Pecans, Weather, and Dental Work

Seven Quick Takes:

1.  When you live in a pecan orchard, money really does grow on trees. Not that I can convince my older boys of this fact. Desperate though they are for cold, hard cash, when the opportunity to earn a little literally lands right in their backyard, they seem completely oblivious.

We had a decent crop, not a stellar crop, but prices were low, low, low. Lots of work for a marginal return. (Please don't inform Tim and Kolbe). John showed a little enthusiasm for picking up pecans and earned some money for his efforts. The nice folks at Atwell Pecan Company cut John his own check. He was thrilled to pieces with the ten bucks he earned. "I don't want a ten dollars," he told me. Nope. All in ones, thank you very much. He promptly spent half his earnings on a collapsible pirate knife because nothing's more fun than pretending to stab someone, right?

2. We have had every variation of weather here except for that most elusive and beloved one -- snow. In between bouts of cold that Augusta rarely sees, we have beautiful days hiking and at the park.

3. The upside of the cold was late school start two days running. The downside is that many friends and neighbors are dealing with the aftermath of burst pipes. Not cheap. Not convenient. I asked Dave about our pipes, and his response was encouraging: When we heat the house, we heat under the house, and, thus, the pipes stay comfortably warm. Occasionally the oddities of our house actually work in our favor.When I was walking around shivering in multiple layers of clothes and two pair of thick socks and lamenting the fact that our house appears to have all the insulation of Ainsley's Dora the Explorer tent, I should have been counting our blessings. Cloud, meet silver lining

4. When the temperatures spike just above freezing, down comes the rain. While there is probably a simple meteorological reason temperatures rise and precipitation follows, we thinks it's a cruel plot. Rain at 42 degrees? What a waste! But the little people manage to enjoy the wet weather as well.

 5. Dry weather means we give the bike another try.

6. And the Penny Board got a four mile ride the other day.

7. The rest of life revolves around dental work which we are undertaking way more than I'd like. Two appointments this week; two or three more appointments next week. If you need to track me down, try the endodontist or the orthodontist or some other tist who is swallowing half my time and too much of my money. Teeth are sort of like tires -- you've got to have them in working order, but who wants to deal with them? After paying for root canal the other day, I wondered if living on ibuprofen for the rest of my life was really such a far-fetched idea.

Head over to Jen's to add your Quick Takes.