Happy Hours

Woke up this morning to rain and a temperature of about 54 F. By this afternoon, the cold front the weather forecasters had been promising, finally moved in and the temperature dropped 17 degrees (in less than two hours). We're now just above freezing and the rain has turned to an ice/snow mixture. It's not enough to start worrying about having to take the truck out to the main road yet but enough to make me listen to the weather radio a bit more diligently. We had to let the wood stove shutdown Saturday morning as it was too hot in the house ... Garrick walking around in his shorts with no shirt on was a pretty good clue that we didn't need to add any more wood to the fire. But, we've got it fired back up again now and it is about 71 F ... downstairs. I think it was the smell of the smoke that attracted our latest visitors. Caroline screamed when she walked down the stairs and saw three dogs pawing at the front door. Apparently, they ran away from our neighbors' camp (that's Maine-speak for house in the woods). These neighbors only live about a quarter of a mile away (as the crow flies) but they are just visiting for the weekend. Garrick returned the dogs safely but it was me that got the invitation for happy hour!

This will make two happy hours within a week of each other. Last weekend, because Cord/Cori/Dia (that's all one person with many names not because she is schizophrenic but because that way she can juggle the men in her life more cunningly) was in town and it was raining, we went to the redneck bar in Greenville Junction to shoot some pool. Talk about some guys who crawled out of a cave ... many looked as if they could have doubled for Grizzly Adams. Needless to say Cori, as she was going by that night, managed to meet a cute guy from New Hampshire, before the kids managed to even get the quarters into the pool table. Didn't turn out to be much of a pool game as none of us are real sharks, at pool anyway. When Caroline got bored, she managed to find a video game with a shotgun and pumped $10 worth of quarters into it so that she could kill a few deer before the night was out. The scary thing is that she was pretty good at it ... now she wants to take a hunting class next fall and kill real deer. Maybe it was those Shirley Temples she was drinking - which, by the way, the bartender had never heard of. Her exact words to Caroline were "What the hell's a Shirley Temple?"

While Garrick wasn't drinking Shirely Temples, he did stick to Coke as he was our designated driver for the night. Cori gave him a driving lesson, his first, on the way to the bar. He backed out of the driveway (which has a curve which frightens even a few seasoned drivers) and headed down the road like he had been driving for years. We were amazed, although not enough so to actually let him drive us the 18 miles home from the bar.

That outing was probably the highlight of the weekend as there isn't much to do up here when it rains. We don't have a movie theater or a bowling alley or even a McDonalds with a play place. They tried to open one of those a few years ago but had to close it when all the locals boycotted it. So, we spent the weekend shopping at the local trading post (Maine-speak for five and dime), talking to 'rough-around-the-edges' men about purchasing a snowmobile, playing games, and eating. I definitely understand how easy it is to put on that extra insulation up here ... with the weather the way it is for eight months out of the year, it is extremely easy to stay inside by the fire and graze and graze and graze. So, I won't be posting any pictures of myself anytime soon.

Since the sun set a mere six hours and 6 minutes ago (and it feels as if it should already be midnight), I am headed off to bed. I'll throw a few more logs onto the fire before I go and take one last look out the window to check the weather.

Karyn