My You Live In Interesting Times

As far as I know I don't know anyone in China but I must have made someone there angry because boy have we been living in interesting times lately. To begin with we still don't have our lawn mower back yet. I am beginning to believe that he has never had any intention of giving it back to us. Maybe he's had it so long that he looks at it as an ornament and he doesn't want to do without it, I don't know. Anyway my husband has plans to borrow a friends trailer and go get it himself.

Since we don't have the mower we can't fix it, which means the grass is getting high. That's not bad in the field because we intended to let a friend hay it. The yard is another matter though. It's beginning to get scary. The other day I was sure that I saw gorillas peeking out at me through the tall grass. I need to get out and take the weed eater to it and knock some of that down.

The city lost it's water again. They won't let us dig a well because they want the water revenue yet this is the third time that the whole town has lost water in the past 15 months. The last time they lost water the repairmen told them that they needed to replace the pipe because it was getting old. That was during the Great Oklahoma Freeze, not even 6 months ago I think. Anyway, the city fathers decided that they would let it go for a while because they didn't want to spend that kind of money. Well, last Thursday the pipe gave way and fell into the well pulling the pump down with it. It's a deep well. So they ended up having to find the pipe and the pump in the water pool and pull it up. It took four days. Now the city has water again but we are under a boil order for another 6 days. They are still giving out drinking water but they don't have enough so they aren't giving out enough to last the day.

It has made it hard because you can only cook so long before all the pots and pans need washed. You couldn't wash them because there wasn't any water. You couldn't use the water they were handing out because there wouldn't be enough to drink and cook with if you did. So in the end we ended up using more expensive non-cooking options; ordering pizza, buying lunch meat and bread and so on. We rarely use paper and plastic for eating so I had to purchase those as well.

The next interesting thing was that one of the cars had trouble. We had to have the car for my son to get back and forth to work. So that was more money that we hadn't counted on having to spend and really could have used for other things.

Now I sit here scouring my freezer and cabinets trying to find a way to feed a rather large family for another two weeks without buying groceries. I have to come up with 39 meals without buying a thing. I think I'll make it but it's going to include beans three times a week. The big freezer will be almost empty when I'm done, which is a good thing because I was thinking last week that I really needed to get in and defrost it. Next paydays grocery bill will be a whopper though because when I'm done there will be very little left in the freezer or the pantry.

I have a little ground venison in the freezer, I think I'll take that and some beans and make chili tomorrow. The guys will like that. I may try to make some crackers to go with it, we'll see. I might be better off making bread, I know how to do that.