Last May

Toby took yesterday off to work around the house. By the end of the day, we had put half of my kitchen cabinets in the house (as I do the victory dance). We then grabbed a greasy burger at Nichol’s and went to pick up a kitchen sink for my cabinet. There is the real possibility that by the end of today, I could have a kitchen sink too!
All of this work on the house made me think of last year at this time. So, I went back to last May’s blogs. We were scrambling and working hard to get our house built by the first of June. We did not actually get into the house until July 1st. Reading through some of those posts made me laugh. Although building our house was especially hard, it was lots of fun working with my family every day. I thought I would post one of my favorite blogs. If you like it, you can read more from the month of May 2005.

Mission Impossible
My husband once wrote me a funny email called "Secret Agent Ranchhand". It started off something like, "Your mission, if you choose to accept, is ..."He continued to give me instructions as if I were a secret agent, but the mission was to put anti-freeze in the bulldozer. This has remained a joke between us whenever he has a chore (mission) for me.
Today my mission is to take the 24' gooseneck trailer to Tecumseh, OK and pick up a trailer load of sheet metal for the roof of our new house (and swing by Ardmore to drop Jesse off to pick up her Honda at the mechanic's). It sounds simple enough, but just like with Tom Cruise, the mission gets a little tougher as you go. First off, the trailer has to be cleaned out after we hauled cattle to the sale barn last week. For those of you who know cow manure after being on wheat pasture, I am sure you will understand the difficulty. For those of you who don't know cows, you don't want to know. It turns out that we left the good flathead shovel and broom at the new house, but no problem, we can use a hose to get it wet, and then shovel it out. This meant hooking up to the trailer and backing to the barn since one tire has a slow leak (why don't we get that fixed?) to air it up before pulling up close enough to a water hose. Most of these things needed doing anyway. Here is where the mission got impossible. Jesse and I put the special nozzle on the water hose to create the pressure needed to wash out the manure, but no water would come out. Jesse unscrewed the nozzle and out fell some sort of giant bug. Jesse screamed and dropped the nozzle. We got a good laugh out of that, and put the nozzle back on. Still no water! We banged around on the nozzle, but nothing came out. So I poked a screwdriver up in it, and sure enough there was something stuck in the nozzle. After I figured out how to take the nozzle apart, I saw the bug guts wedged in the whole at the end of the nozzle. I poked these out with my screwdriver - not so bad. Then I poked the screwdriver back into the nozzle - hmm, more bug. It took me quite a while to get the entire bug out of the nozzle, and it was gross! As I worked to get the bug guts out of the nozzle, I began to think, "Do other wives do this? I cooked his breakfast, packed his lunch, and I am driving the truck to pick up roofing. Did I sign on for bug gut duty?" I was really working myself into a tizz. With all the bug guts out of the nozzle I took it the nozzle to Jesse who was waiting with her mud boots and gloves to wash out the trailer (she is a good kid). This time the nozzle worked great. I told Jesse I was going to clean the kitchen and get the bug guts off the counter. She responded with, "Are you going to put them on Dad's pillow?" Hmm, not a bad idea!