Down The Rabbit Hole

As I was sweeping cabins earlier today,  I got to thinking, "Good-night, M, if you don't post something on that silly blog of yours soon, they'll all suspect you've gone off the deep end".  They'll wonder if you've finally become a forest dwelling, ax-swinging nut with a propensity for off-roading in inappropriate vehicles and having long [audible] conversations with herself.

Phew.  Glad I've avoided that.

My brainchild occurred only a an hour or so after Helen, a new (and awesome) year-long staffer, pulled a mouse out of the washing machine.

And the thought came just a little while before my husband and two of our neighbors/co-workers/fellow woodsman went outside to try and shoot a skunk that is living in our woodpile.

A woodpile located directly below our front deck,

which also happens to sit right outside my office window.

Fine, the woodpile basically is my office window.

While the chase ensued, I tackled my own challenge: eating half of a watermelon.  This comes to no one's surprise.

Why is no one surprised?  Because eating entire melons and chasing woodland creatures is beginning to feel normal.  The strange-but-true reality of life here has slowly pulled a foggy haze over my perceptions of what to should expect out of a day.

For example, I've recently managed to:

• overflow the pot in the Bunn coffee maker, multiple - ok, dozens - of times.  
• shake someone's hand while holding a pirate's hook in my sleeve (we'd never met before)
• spray water all over the dish pit, ceiling included.  

         [Since we're on the subject, here's a brief life lesson:

    In the battle of human dishwasher vs. ladle, 

there are no winners - only losers.

It looks so harmless.

 

    I'd compare it to running an ultra-marathon naked, 

in Manitoba, 

in February

 or 

to drinking questionable milk]

I've also managed to...

• stay upright in a kayak through most of the Kennebec Gorge (read: most)
• drive a four-wheeler 
• pet a black bear.  It actually felt quite like my cat, only larger and less alive.
• plunge the single-most-foul toilet I've ever encountered.  If I close my eyes, I can still see it.
• shoot archery with a gaggle of sweet Dominican grandmothers.
• start wearing hats.  Thank you to my friend Cathy, state food service laws, and that one retreat guest who left me a fedora.  Her fedora.  On purpose.  I look too much like a little boy to pull it off [without looking like a little boy].
• stop sleeping in.  This seems simultaneously gluttonous and tragic, and yet I will probably attempt to return it to my skill set pronto.
• take one day off in a month.  Though it may sound like I'm flaunting some big accomplishment here, what I'm really saying is that this kind of behavior is particularly unadvisable and likely a result of your own bad planning.  Plan better next time. 
• live in a state of heightened anxiety and panic (see above).
• remain in wedded bliss weddedness.  Considering the previous truth, this is a miracle.  I'd have banished me.  

I keep thinking that I should maintain a list of the unique happenings that that take place here in the woods, and perhaps I really ought to, but as time goes on, the instances themselves become less and less unique and, consequently, more and more everyday.

In conclusion, I suppose I will start on that list...

providing something really weird happens.