Last night my 12 year old niece wanted me to sleep outside with her in the back yard here at home so she could watch the Leonid (I think) meteor showers that were touted in the news. So I said yes and hauled out a sleeping bag and pillow for her (to put on Jackie's anti-gravity outdoor recliner) and a blanket, anti-gravity outdoor recliner, and liner for me (to keep the breeze from coming up under the recliner and freezing me out).
I went out an hour before Elizabeth did because I was tired (more about why later). Fell asleep until she came out at about 9:45.
We chatted as we watched skyward. We spotted the Big and Little Dippers and (I think) some other planets. We saw a satellite or the space station go by (a shining orb in the sky). We saw an anomaly that seemed to defy natural laws which I thought might be the balloon someone sent up to take photos of the meteor showers from 10K (or maybe 20K) feet up; I don't know what else it could have been. We legitimately called it a UFO since we had no idea what else it might be and we were really guessing about what it was. It seemed to be moving the way a kite does -- back and forth, up and down, as if buffeted this way and that by wind, but it was way, way up there where a kite couldn't be seen (or fly) and of course it glowed some or we wouldn't have seen it, probably illuminated by the sun or moon. It had no "running lights" the way flying machines from Earth do.
At about 10:30 we decided we were both hungry, so we went in for a few minutes. Lizzie made popcorn and an almond milk hot chocolate; I cut a three-inch slice of a sub sandwich and made hot chocolate. We went back outside and bundled up again while we ate.
Along about 10:45 or so we saw our first, and only, meteor. It was quite spectacular. I say "first and only" because about fifteen or twenty minutes into the vigil, as Lizzie and I were chatting (occasionally) back and forth, I started softly singing (and then humming) AMAZING GRACE. It seemed appropriate as we gazed into God's beautiful heavens.
Well!!! As soon as I finished the nocturnal "lullaby" I said something to Lizzie. No response. I said something again. Nothing! She was sound asleep! That was my permission to do the same, and I was out like a light.
Now for the reason I was so sleepy. I went to McLendon's Hardware yesterday morning and bought ten rolls of sod (2' x 4' each) to put down in the chicken yard to give the chickens something to peck at other than the seed Jackie and I sowed there three weeks ago. Each weighed (I'm guessing) about 50 pounds each, perhaps more, because they were well-watered.
When I got home I backed up the truck to within about ten feet of the gate to the chicken pen (as close as I could get without driving onto the drain field, which is a no-no) then I got the wheelbarrow and placed two or three rolls of sod in it at a time. The wheelbarrow tire was a little low, and I didn't pump it up. Big mistake!
So I wheeled 100 to 150 pounds' of sod through the chicken gate into a semi-soggy-boggy part of the chicken coop (or as far as I could go before the semi-flat tired wheelbarrow got bogged down) and then horsed the sod (which I'd had to move once already from the middle of the pickup bed to the tail gate) into place while hunched over. (The netting over the coop is only about 5 feet off the ground; I'm 5'7".)
By the time I was finished with this "little chore", I was muddy, sweating,breathing harder than normal, and pretty-well exhausted! I'll eventually go get more sod to complete the job if what I bought yesterday survives well (I guess the chicken pen is perhaps one-fifth covered in sod right now), but you can believe it will be in ten roll increments--maybe five--and I WILL put air in the tire of the wheelbarrow! At my age, lifting, carrying and placing sod while hunched over is not easy!
Oh! I also filled the truck (after emptying it of the sod) with all of the detritus we gathered over the winter--stuff we need to haul to the dump. That was EASY compared to sod-carrying, but my elbows were so sore yesterday afternoon and evening that I caved and took a full dose of aspirin!
When I awoke in the outdoor recliner this morning at about 5:45 as the sun came up, I noticed that Lizzie's sleeping bag was empty and Jackie was inside. Lizzie and I had both promised that if one of us went indoors during the night we would wake the other and we'd both go in, so I asked Jackie when Lizzie came in. She said, "Oh, about an hour ago. She was freezing. Weren't you?"
No, I wasn't. I was wearing a coat, winter socks, jeans, and I have 50 or 60 extra pounds on me, so I was just fine. Lizzie is skinny as a rail...she doesn't have any extra "padding" at all on her body. The sleeping bag wasn't enough to keep her toasty warm.
No comments:
Post a Comment