dogbutler promised to start one, but it’s 6:30 am on the east coast of USA, and some of us are impatient. 
Feel free to jump in.
About bloody time… 
Yeah, I could’a started one. But I’ve got a cold and I’ve got the grumps, so I didn’t.
When I moved in to the new place, we had to introduce Gordie to Roomie’s dog Teddie(the 150lbs Sheppard). The first meet went like this:
Gordie: "playplayplayPLAYPLAY! "
Teddie: “Ok, I’m killing it.”
Needless to say, it took a few months before they were buddies. There were of course the usual bouts of toy theft, and the current phase of using starvation as a weapon. Gordie and Teddie eat the food out of each other’s dish, on the theory that the other one will starve to death. So far it hasn’t worked since a. they both are eating out of the other dog’s dish, and b. the humans just refill the dish as needed. Have at it, and
Happy Halloween!
I don’t celebrate Halloween, but I will ask for a thread merge…
Good Mornin’ Y’all! Up and caffienated. Yeah, I’m all caffienated, brekkied and purtified for irk. Go Me! 'Tis 54 Amurrkin out with a predicted high of 70 and maybe some rain. Or not.
doggio this puts me in mind of a cocker spaniel I had (RIP Jake, you were the best!) and a poodle a friend of mine had (RIP both of them. Jim and Pepper are no longer with us.). They got along fine except for one thing. It was ok if one ate out of the other’s food bowl or drank out of the other’s water bowl. They also gladly shared toys and even treats. However, Jake absolutely would not let me pet Pepper and Pepper absolutely would not let Jim pet Jake. Seriously. I’d put my hand down to pet Pepper and Jake would break his neck gettin’ over there to break it up. He’d push my hand away. 
Pepper likewise to Jim. That just was not goin’ to happen.
[size=5]Happy Halloween![/size]
Happy Monday Y’all!
I already posted in the other one. In the interest of fairness and procrastinatin’ goin’ to irk a bit longer I shall also post here.
Happy Halloween!
I understand a thread merge has been requested?
I also requested a thread merge
Getting critters to make friends with each other is always an interesting exercise, and it can fail, alas. We tried for 2 years to get Taz and my daughter’s cat Cleo to coexist, and it never did work, because Cleo is a snot… We’ve had much better luck getting dogs to get along.
I need to remember to close the blinds tonight, just in case some dumb kids ignore the lack of porch lights. We have no candy, we haven’t had candy for the last 6 years. It’s not that we’re anti-Halloween - we just don’t want to mess with it. Taz will try to escape, Ziva will panic and hide, and I don’t know what Scruffy would do, but we just don’t want to deal with it. Besides, there are hardly any kids around here anyway.
But because I lurves you all, I’ve got treats for you. ummmmmm, lessee, you can choose between pineapple upside down cake, apple crisp, or some cheddar on a Ritz.
Blurf.
Well now…that was a fun weekend. 
So, the last time I had posted, I had just finished Sweetie’s Captain Vimes’ badge magnet and I was finally gettin’ studious. I pulled out my history textbook and started to read about the rise of Islam in India.
Out goes the power.
Of course, 6:06 PM in late October in MA means complete and total darkness. Luckily, the fire in the fireplace guided me, without tripping over any dogs, to the mantle for the hurricane lamps and matches.
I put one of the Hurricane lamps by the couch and continued my homework while Sweetie went on a candle hunt. We totally weren’t prepared for a power outage, since it doesn’t happen often, and the weather channel usually lies. Soon enough, we had a bunch of light at the kitchen table and Sweetie cleaned the kitchen for a bit.
Around 7pm, I realized that reading my flickering hurricane lamplight isn’t easy and I gave up on the homework. We moved the kitchen table into the living room (not a far trek thankfully that sucker is heavy!), in front of the fire and we set up a board game (Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror Monopoly).
We were hungry. I was still sick and totally wanting soup. I had some of my homemade chicken soup in the fridge but no way to cook it.
LIGHTBULB!!! I’ve been an OSV member for over a year…have I learned nothing?
Last time we were there, the girls in the cooking demonstration taught us how to make a safe ember bed for cooking on the hearth.
So…I did.
Glad to have a huge cast iron pan.
I let the pan heat up (not long enough though) and then added the soup. It worked! I got it to just warmer than lukewarm before the hungries won out and I stopped cooking. It worked so well that I decided to give grilled cheese a try. It came out really well and had a faint hint of chicken soup flavor. Sweetie was very impressed with my resourcefulness and happy with his soup and sammich.
It was about this time that I ran out of ginger ale and it nearly made me cry.
After we finished Monopoly (I lost :(), we realized that the power wasn’t coming back on any time soon. Our bedroom never gets very warm even when the heat is working and without power, the electric bed warmer wouldn’t work either. So, we dragged our mattress in front of the fire (after moving the table back to its home). We snuggled in (me with cold medicine and half power on my iPod to drown out the sound of a CPAP-less Sweetie) and we and the dogs went to sleep.
