Life in the Country - Just close your mouth when you fall asleep

I offer up to you a brief alternative to the Anna Nicole Smith story. I have been watching for the last 30 minutes and already I have had an "entertainment specialist" a medical doctor, a psychologist and a judge wax philosophic on the subject of this woman's life and death. I am already almost bored. So as the media spin this story, I will talk about another kind of spinning...


One of the first things I noticed when I started living in the cottage was the swarms of bees that lived in the gutters. Tons and tons of bees. It is a short hop to a healthy fushia bush and their hive (I guess, I haven't seen the hive) so the commute for them is terrific. I have had numerous conversations over the years about what to do with the bees. Many are willing just to come in and kill them all for me. I am not comfortable with that at all. One guy said he would come and see what kind of bees they were, if they could be put into hives, etc. I would like that. He also told me that one house where he removed bees had a honeycomb that was 10 feet long and went up the entire lenght of the roof. He said he wouldn't be surprised if it was the same case in my house. I said "so you mean I could have honey dripping through the ceiling". He said, "yes, you could." If I had honey dripping through my ceiling, I am not sure how I would react. I would have a serious Willy Wonka moment just before I freaked out.


The second thing that I noticed was that, despite all the insect life just outside the front door, the buzzing, crawling, flying and generally being alive in the insect world, there was absolute silence and stillness in the house. No flies. No bees. Nothing. Eerie really. Then I started to look in the corners and by the fireplace, over the keyholes and the skylight. Webs like bedsheets. Webs like surgical gauze. Webs made by spiders which at first looked like this...






Well, not that big. More like this...


The spiders in the house are talented. If I hear a fly, I listen for about 15 minutes and I don't hear it anymore. I saw a spider the size of my pinky toe nail eat a bug the size of Mothra. I am not kidding. These spiders are so good at their job that I am afraid they may get ideas about the dog. Creepy.

I have had everything fly into the house at this point. I left the back door open at twilight for 3 minutes and I got 2 bats. During a storm, I got a little bird that we netted in the lace curtains and let out. It sat on the window looking in for a while before he flew away. But the fliers are nothing compared to the scurriers.

Next Episode of Life in the Country: "We can't trap them, they are too cute"

Life in the Country - Where is my Jeep when I really could use it?

After being inspired by my pal Dim's great success in purchasing a house, I thought to maybe share my experiences in the experiment that is sometimes called, "Returning to Nature or Living the Simple Life".

Some years ago, I bought a wee stone cottage in rural Ireland. Let's first get our definition of "rural" down so we get some perspective on this. This place is so rural, Google Earth doesn't really pick it up, it just gives some kind of relief map thing that looks like ones that we had in school where the Rocky Mountains looked like scars. This place is so rural that the road that runs in front of my cottage has grass growing in the middle of it. My driveway is about 1/4 of a mile up a cow path that is dirt and rocks (with a waterfall if it rains too much) and, cows! Go figure. How rural is this place Pog, you ask? This place is so rural that it is 8 miles to the nearest store (in off road conditions)...but only 2 miles to a really good Guinness. The killer thing about this is that when I lived in Boston and only needed a car to go the length of the Mass Pike to Framingham, I had a 4x4 Jeep Cherokee that was so high off the ground, I got nose bleeds. Now that I have no asphalt in my life anymore... I am driving a bottom heavy VW (see yesterday's post). The mud flaps are totally gone.

So here I am, in the middle of nowhere, enjoying my surroundings and not regretting a single minute, believe me, but my education about everything - animal, vegetable and mineral - was about to begin in earnest.

Next installment ... The Birds and the Bees ... and Spiders.

Pog's Regrets and Mistakes

Thanks to everyone who put in their 2 cents about my poetry anthology. I got the damn thing in, realized on the day, when I saw everyone else's, that I got the assignment totally wrong. By that time it was too late, and I couldn't give a monkey's ass. So, its in and I haven't received a grade for it but that is not the point of me doing this class anyway, for the grades I mean. I am hoping to be discovered, if you must know why I am putting myself through this annoyance of weekly classes and homework assignments. So far, I haven't been discovered. I live in hope.

But what I really want to talk about are regrets and mistakes. It is an unfortunate segway, lest you think that one of my mistakes was going back to school. It isn't. I don't think furthering an education is ever truly a mistake...unless of course you are going for you MBA or to be a certified accountant. :-) Friends don't let friends become certified accountants. Here is my list thus far:


1. Buying a white, berber carpet - Oh man! What a nightmare. The professional cleaner is coming on Tuesday to try to sort out some of this mess. I can't totally blame the state it is in on the dog, although he certainly had his part to play. This carpet is the reason that I started thinking about regrets and mistakes. Everytime I step on it, I think of my folly.

2. Buying a volkswagon and using it for off roading - say what you will about German engineering. Praise them to Mount Olympus if you want to. Fine. All I can say is that if you drive them anywhere other than the Autobahn, you are going to pay. And pay big! Stuff is just falling off this car and I never get out of the shop for under $1000.

3. Getting my hair cut on Monday - I know, I know, it will grow back but I have to live with it until then.

4. Wasting 7 euro and 50 cents to see Babel - I don't know about the rest of you but it had to be one of the worst, pretentious, yet said nothing about anything, movies I have seen in a while. Can anyone explain to me, and give me a plausable explanation please, why they just didn't take the tour bus to the nearest hospital? Could it have been more dangerous to drive 4 hours in a bus that have a Moroccon vet sew her up with a burnt needle and black thread - without anestesia? And why did we have the Tokyo story at all? What was the point? I think it was supposed to say something about the collective human condition and it just failed miserably. In my humble opinion.

5. The moment of lapsed sanity when I said, "No, don't call a cab. I'll drive you." - Now I have to do it.