Murder in the afternoon

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Okay! ARE YOU READY??? OKAY, NOW, RELAX, DAMMMMMITTTT!!! Or, otherwise titled, "Vacation, Day One."

We always say we're not getting out of bed until 9am on vacation days, but we always get up right around 7. Maybe stay in bed an extra thirty minutes, each of us thinking about the day ahead. Which is a waste, you know.

Yesterday, Mike called the Kenfield Golf Carts on Pond Springs Road, way the F)*()#$# on the other side of Austin - to find out that they're open today from 9 to Noon... and it would take us - or so we thought - about 50 minutes to get there from the house. So Mike starts a little after nine am to get the cart put back together (he replaced the brushes in the starter/engine and the solenoid a few weeks ago. Neither made it go). The starter wheel now just turns slightly. But it still don't go.

In two hours, Mike has to put it back together, fill one of the wheels with air in the back and reseat the bead on it. We cleaned it up and then tried to get it onto the truck bed. After two hours of exertion and while we're just leaving the farm, Mike said: "If I was going to have a heart attack, I would have during all this," We only had just slightly over an hour and ten minutes to get the cart to the cart shop and finally, we were on our way. Out the gate, then to the second gate near the road.

"Wait! Stop!"

What now?

Barbecue had escapes the confines of the farm and was just casually walking down the road. Great. Stupid dog. Get her into the driveway, close the outer gate -- which means she'd be without food or water until we got back home.

Then we head to the shop, but Mike insists on taking the toll road to 620 and then to 183 or some such nonsense. It takes a long time, we're both stressed and when we pull into the shop at 12:05, everything looks closed. We catch someone who says the manager's inside and we plead our case... we've come from Bastrop and, implied, it's a long drive. They let us us. It is Mike's way of pushing it, you know, but even he was getting frustrated by slow drivers, red lights and, um, driving for miles out of the way. (ducks).

We headed to Der Wienersnitzel (one of those places we don't have on our side of the world, but it's a Kristi place, not a Michael place.). I had gotten a Saveur baseball gimme cap in the mail while Mike was enclosing Barbecue in the driveway and wore it to the fast food place. Oh, the irony.

So we come back and hey, it's time to rest, right? I was a little restless having been in the truck for three hours and went to take the rest of the hay from the hay stall (we always let the goats in to clean up after we've fed them all that's in there). I look and what looks back at me is a sleeping possum. I run like hell to the house while Brisket, the dog, who's not used to seeing me run so fast, barks like crazy at me.

"Get the .22!" The possum must have been there a long time under the pallets that we put on upright cinderblocks. It had made a nice little nest. The last time I raised the pallets, I noticed that the hens had been laying there... at least there were a ton of eggshells everywhere. Now I know why. Mike suspects that when we let the goats in to graze the final bits of hay before we put in the new stuff, that they ate away part of the top of this creature's 'hole' in the hay. Also, this is probably the same possum that both Brisket and Barbecue had cornered in a tree a few weeks ago.

It was a convenient arrangement: The possum simply lays around, waits for the hens to lay or goes and gets them from nests in the barn and eats them, then goes back to sleep cozily under the pallets. I'd been wondering about Brisket and his harming chickens enough to kill them, but now I think he had some help. Also, the goats tend to stand around and stare at something with their ears on high alert when something's off or odd in the neighborhood. We just haven't been paying attention.

Mike put his boots on -- after thinking we were, you know, going to have some downtime, and gets the .22 from the place we keep it, goes to the barn and shoots the possum in the head. I feel completely helpless as I grab a shovel and went to our pet cemetery to start digging a hole, leaving Mike to shovel up the creature, find something to put it in, then collect the bloody hay in the hay stall, as well. My hole was in the wrong place, of course, and was dug into very hard dirt (as really, no rain and all that creates a very hard tundra here). So Mike dug a new hole, as well.

So finally, we can rest a little, lay in bed a bit... but then we're just laying there after all the commotion and it's hard to close our eyes, much less sleep.

"Hot chocolate?"

"Sure!" Why not, the day is young.