How's the weather in your neck of the woods

It's springtime here. What season are you folks in, in other parts of the world?

Ahhh. spring is in the air

Mud season is official over. I no longer need to put my pickup into 4WD to get out of the dooryard and the white water rapids running through my dirt basement has subsided and I can safely stow away the lifevest. Now I just got to remember to go to market and buy a case of DeepWoods Off. Won't be hard to remember though, because everytime I step off the porch for more than 30 seconds I get eaten alive by black flies.

Soon, real soon, it'll be time to pull the lawnmower out of the barn again. Unfortunately once again the lawn weeds are winning out over the lawn algae. Took a little longer this time. Maybe next year, if mud season is a week or two longer, the algae will win and I won't have to mow the lawn.

Speaking of mowing lawns and such things. That I have to mow my own lawn is the problem with American youth these days, mind you, it's not the youth's fault or the parents fault, but Corporate America, Korea, China, Japan and Bill Gates' fault. Back when I was a kid, you needed money, you mowed the neighbor's lawn, you raked their leaves in the fall and you shoveled their driveway in the winter and if you were a girl, you babysat their kids. This was all good and gave you some pocket money, but not really ever enough to do anything much with it. Kids these days can get a part-time job at a fast-food joint thanks to Corporate America, get cheap transportation, thanks to Korea, and spend all their free time on their PC's, X-Box's, Sega, etc., thanks to China, Japan and Bill Gates.

And because of this, I've either got to mow the lawn myself, hope it just dies on it's own or pay for a lawn service.

Ahhh, Another sign of spring

Craney Hill....that's where my wife's parents live. I pretty much think of myself as a redneck and I live in a pretty rural part of New Hampshire, but I might as well be living on Main Street, USA compared to Craney Hill. Craney Hill is serious Redneck territory. The day that the USA gets invaded or that society breaks down, me and the family are in the pickup and heading straight to Craney Hill. That man has an gun arsenal like you read about. Three summers ago, when they still had goats up on the hill, a bear was coming out of the woods and killing them. Anywhere else, you'd pick up the phone and call animal control to deal with the situation. Not on Craney Hill, you and the family wait for that bear to come back, you throw open the upstairs bedroom windows and with guns ablazin' you very nicely add bear meat to your diet. It's actually not bad, a little stringy, but it makes a great stew.

This year we're bring farm animals back to Craney Hill. My nephew Marley is two years old and Dean, my wife's dad, figure it's time that Marley learn about taken care of animals. Now most folks will get their kid a hampster or goldfish. Not on Craney Hill, not enough meat to make a decent meal out of a hampster or goldfish. We're gonna raise pigs. Which is good, because when you go up to Craney Hill for a Sunday dinner and it's stew, you never quite know what kind of critter the stew meat came from. At least with pigs, we've got a pretty fair shot of getting a ham and bean supper.

Oh yeah, sign of spring at Craney Hill, almost forgot. Other than the same business about black flies and the end of mud season, we have the annual talk about getting rid of the collection of parts vehicles sitting in the dooryard or just strategically moving them around. We're up to, I think, eight or nine parts vehicles and it's been at least three years, so my bet is that with the introduction of farm animals again the vehicles get towed off this year.