The Glory Hole

My trailer isn’t the only thing going on in my life. Check out other things I like too.

http://storytopper.tumblr.com/

I’ve been absent from Honey Bend most of the time recently but I managed to get a day off yesterday to prepare for and cohost the Trailer Park Hoe Down and First Annual Gumboot Toss. It was a screaming success for a Tuesday night party, complete with said gumboot toss, Trailer Park Paternity Test, mud wrestling and bobbing for weiners. The mud wrestling wasn’t completely successful with one filthy fighter winding up with a twice broken once dislocated arm, but it wouldn’t have been a Spicer party without a visit from the Ambulance. All in all, it was an awesome time with a wicked turn out and appearances made by two of the three deemed “essential services” (the one missing being the fire department) -the police came by, responding to a noise complaint, hilariously five minutes after we’d turned off the heavy metal and were sitting, quietly, around a camp fire (albeit surrounded by beer cans, mud, wieners and gumboots). I wish I had been able to take a photo of the carnage this morning when I arose at 4:45 for my morning commute (only to be greeted by party stragglers still poking the coals) but it was too dark out and I didn’t have my camera on hand. Pics will be posted soon of the actual party, and that should give some idea of the battle field left for KJ and KJ to clean up (as I am in the city today at the office). Spicer bought 200 wieners and I think we only used 50 of them; we’re going to be eating those puppies for weeks. Perhaps we’ll have to have a wiener blow out bbq.

Needless to say, I’m already excited for next years ripper. It will, no doubt, be bigger and better.

Keeping my trailer floor clean is hard and there is always grass in my bed.

Next thursday, we will have 18 chicks. Two days later, we will have two more. Honeybend is turning into a regular baby factory.

There is a mosquito in my trailer tonight. I’m trying to watch something on my laptop before I pass out and it is attracted to the light and keeps flying in my ear and nose. I keep grabbing at it, think I have it, and then the sneaky fucker escapes my clenched fist.

The other night, I stupidly left the glory hole open while a friend and I sat at a campfire outside. When I came in, there was a moth stuck in my lamp. Even when the light was out, I could hear it fluttering about, trying to get free. I don’t like moths. It might be hereditary because my Granny is absolutely TERRIFIED of them. If you ever want to see an eighty-year-old woman cry (and I’m not sure why you would), put Sylvia in a room with a moth.  I’m not scared of moths per se, although, I will flip out if one flies in my face. I was discussing moths with a friend on Friday night and she told a story about one night years ago, when a moth got caught in her comforter and she straight up threw it out the window and left it there over night. That’s extreme. I don’t think I’d do that.

I REALLY don’t like mosquitoes. I don’t think that’s unusual though - I have never heard of anyone professing their undying love of mosquitoes. When I was a kid, I got absolutely EATEN every summer and I was a picker so that didn’t help matters. I’m literally covered from head to toe in scars from mosquito bites. As an adult, however, I haven’t found that I get bitten often (literally receiving one or two bites a year -I think I deserve it after what I went through when I was young) but it’s the incessant humming that really gets to me and can bring me out of even the heaviest of slumbers.

When we were growing up, we went camping a lot as a family –at least two weeks every summer. We went off the grid camping, to places you’ve never heard of, places you had to hike to, places next to lakes, places infested with mosquitoes, horse flies and deer flies, places that didn’t help me with my tendency to be mauled by said pests. My brother and I had our own tent, separate from my parents’. It was a tent that was handed down by my Grandparents. A green two person Eureka a-frame that was probably 20 years old already by the time Quinn and I claimed it for our own. We hated setting it up, but even more than that, we hated taking it down and we were made to do both on our own. I was an absolute stickler for keeping the door or at least the screen (one side which eventually had a hole ripped in it by my infant cousin, Marli) closed at all times so as to keep it insect free. My brother, however, was not as diligent as I (he is my mother’s child and I my father’s) and quite often, come bed time, despite my efforts to prevent it from becoming so, the inside of our tent was teeming with mosquitoes and I would refuse to submit to my bed time as requested by my exasperated mother. And so we came up with a system: Myself and my brother, one with a flashlight, would sit inside the tent, my mother on the outside and we would wait for a mosquito to land on the tent wall and whomever held the torch would shine it on the mosquito and my mum would place her hand on the outside to create a hard surface and the one of us without the flashlight would smack it dead –a slightly morbid high five. Subsequently, that tent, to this day (we still use it, even though it is 35+ years old), has blood splotches all on the inside. Splotches that, 15 years later, have faded to brown and look like dirt.

I’ve found myself telling that story quite often lately. Perhaps because it’s summer and I’ve also been finding myself spending evenings outside around fires, around picnic tables or at the beach –all places where mosquitoes tend to run rampant this time of year. It’s a cute story, one I will probably tell for the rest of my life. However, I don’t see it helping me tonight, in my trailer, as I don’t have anyone to hold the torch or to high five through the tin wall.

I just realised that I’ve become kind of lame and posting all about chickens and nothing about my trailer which was the point of this blog in the first place.