Happy omen
Until recently, the CoE would only consent to marry couples in their local church (or one of their local churches, if the two were from different parishes). So most of the people who lived in Badger House over the last four hundred years would certainly have been married in the ancient church around the corner. That’s why we were so dead-set on doing the same, despite — to put it mildly — not being church-going mustelids.
But services are held in a nearby parish in Winter, on account of our church has no electricity and the lane leading to it is muddy and impassible much of the time. We took a real risk picking February. The 14th was the earliest the vicar would consent to open the building (heh. And you thought one of us was an incurable romantic).
February in England is…iffy. It can be startling warm and sunny. It can be an absolute asshole. Predictions can change by the hour. I’ve been holding my breath for months.
This Saturday was…improbably gorgeous. Sunny, warm, high puffy clouds. Okay, yes, we had to walk to the church from the main road and our vows whuffed out in little puffs of holy vapor, but I got feeling back in my toes again after a couple of drinks and an hour or so in front of the fire.
Everything, from beginning to end, was…absolutely perfect.
Well, holy shit.
I’m taking a week off blogging. I gather I’m supposed to moon people or something. I think there’s honey involved. Thanks so much for the happy thoughts, everyone — y’all have been too kind. And all your good wishes came true, so you can start thinking about lottery numbers next, ‘k?
Oh, the picture? That, my friends, is weasel shit. Stoat plop, to be more precise. You can tell because it’s tiny and it’s wearing an ickle fur coat, courtesy of the more indigestible bits of its victims. The day was so lovely Saturday morning, I decided to walk into town for my hair ‘n’ stuff, and found this token of esteem lying right in my path.
So my family made it after all.
February 16, 2009 — 8:23 pm
Comments: 54
She sees…dead people?
I must tell you — although I am as psychic as a potato — Badger House doesn’t feel the least little bit haunted to me. Despite its old bones (between 399 and 421 years old, depending on whether you believe our earliest property tax bill or the plaque on the front), it feels nothing but warm and happy. This place has been added to, taken from, patched up, mutilated, renovated and redecorated so many times, all the ghosteses must have packed their bindles and hit Ye Roadde centuries ago.
But Charlotte here is kind of freaking us out.
She’s a spooky girl. She was a feral kitten and she’s been a one-weasel cat ever since, but she did pretty okay the first few days. She explored the house, she cautiously interacted with Uncle B. She was acclimating faster than I expected.
Then she stopped coming downstairs one day. She’d hide in the closet with the water heater if I left it open. I had to move her food up. She slept twenty hours a day, only came down when I carried her and scooted back up the moment I let go. It was a cold week; I put it down to that.
Then she gradually calmed down. She began coming downstairs for a few minutes on her own. Accepting skritchies from Uncle B. She’ll still startle at the least noise, but after weeks and weeks she’s getting back where she was on day three.
But for one thing: she’s fixated on a particular spot on the wall. She’ll be grooming or snoozing or playing with string, and suddenly she’ll jump like she hears something and stare at That Place (this lucky shot catches her the very moment she stopped chewing toe and started the creepy stare). No doubt about it: she’s watching something.
The spot is in the short hall between the livingroom (with the fire) and the dining room (where Granny Weasel is hung). There is a small window. There’s nothing else there. Now.
But all the old geezers in the neighborhood tell us that’s where the front door was for hundreds of years, until the major renovation of 1970-something.
wwwwoooooOOOO0000OOOoooooo!
February 11, 2009 — 8:42 pm
Comments: 26
Miss Marple? I say — something dreadful has happened at Badger House!
They say we got a month’s worth of rain in one night last night. I believe it, too — we took a drive around today, and most of the fields hereabouts have been magically transformed into lakes. With ducks on!
One of the casualties was our house telephone. There was a leak in the roof right above the kitchen table and it got soaked through. None of the buttons worked.
So we set off to buy a new one.
And came back with this one. The one in the picture. No, really — they’ve jiggered it so it does all the modern British Telecom dealies. It dials out, it rings (rings! with a bell!). It’s made of Bakelite, it weighs fifty pounds, and that thing at the bottom is a brass handle. Presumably so I can do preacher curls and build my biceps while I chat with my girlfriends. As if.
We went in to a clock shop to shop for a clock, and they had about twenty of these. We had to walk around the block a few times to convince ourselves. Despite the Bell Labs on the label and the phone number in English, this one is Belgian.
‘Allo? Allo? Monsieur Poirot? Quelque chose terrible s’est produite à Maison Blaireau!
February 10, 2009 — 7:58 pm
Comments: 38
We hung Grandma tonight
Relax. Pictures are hung, people are hanged.
Great great great grandma, actually. I got her name; I’m told there’s a resemblance (honestly, if we want to wear crochet’ed earflaps in the house, I don’t see what business it is of anyone else’s). She buried three husbands and owned a bunch of property, including slaves (we saved the receipt). Lived most of her life in Louisiana, but came back to Tennessee to die. Or they shipped her body back, anyway.
I stumbled over her grave in Nashville’s old city cemetery once quite unexpectedly; I had assumed she was in Monroe. That must have been quite a trip for a stiff in 1850. There was a high pointy iron fence around her grave, and no caretaker in sight. I badly wanted to scale the fence and read more of the inscription on the stone, but I feared that would end badly.
Anyhow, Granny has been propped up against the wall of the dining room ever since my stuff got here. Uncle B and I salute her politely whenever we pass through the room. We’ve gotten so used to her company, we kind of wanted to keep her in that room. Tonight, Uncle B noticed some damn fool had screwed a heavy screw into the beam above the booze pile by the door, so that’s where Granny lives for now.
Keeper of the Hootch. I don’t know if Granny Weasel was a drinker, but (knowing what I know about the rest of the fambly) the odds are very much in favor of it.
