Cabin Life

So, turns out I still have a blog? Who knew? It seems like I forgot. But a couple of things lately have been compelling me to start writing here regularly again. One of them was Allie, telling me that she thinks I'm an awesome writer (thanks, Allie), which made me feel good. And another one was this Relief Society thing I went to about creating a personal history. I'm not really that great at writing in my journal and I don't have a scrapbook, so I might as well blog, yes? Yes.

I have so many things to catch up on in this space, like a trip to Europe, and I will. I have grand plans to do 4 posts about that trip, one for each country visited.

But for now, let's get to what's really on my mind. Which is flies.

You see, Christopher and I have moved temporarily to my family's cabin while he does a 6 week rotation at the hospital nearby. I will just commute to work from there, and then we'll both come home on the weekends, for social and religious reasons.

I love the cabin. It's so cozy and cabin-ish, surrounded by fields and mountains, with a big deck and a fire pit in the backyard. There's probably just one thing I don't love about it, and that is the flies. Much to my parents' chagrin (they have gotten new windows and doors, and had the whole house re-sealed in an attempt to squelch this issue), there are flies all over the place at the cabin. When we're not there and the heat is turned down they all sort of die and/or hibernate, but once we get there and it gets warm in the house, they reanimate and ruin your life.

Thankfully, this is 2012, and we have a wonderful invention down there called a vacuum. So, one of the essential tasks of cabin living is vacuuming up the dead flies. Last night being our first night down there, there were a lot of them to deal with. Chris had sprayed something earlier in the day, and that took care of most of them, which meant we then had to dispose of the bodies. Vacuum style. I have to admit, it's pretty satisfying to put on the hose attachment and just go for it, sucking those guys up. I like to sass them while I do it and say stuff like, "Get out of my HOUSE, flies!!"

I maybe should have taken a picture, but maybe not because it's so gross, but there were SO MANY of them. It was like there had been an epic battle for control of the ping pong table and nobody won. Their dead were not numbered because of the greatness of their numbers kind of stuff. Anyway, somehow in the middle of vacuuming up the dead flies, I thought, "I need to blog about this!" And I really don't think you should ignore promptings brought on by insect body disposal, you know?

And really, there's something about me that sort of likes the flies. Let me explain. Yes, we call it a cabin, but it has more amenities than my house. Like more than one bathroom, and a satellite dish. So to have something rustic to do like worry about bugs is just sort of part of the cabin experience to me.

The point is, I really want to try and create a cozy little cabin life for us the next month (once all those dang flies have been taken care of). And I think I will try and document it here. You know, for posterity and such. Incidentally, we aren't returning there the rest of this week because the pharmacist Chris is working with wants him to go to Salt Lake for some meetings the rest of this week. So--my cozy cabin plans are being put on hold for the time being, but that doesn't mean they will be forgotten. Here are the things I want to make sure we do during our time down there:

• Snowshoeing. (Once/if it snows, that is.)
• Eat at the Dairy Freez.
• Make tinfoil dinners in the fire pit. S'mores for dessert, obviously.
• Build a fire in the fireplace and have a read-a-thon.
• Eat soup at least twice a week. 
• Go to the Manti Temple.
• Ping pong tournament. 
• Drink hot chocolate on the porch.

So you can hopefully look forward to hearing about all of those things. I know that list doesn't seem that lofty, but we will only be there for 6 weeks, and really only in the evenings, so I didn't want to make it too unreasonable.

I'm not typically the most reliable sort for things like this (this being the whole do fun stuff and then actually blog about it), but I really want to. And I feel silly making a list, and part of me just wants it to all happen organically, but I've learned that sometimes making memories has to be really intentional. Otherwise you just lay around eating salt and pepper pistachios and watching Love It or List It on HGTV. (That's what we did last night, and actually, it was so so awesome, but I don't want to do that EVERY night, you know? Also, the people on it were SUCH JERKS. I could not get over how rude they were!)