The Porch Debacle

Yeah, it was almost this bad.

 Yesterday I cleaned off the front porch. Now to you that might be a normal thing to do. Heck, you can probably eat directly off your porch. But for me, the junk took on sentience and was lying in wait to eat an unsuspecting visitor. I could sense the latent vengence growing.

Then it started raining on all that crap and I figured if I didn't want it to be complete muck, I'd have to deal with it. The thing is, The Hubs gets angry when I straighten up the shed or the walk-in or the porch. He says he has everything just where he wants it, although he often grouses about not being able to find things. In my head I'm always grumbling, "Look down, look down. You're standing in your...crud."

So I snapped. I took my mental health in hand and just did it. Luckily there were no domestic dispute calls to the cops. In fact The Man was pretty much okay with it after I timidly queried him. No kidding. I nearly fainted. (He's really not an ogre. He just likes his stuff a certain way...that I don't.)

The other problem (besides questionable insect life and the occasional four foot rattlesnake or pack rat) is that the temperature is distinctly oven-like, if you have steam incorporated. Maybe more like a sauna. We're talking the inside of an underwater volcano here. So doing anything outdoors for any length of time necessitates a gallon of ice cream, a half hour cold (relative since water here never gets below about 80 degrees) shower, and a three hour nap.

The Christmas lights were a huge part of the mountain. I don't usually deal with them since the year I neatly wound them up and stowed them in a bin. Apparently I broke a light or two, rendering the strings inert. Of course that breakage couldn't have happened between May when we took the lights down and October when I packed them nicely away.

Another ingredient of Mt. St. Murphy was The Hubs' empty box collection. Now at times those boxes come in handy. But when they've been rained on for several months, the boxes get all Stachybotrus-y and shredded, rendering them useless. He gets upset at me when I put them in the shed, since they get in the way of his tool collection spread felicitously all over the floor. I guess I'll just have to "use them up."

Various tools, rusty nails, and sharp bits of duct work metal provide foot mines for the uninformed barefooted and very intrepid person. (He's re-doing our roof and also installing new ductwork for our new cooler he put in. He's a very Very handy guy. I'm quite lucky to have him. Until he's done with that, though, we keep cans in our hall for those lovely impromptu roof hole fountains.)

And lastly the camping gear, baking in the grueling sun. Ah yes. One always wants to find out that their tent has been baked full of large holes, during a downpour of Noah-like proportions when they are far from home and everything in their backpack is sitting under one of those downspouts. We wonder why nobody wants to share a tent with us.

At any rate, the front porch is pristine, now. The junk is accessible and readily available. And I shall now go hang the laundry. And make plans for making the back porch livable again. There might even be a yard back there we can use for something other than to hold our gracefully-used-but-at-this-moment-non-functioning-nor-ever-will-run-again-if-we're-being-totally-honest station wagon and collection of old Christmas tree stumps.

If only our junker looked this pretty.

I'm really not a red-neck. Really. I mean, I do like banjos and practical jokes, but I'm not poor white trash. Yeah. Sticking with that.