while he scratched his nose rather thoroughly--they looped the nose one several times and it looked like he was drilling for gold.

So, viola! I was hired. And I have been ever since. Sometimes as a contractor. Sometimes as an employee. Sometimes as unpaid lackey. But always hired to keep him out of his "fundamental" vocabulary rut. I have other responsibilities as well given my scientific and computing background. A lot of technical design and analysis has come my way and I have had to learn it to earn my keep at times, but when it comes right down to it, I'm here to make us sound good and look good on paper...and if we open our mouths.

This can be a challenge. I have trained Dad. Clanpaw is a whole other story. His writing technique is, well, hideous. He switches ideas mid-sentence, spells phonetically, writes using sentence fragments, and frequently skips a step in step-wise explanations. Usually, he omits things when explaining some things I know nothing about. I know its missing, but I couldn't fill in the missing information to save my life. He starts sentences with "and" and "but." He concludes them with prepositions. He uses italics and quotations indiscriminately and has a penchant for rhetorical questions. Last but not least, he's a drama king. An interesting feature becomes a "diamond in the rough." Geologic areas that have yet to be explored aren't "yet to be explored," they've been "historically shunned!!!" Like lepers I guess? And he takes every opportunity to use the phrase "tested with the drill"--usually several times in each paper. Today, one of our exhibits, a map to be exact, was providing "taunting evidence!!" And, no, I did not add the exclamation points...he did. Both of them. It almost defies correction or taming into modern language. What is the modern equivalent of "taunting evidence?" It almost requires dramatic musical interludes and overtones for proper interpretation. I could easier turn it into a comic strip:

Radio Voice: "Exhibit 2 rises up not as significant evidence of structural trapping, but of stratigraphic trapping it provides taunting evidence!!" (DUN DUN DUUUUUUUHHHHHHHH.....)

And for all I know, that may be how he would present things if he were left up to his own devices. As it is, he's unhappy with the fact that he doesn't get to talk as much as he wants to. That is a whole other story.

So, for now, we are in the writing, selling, drumming-up-of-investors stage of our business. The part I, personally, find the most distasteful. Begging for money has never been my strong suit, though I can do it with the best of them. There's just something distasteful about it as part of the whole process. Research, investigation, conducting surveys, processing, interpretation, and even leasing are interesting parts of this business. Finding investors to fund it all is not always the hard part, but it's definitely the most precarious.

No matter what the stage of the business, though, there is always a load of writing to do. Articles, booklets, proposals, releases, speeches, presentations, prospect reports, teasers, confidentiality agreements, nondisclosures, etc. etc. A person could go blind on the paperwork that's require with any technical job these days. Not to mention just the notes I have to keep that remind me what I've done in a single day and my results, progress, etc. Then, of course, there are the notes I keep for Dad and Pawpaw....hours, projects worked on, blah blah blah.

And then for fun I write a blog. Huh.

Squib finally fell asleep last night after several hours of "I neeeeed you, mama!" Buddy and I consoled him off and on to no avail. Eventually, he just passes out with exhaustion and the torment is over. If I knew what to do to get him back to his happy bedtime self, I would do it!

Beanstalk is safely ensconced in his cast. His entire left leg from ankle to thigh is casted as a result of his broken femur. Fortunately, the swelling was such that he could be casted which marks the beginning of the true healing. Twelve more weeks to go on that front. Yay! Let the countdown begin! We are, apparently square with the school again regarding what "safety precautions" actually means. They have all now witnessed a breakdown in protocol of epic proportions followed by the wrath of Beanstalk's Dad, so they are toeing the proverbial line and all is "Yes, ma'am...Yes, sir." As it should be, I suppose. What incredible stupidity, I must say. Take his braces off and let him run about on a concrete floor until his femur fractures...yeah, that sounds like fun...then hide behind a permission slip. Poor child is now NOT permitted to go on any field trips until such a time as we can be sure he will not be broken on purpose due to gross negligence. Not my words.

We shall have the last of our squash and zuchini shortly! We put in a huge plot of it where we lost that huge stand of pine trees earlier this year. Now they are finally nearing harvest. If we can keep mom from plucking them off the plant before they are ready, then we'll have some tasty veggies soon! A little later on we'll have still more okra! It seems to be growing slowly, though we can't really figure out why. We planted it in series just as we did last year, but this last planting is growing much more slowly for some reason.

Last, but not least we have a cracked pipe going down into our water well. Bah, humbug. We are puzzling over a method to fix this ourselves, though I am crying "Hire a repairman!!!!!" (THOSE exclamation marks are MINE!) Until it is fixed, we risk contamination of our well through the crack in the pipe. So......no drinking from the faucet or using it for food prep, teeth brushing, or ice cubes. What an enormous pain in the keester. It's times like these that my dreams of owning a Big Berkey surface. We have occasion to need such a filtration device at least three times a year. Sad, but true. Welcome to the sticks and to my grandfather's preference for only kinda fixing things and then only with parts we have on hand that have been used before. Ugh.

IF my grandfather ran KFC, his motto would be "We do chicken right...most of the time." He'd want to put a disclaimer on every add saying: "We like to keep reusing our oil 'cause it's cheaper and 9 out of 11 herbs and spices is ok 'cause that's cheaper, too. We'll end up making more money that way." But he'd never admit that he'd lose money 'cause people like fresh fried chicken with the original recipe. Dad would have to come along and browbeat him for an hour into doing things the right way. OR he'd have to lose money for at least a year before he fixed the problem. After all, this is the man who though $700 electric bills (for a 2000 sq. ft. house) were normal and refused to have the AC looked at cause he'd "never had a lower bill while he'd been in this house."