Amazingly enough, we were able to sleep fairly well. I woke up 3 times to feed the fire and sweetie woke up once for the same reason. We also woke up when the dogs freaked out at a noise from the outside.
We woke back up at 9am, thanks to Ray the awesome neighbor snowblowing his driveway.
I stood up and looked out the big window in front of me…and saw that one of our trees had fallen over…and was on the power lines. That must have been the nose that pissed off the dogs. But, that section of power lines doesn’t feed our house apparently because the tree is still there and we have power (obviously).
I grabbed my cell phone (showing half power) and tried to call National Grid.
The battery dies.
I grabbed Sweetie’s cell phone (showing half power) and tried to call National Grid.
The battery dies.
I grabbed Sweetie’s piece of crap work cell phone (showing full power) and try to call National Grid.
Busy signal.
I call my mom. She also has no power (she had lost it about 5 ours after we did) and she’s stuck in a house that borders on hoarder territory, with my step brother (who came up from DC for a visit this weekend - and who pisses off my normally mild mother). She was sad that they lost even more of their magnolia tree (the big ice storm a few years ago took half of it).
I called Sweetie’s parents. They also had no power still, neither did his parents (his first experience with homeownership - two weeks after moving in and they have a snowstorm and massive power outage - with 4 kids and a puppy).
I called National Grid again.
Busy signal.
I woke up Sweetie and put the dogs outside. I sadly informed Sweetie that we lost one of the arborvities (we both detest those damn trees) and that I was sicker than ever and unable to help him snowblow the leaf, branch, and snow covered driveway. He was very manly about it and asked me to make him some breakfast.
I fed the dogs and decided to be a good wife-type-person and figured out how to make my Sweetie some coffee. I boiled water in the frying pan. I put a filter in the coffee filter holder thingie and rested it on the top of an old carafe. Then I poured the water over the coffee grounds. Voila! Coffee!
That’s when I realized that the fridge was rapidly warming up so I put the milk and creamer in a snowbank.
Then I brought sweetie a cup of coffee (in a travel mug). He thought it was tea. The look on his face when he realized it was coffee was priceless.
Awesome Neighbor Ray came over and told us that another tree was down around the corner and that the lines right in front of us don’t actually serve us. He also told us that no one had seen a single National Grid in all of Southbridge up to that point (over 12 hours since we lost power).
Sweetie finished clearing the driveway while I attempted to clean up the house a bit, without depleting the stock of hot water in our tank (so thankful that we installed that thing last year). I accidentally broke the coffee pot on the Bunn. 
When Sweetie came back in (after putting the snowblower away and manually closing the garage), I reminded him that he hadn’t made a path from the street to the oil fill pipe. Not that it matters since the oil company definitely wont be parking under that power line today.
I checked the freezer (unopened up to this point) and realized that I had 2 thawed packs of bacon. Hmm…I had kept the pan hot after boiling the water.
So I made bacon.
We had ham and bacon sandwiches for brunch.
I took the frozen beef soup out of the freezer and put it on the heart to start thawing.
Then we got out the World of Warcraft board game that my mom gave us 2 years ago and attempted to learn how to play it. Two hours later, we gave up and started playing Monopoly again and I started cooking the soup in the frying pan.
I lost again.
We played Battleship.
I WON!! Then we ate our soup - much hotter this time and quite tasty.
We set up another game of Battleship. Just before Sweetie put in his first move (it’s electronic and the batteries were good), I heard a gurgle from the fishtank behind me.
We both paused and looked up at each other in awe.
The lights lightly flickered.
The fish tank filter started filtering.
The lights came on.
I nearly cried again.
I grabbed the old coffee pot and made a pot of coffee for Sweetie.
We went around the house and turned off all the lights we had accidentally turned on over the weekend (just couldn’t break old habits).
We turned the heat up to 65°.
We blew out the candles but not the hurricane lamps. We weren’t trusting the new power.
It was 24 hours and 45 minutes since we had last had power.
I tried to call my mother. Both cordless phones were dead. I used the old rotary phone. :smack:
Phone is provided by Charter. No internet.
I pointed out to Sweetie that with the hot water already in the tank and the electricity heating more, we could probably swing a shower before the power went out again.
So we did. Quickly and together to save time. We just had enough time to get clean and warm before we ran out of hot water - something that has not happened since we installed the electric tank.
Then we both had a nice cup of coffee without the additional flavor of chicken soup (I did clean the frying pan but flavors linger in cast iron).
I started a load of laundry.
I started a load of dishes.
Then we played our second game of Battleship.
I lost.
Then we played Risk.
I got murdered.
Then we moved the mattress back to the bedroom and plugged in the bed heater.
I checked the internet again, worrying very much about my midterm which was due by 11:30 Sunday night.
I started another load of laundry.
I started another load of dishes.
I took my last dose of cold medicine.
We went to bed, in our warm bed, with our dogs, a CPAP, and the faint blue hum of the Buddha lamp.
Ginger woke me up with a very annoying bark at 7am. On a whim, I picked up the rotary phone receiver.
DIAL TONE!!!
