A Whole Lotta Love

For Valentine's Day, Ryan brought home a bag of truffles, a velvet-flocked card that he chose for his gramma (I think my sass may get me in trouble here), and a balloon and book for each of our three girls. We live in the boondocks, so stopping after work at at least two stores for love gifts was pretty heroic. We ate Costco roasted chicken and salad. I can cook, just not on Valentine's Day.

Today, we are celebrating Presidents' (President's?) Day by covering the hardwoods with Legos and incidentally by hanging curtain rods. We moved to the aforementioned boondocks six months ago but still don't have window treatments. You might think, "what's the matter? it's the boondocks, she keeps saying." However, our version of country hobby farming looks more like the center hub of 1887. Our home is an 1887-built church which faces another church (still a church) that was built in 1906. From our front windows we can see a Rebecca Lodge, the church, its parsonage, an underground house currently under renovation, a milk goat farm and a grange hall. It's the center of town, really.

So every sixth Saturday night or so the grange hosts a movie night, and we put on a show for folks from the surrounding 10 mile radius or so. Not to mention Monday night Fire Hall volunteer training and of course the construction crew for the hobbit house. The ladies who own the goat farm may or may not appreciate being able to watch our every move inside the fishbowl. The pastor and his wife and their three children recently moved from the parsonage, mostly to get out of the center of the universe feeling that this tiny hub can engender. So we don't have to worry about offending them.

It's incredibly quiet here. We are 15 miles away from any train tracks, and further from an interstate freeway. The "highway" that we can see from our back windows is a country road that most use to get in to Eugene for work. Sometimes log trucks use their jake brakes. I never knew what a jake brake was before, so you should know it's noisy. I don't know why they use them, possibly to say hello, boondocks, I'm coming through. Are all of your cows in the fences?

Back to the windows: We got tired of having to put on pants to come downstairs. So Ryan is hanging curtain rods and I am procrastinating about sewing some drapes. The girls are building a Legoland. The pony is pigging out on the hay Ryan and a neighbor picked up Saturday between rainstorms. Hay is expensive this year... more on that later, possibly. It is a pretty quiet Presidents' Day. I still am not sure about that apostrophe.