Busy girl

I’ve been a very busy girl this weekend.

I came home from work last night and cleaned the pond filter, adjusted the fountain, cleaned up after the dogs, fed the hens, removed a section of fencing that we were no longer using in the backyard, pulled out last summer’s dead sunflower stalks, mowed the yard, picked up trash around the yard, cleared a shelf and moved it from the bedroom to the living room to accommodate some plants I’d bought, cleared the kitchen table, fried a ham steak, made red-eye gravy and cheese grits to go with it, and picked up a big bale of pine shavings for the chickens.

We awoke early this morning to the ringing of the phone. Bill Kinder, the owner of the beautiful Blue Swallow Motel in Tucumcari, N.M., was calling to report that a hailstorm last night did serious damage to the gorgeous neon at the Swallow and several other Tucumcari businesses. Bill said the insurance companies just won’t cover neon — too fragile and too vulnerable, I suppose — so I started my morning by calling Friends of the Mother Road treasurer/co-founder/all-around good guy Kip Welborn to get a special fund set up to help Bill and the other business owners with some of the repair costs.

If anybody has a few bucks lying around, please consider making a donation to help with this worthy project. Information about the storm and where to send tax-deductible donations to help the Swallow and other historic properties can be found here.

By the time I got off the phone with Bill — who has this wonderful, totally contagious energy and enthusiasm for whatever he happens to be doing at the moment — I was ready to get up and busy DOING something, so I hopped out of bed, threw on some scruffy jeans and a tank top, and headed outside with Ron to change the chickens’ litter and give them a little playtime in the yard.

After the hens had spent sufficient time scratching around and enjoying the pretty weather, we brought them back inside and went over to Swinney’s Hardware to pick up Ron’s birthday present — an umbrella-style clothesline and a bag of Sackrete to support it — and some gigantic nails.

When we got done at Swinney’s, we went to Catoosa to try out a restaurant Ron had heard about. It wasn’t the best place I’ve ever been, but it wasn’t bad. It’s pretty hard to go wrong with fried chicken gizzards, green beans, okra and tomatoes, and fried potatoes.

I spent this afternoon sharpening the mower blades and building myself the bottle tree you see pictured above. It’s not as cool as the ones at Elmer Long’s place in California (the trunk is too thick — I basically just recycled one of the old clothesline supports — and bottle trees don’t really look cool unless you have a lot of them grouped together), but I think it turned out OK, and it reminds me of Elmer, which is nice.

Besides … building a bottle tree is the first sign of dementia concretia, which is the one “ailment” I’d really love to contract. 😉

Emily