I turned on my computer, uploaded the pictures from the camera, and started writing this post…after I checked my history class message board and found out that I now have until Wednesday to do my midterm.
Today is going to be a busy day. Sweetie absolutely HAS to go to work today - simply to drop a piece of equipment to Channel 10. But, the car is still at Dr. Firestone because they didn’t have power yesterday either. His dad is going to drive 40 minutes to our house to pick him up, and then 45 minutes to his work to drop him off. Sweetie is going to see if there’s a work vehicle available before he lets his dad leave.
Hopefully our car will be done today but I don’t know if Dr. Firestone has power back yet.
I have to cancel our oil delivery for today because the power line problem is preventing us from clearing a path to the pipe.
I have to try again to get through to National Grid.
I have to shiver my ass off until after the chimney sweep leaves around 2pm.
I have to do my homework dammit!!
It’s good to be back and I missed you all!!
The pictures of my weekend
p.s. I’m still sick as a dog (what does this mean anyway).
Considering how sick the Bubster was last weekend, I’d say pretty sick. I’m so glad that your midterm deadline got extended.
Today I MUST finish my part of a group research paper. The rough draft is due Wednesday and we gave ourselves a deadline of this evening to be finished. I have to say it made me feel a little bit better when I just looked at the Google Document and saw that no one else was done yet either. The thing that drives me crazy is the mass killing of trees. I just can’t write a paper without printing out all of the journal articles and reading through them that way. It’s a complete waste, but my brain can’t function properly if I just read this stuff online.
So… I’m off to work!
Everybody have a great day. 
Sorry you got murdered, shorty!
I need to find out what’s the procedure for us externals to warn the company if we’re not coming in. I really shouldn’t have, my brain is just so much mush despite all that paracetamol and cough drops and antihistaminic syrup (which apparently works by sending the opposite signal as histamines do, rather than by blocking them, but in any case it’s wonderful and it works for pseudoallergies and for respiratory allergies and for good old colds). Mind you, I also had no way to receive my signed-off timesheet without coming in… (well, I guess I could give someone my password but I didn’t say that!)
Going home this afternoon for the holiday, and I’ve got the 2nd off. I’ve got to go to my local IRS (nothing serious, I just think they took me off the register of “companies which do business internationally” at some point) and to buy paint and to leave a jacket at the dry cleaner’s (can’t find one near the Madrid studio) and…
and to the phone store, because my phone has been rejecting calls and refusing to let me make calls since Saturday :smack: Of course and as it’s traditional for phone companies in Spain, their website is set up in such a way that it’s almost impossible to find a way to contact them, so I’ll have to walk into one of their stores so the people there can tell me “we can’t fix that” and then give me a number to call… and a way to call it!
Now egguze be, I deed do bdow by doze again.
Tenth!
Have you ever reused the other side of the pages you printed out to print other stuff? That might save a few branches anyway…
And on that note, I think I should probably shower and dress and get my chores started. After taking the trash and recycling, I need to run to the grocery store for a few things. My sweetie wants bean soup for supper, and I’m pretty sure I have all the ingredients, but I need to check before I go. In fact, I should do a pantry inventory.
Of course, if I go shower now, I’ll disturb Taz, who’s curled up on the desk between me and the keyboard, absorbing my body heat, the wuss! I think that’s all he wants me for - warmth. And treats.
Off to start acting line a semi-responsible adult…
Taking a break from irking from home to check in.
Thanks for the OP, doggio!
That was a great “lights out” story, shortdrum. I’m glad you got your power back!
Saturday I celebrated my girlfriend’s birthday by making her a very cheesy pizza with garlic bread and salad and cute little cuppy-cakes. Sunday morning, I braved a pea-soup thick fog to grab us Mickey D’s drive-thru breakfast. She was delighted and is enjoying being 29 Part VIII.
Yesterday I had a bunch of nachos & salsa while watching the Steelers dismantle the Patriots. I was surprised by this game as I expected it to be a lot closer. Everyone in my City of Three Rivers is in a good mood today.
Well, that’s all I got except for the strip steak in the fridge which will be supper later today.
Happy Halloween!
Bri2k
Holy crap! I just got my first bit of news since Saturday afternoon. HOLY CRAP!! It’s hard to know just how bad things are because of the storm when you are totally disconnected.
So, since June, my town has had a devastating tornado, a hurricane, and a snowstorm before Halloween. I am NOT looking forward to this winter.
No power. Still. Cold. Very cold
Limited cell power and connectivity.
Halloween might not happen tonight. 
Well, you can make the trek back to shortdrum land. I should have a fire going around 2:30 pm.
Everytime I see M M Post it reminds me of digging fence posts one summer across a hardscrabble ranch. It was tough, hard work and we relished our days off. So one Sunday we’re sitting in a nice air-conditioned church listening to the sermon and the preacher, quoting John 14:31, says “Let us arise and go hence”, only I thought he said “Let us arise and go fence.” I remember thinking oh no, can’t a guy get even a single day off?
Here’s hopin’ all you w/o creature comforts get restored asap.