February 5, 2009 — 7:43 pm
Comments: 21
Good to go
Our shit farm had its first annual service this morning. Some of my more faithful, losery readers may remember from last year that putting in a new septic system was a condition of sale for Badger House.
Not just a regular old septic tank — oh, no. The hippies who run Britain decree’d we must have a state-of-the-art chrome-plated shit processing factory. It has a pump and a computer and it goes shusss-shusss-shusss- softly while I sit in the garden trying to contemplate the beauty of creation and not so much the poops running along tiny conveyor belts under my feet.
It’s a high-strung, finicky filly, this thing, and it needs regular looking after. Two of the nicest shit-techs you could ever meet turned up this morning and saw to ours. This they did without gloves, cheerfully rescuing newts from the pipes with their bare hands and tossing them onto the grass.
Uncle B, who is inclined a bit toward the Howard Hughsian, had to wash his hands every time he saw them touch the machinery. That was worth the price of admission right there.
What? You didn’t think I could post about something other than myself two days running, did you?
January 29, 2009 — 8:54 pm
Comments: 43
My sheep are back!
Okay, not my sheep. My sheep are the gentlemen sheep, who are apparently still out doing guy sheep things. The gents are due back in March, no doubt with big, sheepish grins on their faces.
I’m no sheep expert, but I think these are last year’s baby ewes, too young to breed. They have a certain, wide-eyed, “a weasel, you say?” look about them.
Anyhow, it’s nice to have something woolly and stupid to watch out the window while I pickle hedgehogs, or whatever the hell I’m supposed to be doing in the kitchen.
January 23, 2009 — 7:46 pm
Comments: 26
I wonder why he never used this…
Huh. I found this in a box with the sushi-colored bandaids. Sometimes I wonder why I bother to buy him nice things.
I’m moving all his shit out of the dining room, to make room for my shit, which arrives tomorrow afternoon. Well, two thirds of it, anyhow. They took my trans-Atlantic container and broke it up into three crates for storage. I really didn’t think we could absorb such a very great deal of shit at once, so we’re accepting delivery of two.
Um, yay. I guess.
We had our last counseling session with the vicar earlier tonight. Uncle B managed to peek over her shoulder and read, “you can slip in the stuff about Jesus now” in her vicar’s notes. But it was just a pinch of Jesus and a little prayer and it hardly hurt at all.
Actually, the vicar never says Jesus, she always says “Jesus Christ,” which makes me think she’s about to cut loose with a string of profanity.
Also, the way she says “God” is flat-out terrifying. Like Gowwwdeh. It sounds serious as a heart-attack.
Anyhow, I’m going to go contemplate my sins. By which I mean soak in a very hot tub with a very large vodka and listen to Classic FM by candlelight.
I’ve got a tough day tomorrow. I’ll probably have to get out of bed before noon.
January 15, 2009 — 8:29 pm
Comments: 11
Some fresher crazy, perhaps…?
I’ve spent a delightful evening paddling around Britain’s National Archives looking for records of Badger House*. Brits do their censuseses on the year one, and I have managed to find Badger House in two of them. In 1901, it was listed as Badger Cottage and uninhabited. In 1911, it was listed as Old Badger (the name it has today). For more detail, I’ll have to give the Queen a few bob.
Earlier censuxices are online — back to 1841 — but it’s all still in beta. I haven’t gotten any hits before 1901, which either means the information hasn’t been fed into the database yet, or the house had a different name. Either. Both. Take your pick.
For the very besteses information — the proper parish records — this little weasel is going to have to hop a train for the county seat in Lewes. All in good time, my pretties. All in good time.
Anyhow, the stuff the British government has gotten online so far is impossibly cool. I posted about the proceedings of the Old Bailey database this Spring (couldn’t find any significant criminal records for the Weasel *or* Badger families, which probably just means we got away with it). As a devoted British true-crimophile, this stuff blows my mind. Britons make fabulous criminals.
And for all you UFOlogists: the UFO files. I’m not much into it myself, but I did check to see if anything weird is on record buzzing Badger House.
No. For once.
*name has been changed to protect the mustelids. I hate to be cute about it, but the real name of this house is enough of a true and legal address to track us down like dogs. Like dogs!
January 13, 2009 — 9:37 pm
Comments: 11
It was so cold in England today…
…we had blue tits.
On our fat balls.
I’ve been crumbling up bread ends and meat scraps and leaving them out for weeks now, but for all I know I’ve been fattening rats (last Summer, Uncle B took a picture of an especially fine specimen waddling off with a crust; that’s when he quit leaving food out).
Today, though, bits of Britain were colder than bits of the Antarctic and the boids turned up in hoids.
I totally don’t know from birds. I love watching them, but I’m at a “ZOMG, look at that precious fat one with the beak!” level of expertise. So I got out the binoculars and the Field Guide to British Birds and I counted
■ One thrush
■ One robin
■ Two pairs of moorhens (maybe one pair of moorhens and a pair of coots)
■ A lovely pair of chaffinches
■ Half a dozen blackbirds (a different species than ours; the British kind really do have that sweet, meandering song like in the old Beatles tune)
And that’s before the rooks came home from work and scared everyone off.
Oh, and Uncle B swears he saw blue tits on the seed feeder, but he sees tits everywhere. I’m worried about that boy.
January 6, 2009 — 8:00 pm
Comments: 36
Tolja
We got invited ’round to the neighbors for Boxing Day afternoon. We got the time wrong and landed in the middle of family celebrations. Awk-warrrrrd.
Still…on the way home, I got Uncle B to take a picture of me next to The Sign.
December 26, 2008 — 8:47 pm
Comments: 45