P.G. Wodehouse

The last few days, I've tried to write my posts with the boys' favorite radio program, Adventures in Odyssey playing in the background. Since I recorded them off the radio more than a decade ago, and my siblings enjoyed them all repeatedly, too, I have them half-memorized, and it suppresses the creative muse to have the noise in my house and my head. QUIET!

I am thankful the boys are learning valuable life lessons, but the inability to escape the noise is one of the more challenging aspects of living in 224 square feet.

Phil has run errands every day this week. He stopped by Costco yesterday, on his way home from picking up K-Mag, which we plan to spread beneath our trees. Apparently, a 200 pound/acre spread of this once a decade will help the copper levels in our trees, which keeps their trunks elastic.

We hope to avoid the trauma of mineral spreading last year: 200 pounds for two acres is much easier than 3000 pounds for five acres.

But I digress. Phil stopped at Costco and happened to see a DVD series he (and, subsequently, I) desired, and bought: the complete Wooster and Jeeves, done by the BBC and based on the books by P.G. Wodehouse.

If you haven't read any Wodehouse, and have a bit of free time, he is quite funny, in a British humor, slapstick sort of way. Not everyone's cup of tea. Before the farming bug hit, I realized that Phil spent about $25 a month on coffee beans, and I treated myself to $25 in Wodehouse. (Whether that is incredibly parsimonious or incredibly profligate I suppose depends on your point of view. For a period, I had read so many missionary biographies about people around the world in dire circumstances, I had a hard time spending much at all on "fun" purchases for myself. Hmm. Which is probably why I can live as we do now.)

I would recommend the Blandings series. My absolute favorite, which left me (literally) screaming with laughter, is Full Moon.

The boys and I joined Phil down at the lower pasture this afternoon. He had been lumberjacking much of the day, and cleared enough of the bank to find our one spot of easy access, where we can just walk all the way down. The boys played in the creek and Phil showed me his progress through the brush.

We're wondering now if we could bush hog some of it. There are plenty of large trees that a bush hog couldn't take out. And we can't really take out the trees until the brush is gone. Maybe it's a catch-22, and there's no real help but manual labor. But, wow, does it take a long time.