We frequently (and jokingly) use the phrase "If it's broke, don't fix it."

Dear Lord, please help me outlive my grandfather...
Scat

I Neeeeeeed You, Momma

  We made a pilgrimage to Oklahoma recently to visit my mother's relatives. The trip entailed meeting a slough of new people and three dogs. This scared the bejeezus out of Squib. He began freaking out every time the door was opened and every time a dog approached him. Naptime and bedtime became these torturous events during which he would scream "I need you, I need you, I need you" incessantly at the top of his lungs.

  Before our trip, he always trooped off to bed as though happy to go there. Not a worry. Not a single qualm. I was hoping that upon our return to our nice, safe, dogless house he would go back to his normal routine, but alas...it is not to be...

  I did not want to go to Oklahoma. I knew what his reaction would be because he said he did not want to go. It takes time for him to warm up to people. I had no idea it would be this bad, but I knew it wouldn't be pretty, but there was the issue of trying to please my mother by taking her second grandchild and presenting him to his great-grandmother (who already doesn't remember him :). And NOW, he's a candidate for anti-psychotics. Yes, drugs.

  I am officially through with any and all delusional efforts to please my mother. This one was disastrous.

  So here we are. He has been in the bed for two hours. For an hour he was silent, then he remembered that he "needed me." The ENTIRE next hour was filled with his repeated statement "I need you, mama. I need you, mama. I need you, mama. I need you, mama. I need you, mama. I need you, mama. I need you, mama. I need you, mama. I need you, mama. I need you, mama..."

  Yes, I have attempted to console him. I've gone through his bedtime ritual at least twice in full and in part several more times. I've tried rational discussions and irrational approaches. In the end, all I can say is "I know you need me. I need you, too. It is time to go to sleep. I love you." AND WALK AWAY. Staying with him actually makes it WORSE.

  I desperately want my Squib back. My calm little happy bedbug that loves being under the covers and doesn't sweat it. Something bent and maybe broke during our time away. If it's permanent, I shall be chapped. VERY CHAPPED. Not at Squib.

  Nevertheless, it is safe to say that we are not going back. At least we are not going back until he starts to love dogs or until the idea to go back is his, and not mine. There's just something the matter with "family" vacations that end up warping your kid so badly that they can't sleep. 'nough said.

  What's really squirrelly is that he's around dogs ALL THE TIME!!!!!!!! Just not these dogs.

And if baby ain't sleepin'....nobody's sleepin'.
Scat

Ooooooooooooklahoma where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain...

  Yes, we are coming to you live from Oklahoma this week! Previously, we've made several plans for this pilgrimage, but all our previous plans were foiled by my mother's various bouts with various illnesses. I refrain to comment on that because I respect my elders, love my mother, and despise being in a bad mood.

  The trip up was pretty eventful. South of Dallas, we encountered a tornado. I am not speculating. I am dead serious. We saw the wall cloud with a rotating tail descend and touch the ground. It crossed I-45 just as we did. I haven't ever felt wind like that. It came complete with marble sized hail and we had to take shelter with all the other cars under a woven nest of overpasses until it passed.

  Feeling very relieved, we eventually got back on the road only to find that the air conditioning system had gone out. Burnt out would be the verdict later. As it was in the high 80's and we couldn't roll down the windows (they are electric and that mechanism failed as well) we were driving in a toaster oven. I haven't been that hot and sweaty in years. We used water and baby wipes to cool down, but I thought mom was going to have a heat stroke. Squib wasn't far behind, but at least he would drink the water. He slipped off to sleep and I wiped him down every so often to keep him cool. Buddy and I are a lot more conditioned to the heat because of all the outdoor work and activities we do...good thing, too. Needless to say, here we are on vacation and our car is in the shop.

  Being stuck here isn't all bad, though. My uncle has about ten acres that are his plus we're free to wander on neighboring land until we hit the fences on the north, east, and west sides. There are three ponds absolutely stuffed to the gills with fish, an elaborate jungle gym, and more wildlife that you could possibly imagine. This morning, Squib and I hiked down to the large pond. Squib found a giant turtle--almost stepped right on it. He got a little freaked when I picked it up to look at and showed it to him. He's, uh, skeptical. Yeah, that's it...skeptical. About everything. (Read: TERRIFIED)

  He's even skeptical about the new locale. Skittish would be a better term, maybe. Seriously freaked out at times, too. How a child like that came from a family like this I will never know. But somewhere in that vivid imagination there is no sense of adventure or exploration. He seems to keep it all within some very rigid and known boundaries. Definitely inside the box. Granted, it's his box, but he is firmly entrenched within it.

  Beanstalk, however, doesn't even seem to find even a broken femur limiting. He's the head pirate, the first conquistador, test pilot, sub driver, and director of a symphony orchestra. Squib's opposite in every way. But it's like their bodies were switched. Granted, Beanstalk's temperament came in handy especially in the early years when we lived at Texas Childrens' but really, the adventurer should have the rugged body and the timid box-dweller maybe should have been the one with fragile bones. Obviously why I am not God.

Point taken.
Scat