Beginning of a new life for the completely uninformed

Pat ran into a very dear friend of ours here in Texas today. Barry, AKA the water terminator, encouraged me to write more. So, with a tip of the hat, Mr Edwards, the irrigation expert (he runs his own irrigation company, Barry Edwards Irrigation), I dedicate this entry to you. Now, before you go accusing me of shameless plugs, let me tell you, that is exactly what it is. But I offer that only because he is a friend. Actually, without getting all maudlin and sentimental, I will tell you never was there a person kinder to two Texas imports than Barry. But besides all that, Barry knows more about back-flow than anyone I know. Before I met Barry, I just assumed back-flow was something that happened when it was time to drain the septic. And believe me, Barry is very clear when it comes to explaining that a zone is not just a football defense. So, Barry, this, bud, is for you.

In my last entry I mentioned the beginning of my love affair with animals, or what might be casually called “my life of crime.” Well, this will be a recurring theme throughout this blog. Animals define, indeed, embody, the love God put on this earth. They love unconditionally (okay, okay, maybe love isn’t unconditional with cats, but if you’re a cat person, as I am, you’ll understand that, while cats are more demanding, they simply deserve as perfect an existence as they can be given. The purr, they will remind us, is nature’s perfect sound. It is neither trill nor bone-shattering. A purr is simply a cat’s way of saying thank you for loving me. Now, scratch me there just a tad harder. Oh yes! Down a little bit. And so it goes). Though a cat defines “unconditionally” a little differently than Webster does. But more about the felines in our lives later.

June first, 1994, a day which will live in infamy. Our arrival in Texas. It had been a wet spring. So wet, in fact, that the mobile home transport company had to be threatened with a lawsuit to finally get my house placed on the five acres we’d bought. How did I know the wet muck jokingly referred as soil around here would cause tire tracks that would make the moon proud? A Mobile home?, you ask, your right eyebrow raising questioningly. Yes, the finest in disposable housing, made by people who swear up and down they are doing you a favor by selling you $100,000 worth of house for less than half that. The truth is you get $5,000 worth of barely standard shingles slapped together with spit and roofing nails for $40,000. That is just my opinion, but it came from experience. Don’t believe it? Try getting the floor of a mobile just a tad wet.

The first obstacle: the incumbent energy utility had not hooked up our electrical as of yet. The aforementioned Barry, who along with his wife at that time, were our new neighbors just the other side of our road, offered us a very long extension cord so we could at least enjoy a bare bulb at night. I mean, we were newlyweds, for heaven’s sake. Who needed more than a bare bulb? We accepted the offer, but as fortune would have it, the utility crew happened to be in our area that day (a Saturday, no less), and hooked us up before the sun set. I was terribly grateful, though in retrospect it was more a move of expediency on the utility company’s part. Nobody likes to come out to our town unless absolutely necessary. It’s not a bad place; just very out of the way and, therefore, inconvenient. Even today unless you’re handy with everything from plumbing and electricity to carpentry, you’re dead in the water. And remember, I am a city boy who never had to learn any of that stuff; and I have no patience for directions. Hence, very little gets done until it’s absolutely necessary. Hence my credit card bills. But, gotta keep the economy going somehow. Washington doesn’t seem to know how.

Okay, okay, I have gotten way off track. Let me cast out the reel, hook myself by my pants, and ease back to the topic at hand. Which is . . . Give me an A somebody . . . Animals!

Earlier in this blog I mentioned the three neighborhood dogs that were the first ones to greet us on our initial visit to Texas to choose the piece of land we would call our own. Herbie, Blue Eyes and White Boy. Herbie was supposedly a spitz. If ever there was an obnoxious dog, it was Herbie. Maybe it was his way of thanking us for the hospitality of letting him get cool inside our new home, but the first thing that animal did when we let him inside was to hike up his right leg on a corner. Needless to say Herbie was no longer welcome in our house. Then there was Blue Eyes. Blue Eyes was the first dog to show me how smart animals can be. During the month of mobile home life without skirting, Blue Eyes and her friends would rest in the cooling shade of the home. Blue Eyes was the tallest of the Texas triumvirate having shepherd blood in her lineage. And without fail was our watchdog. For no matter where we were in the house, if someone just as much as drove past the front of the house we would hear the inevitable bark bark, bark, clunk; the sound of the trio rising to greet the new menace. If we missed the barks, we would definitely hear the clunk. The clunk was Blue Eyes cracking her head against the metal frame of the house. This went on the better part of the summer (yes, my dear observant reader, this means it took a lot longer than 30 days to get the skirting around the base of the house).

There is more to tell you about the interesting band of brothers. More in my next installment. As always, stay safe, and have a great 2010.

This entry was posted on 1. January 2010 at 09:16 and is filed under you're a blogger? You should be ashamed. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.