The baby yard bunny and the backyard squirrel were frolicking in the backyard, and the bunny hopped down off the stairs to eat some weeds. Yay! Bunny.

So the squirrel hops up on the stairs and starts chomping on the cucumber vine and eats a baby cucumber. Then starts eating petunia flowers. Bastard!

So, this morning I woke up a little late shall we say and drew open the curtains to peer out the blinds into the back yard, where a male cardinal was splashing around in the cement birdbath my sister gave me quite some time ago. (One of these days, I’ve got to try and level it again so it will hold more water. My last attempt merely repeated the lean on a different side.) The back of the yard is filled with a ten foot tall hedge of mock orange, which is all in white flowers at the moment.

Free and worth what you paid for it!

While it’s nice to have an extra house in the Caribbean, full geothermal heat systems, and backup generators that self-test every month, most of us live a little lower on the hog, so what makes for a survival kit that you probably can’t buy at Neiman Marcus?

1. Heat — A backpacker alcohol stove and a gallon of denatured alcohol or ethyl if you can afford it. Sterno is a good solid fuel alternative but it has a shorter shelf life — the alcohol evaporates.
2. Sleeping — Enough mummy sleeping bags for your pod.
3. Light — LED tea candles and a couple larger LED lights.
4. Communications — Charged battery cellphone chargers and a cellphone.
5. Entertainment — Playing cards, chess, checkers, or other games.
6. Food — Pantry supplies like soup, crackers, canned beans.
7. Water — Something to store water and some source of drinkable water.

Note: This list ain’t gonna keep your pipes from freezing, it’s not shrimp on the barbie, and yes, a landline is better, but if the power is out and you ain’t got a landline, you probably ain’t going to get one put it right now.

So last night around 7:00 pm, two weeks before a new furnace is going to be installed, the 20 YO one quits. The condensate pump had been misbehaving, primarily because it was filled with gunk, and I’d tried to rinse it out, but finally gave out and took it apart and really cleaned it out. Anyway, the furnace stopped igniting around the same time. It would turn on the fan, increase the fan speed, and then slow down the fan again. No heat. I called my power companies home warranty line around 9:30, and a repair guy arrived around an hour or so later. After a considerable amount of time, a diagnosis was achieved, and off he went to retrieve a new part. An hour or so later, the part was installed, and the furnace started running again.

Well! My porch roof appears to be the very model of a modern insulated roof! It is just too bad that it’s open to the air on three sides. I was shocked, shocked I tell you, to see fiberglass insulation amongst the blown-in insulation above the ceiling. I’m having it insulated — or more accurately, I’m having the bay window that juts out into the porch roof insulated. In days of old during one particularly unpleasant winter with lots of snow and ice dams, water dripped from the ceiling and froze on the floor in the bay window. Thanks to whoever put the fiberglass insulation there, but it needed to be under the bay window, not over the porch roof.