Isaac strikes the farm

The last couple of days have been eventful, thanks to Hurricane Isaac's remnants. Thursday wasn't so bad, other than the fact that we moved the last of our stuff from the apartment Wednesday, offloaded a lot of it right before I went to work Thursday, and so I worked on little sleep. I don't think Quentin really got any, either. Friday was when the remnants went through here, and it rained and rained and rained and ... you get the drift. Mostly just a steady sprinkling, but the mountain road hadn't been graded in a while despite me calling the local County Judge right after the electric company had been out brush-hogging. That was a couple of months ago, right? (Should note that the County Judge is also the head of the road maintenance crews. Yay. NOT.) Considering the road's not been graded in close to six months, all the rain from Isaac turned the two steep rises coming up to our place into a bit of a mess.

That's kind of an understatement. The bottom rise wasn't so bad, but the top one had been torn up by someone plowing through at high speed with a heavy truck. I'm cruising along up the road in my little five-speed standard compact, which NEVER has trouble with this road, EVER, and hit that. I nearly made it up through it, getting about ten feet from the top of the soupy mess, when my tires lost traction. Doggone it, I had to back up downhill around curves to get the car back onto solid ground. I should have stopped there, continued snaking my way downhill to the drive for Red Fern Glass, and turned around there and gone back down to the cow pastures at the bottom of the road. But nooooo. I had to be a brave little homesteader, and got stupid. I tried again to get up the hill, figuring I almost made it once, surely I could get through it this time!

Nope. I got just a bit past where I lost traction before, and got stuck again. This time it was worse, in a way. I put my little car into reverse, and just as soon as I touched the gas lightly to start backing down again, the car lost all traction and literally slid downhill. Fast. I tried to steer out of the skid, but the car was going too fast. One of the ridges left from the last time the crews graded caught the car, and I was slipping fast enough that the whole car ended up hung up on one, high-centered really badly. I had only the left front tire still on the road. The right front was just barely touching the ridge, and the rear tires were totally in the air. Q was later able to touch the car and rock it on the ridge. I was lucky I hadn't gone a bit straighter down the hill, because just behind the ridge and up a slight rise is a big tree I would have slammed backwards into.

I say it was all worse in a way, because nobody likes to have something like that happen, and my inner voice from childhood started telling me what a total screwup I was to have something like that happen, leaving me dependent on others to help. I hate that, I'm a bit OCD about doing it myself so it's done the way I envision it. I tried to call Q, but he didn't answer. Plus since I was the one who got hung up, and was first in line, my car served as a huge warning to everybody as to just HOW bad that mess really was. I tried again, and again, and finally texted him to answer his darn phone. He finally answered, and was thankfully not too far away, but I told him what had happened. We almost ended up getting the van up through the soupy spot, but Q almost got stuck, too. He started backing down to Cliff's place at Red Fern Glass, and then a neighbor was coming up the road in her small sedan. Bobbi and her husband Eric are good folks and we knew Eric from before we moved here.

Eric hadn't gotten off work yet, and Bobbi was dismayed to say the least when she found out how bad the rise was. On a three-mile-long or so county road, when you live a mile (more in Eric and Bobbi's case) up the steep hills, that kind of a walk is not fun. Thankfully, there's only those two spots that are bad at all, but the second one was bad enough. They both had small sedans, a bit bigger than my car but not by much. Eric also has a big old 4x4 with mud-bogging tires and a hitch on it. Bobbi walked with us up the hill through the muck, and slogged up to her house. Later she told us that the soupy patch was the only really bad spot on the whole road, and one of the neighbors had ordered a few loads of gravel to be put down there so that the soupy spot isn't soupy anymore even in lots of rain.

We decided to haul up a bunch of stuff from the van to the house that Q had bought to help run electric around the house to be able to have our entertainments. This is great, but two trips down to the van and back up to the house for stuff just about killed me, or so it felt. I'm not in the best of shape physically, but who ever said homesteading was easy? (Eric and Q think they are lucky fellows to have wives that are willing to live in the middle of nowhere like this and not gripe about it. They really are, but we won't tell them that.) Bobbi got to her place, and her mom and aunt were out doing some grocery shopping, before they came home. (Bobbi, Eric, her mom, aunt and gramma all live in a few small houses up at the very top of the road.) So she grabbed a shovel, walked back down and proceeded to shovel the heck out of enough of the rutted up mess to get every vehicle up the road but mine. Even her mom and aunt were able to get up the road safely. Poor Victor was still hung up. By then, we'd managed to get ahold of Eric, and he was willing to help get the car out of trouble, and our tow fee was cheap. Q offered Eric and Bobbi a bottle of beer each. I offered to have them over for dinner one day when we get a bit more settled. They took the beer and said they'd love to come for dinner. Just let them know when.

Eric and Q went down to the car with Eric's 4x4 and a tow chain, and quickly had the car off the ridge and hauled up past the messy spot, so now the car and van are in the drive. The van can make it up and down the road without a problem, but if the road isn't fixed by the time Q leaves for work Tuesday afternoon, I'llhave to park down by Cliff's place so I have less of a walk, and do things that way for a bit to get back and forth to work. At least it's a pretty walk through the woods.

It's now the next day, and once stores open up, Q and I are heading to Harrison to get some sawdust for the toilet, and so because he got stubborn and I decided it wasn't worth a big fight to be right (I learned to pick my battles a long time ago with the kids when they were little, and husbands aren't much different than overgrown kids, right ladies?), I let it go. But now I get my sawdust toity like I wanted. He's still fixated on a camp toilet from Coleman's or a regular toilet that would flush out into the sewage lagoon, but I'm not too fond of the latter. I got a look at the lagoon a few days ago, and it's just a shallow depression in some rocks. It's not a deep hole in the ground, like he thinks it is. I do NOT want that going on for sewage waste. I'd rather compost the heck out of it and put it around the eventual fruit trees!

On the upside of it all, we're completely unpacked, barring finishing up the electronics hookups, and I fixed dinner last night so we had a nice dinner for the start of our first weekend up here. Q is sleeping in a bit yet, I'm relaxed and having fun writing so I can post this later, and even though it's still threatening more rain, I'm feeling pretty calm about the whole thing. We're home, finally, and the homesteading is starting off with a bit of hassle, but it's not like we haven't made it through tough times already. This is just another hurdle to get over.

Until next time, Gentle Readers. I need breakfast!