Well, thank you for the hug, I sure needed one!

Things are a bit better, the last rain we just got a few drops of leakage threw our red neck roofing job, and just today I finally finished cleaning up the mess in the bathroom. It is pretty hard to get the inspiration to clean up the mess when you clean everthing up and it still looks like crap anyway. Especially when housekeeping isn't my strong point anyway.

Now let's keep our fingers crossed that the dog market picks up, and the price of scrap metal stays up, maybe we can get a new roof sometime soon.

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Well shut my whining up. After reading about all your problems, sheepdog, I am for whining at all. My problems don't hold a candle to yours. Hope things get better for you really fast.

As to the goats, well that is why I never raised them. We stuck to horses, chickens, rabbits, and cows (beef and milk). Had various dogs and barn cats over the years, as well. Never had the rain problems as our land was pure beach sand and percolated great. However, it didn't grow things very well without a lot of compost.

Here is a ((((((((((HUG))))))))) to try to make you feel better.

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Well, I should of known better than to whine about my computer problems, as it is now, things can (and did) get a lot worse. Oh sure, I got my satalite and boy do I LOVE IT, but everything else promptly went to hell in a handbasket.

You probably all saw on the news last week about the torential rains we had here in the midwest, and all the flooding. It was a giant mess. Here were we are we got 7 inches of rain. Many people lost or had serious damage to their homes. Some even lost their lives. So, while I can be at least thankful to still be breathing, it really doesn't help all that much.

We live on a hill, so the water coming up from the ground up was not the problem, it was the rain coming down that turned the whole ordeal into a first class nightmare. Our roof has been leaking for awhile, can't get enough money ahead to put on a new roof, so we just put a few buckets down to catch the drips and call it good. Well, with 7 inches of rain, well, the buckets just weren't cutting it. Water was just pouring into the bathroom, kitchen and utility room. I could hardly keep them dumped fast enough. Sometime after midnight the rain finally started to slow down. I went to bed later, but was having trouble going to sleep. We had been extremely busy with other projects around the kennel and had run out of firewood. So of course, the day of the big storm, we also ran out of propane, so the house was cold and damp. About 2am I hear this god awful crash in the kitchen. I was cold and miserable and tired and didn't even want to get up to see what it was. I really thought the kitchen ceiling had fallen in and the light fixture had broken. Oh if only that's what it was. One of my kitchen cabinetes had come loose from the top of the wall and tipped down, dumping all my dishes out in the floor. On the top shelves were my mothers set of beautiful antique dishes. Nearly every piece of the set was destroyed. It was a really fancy set of dishes, complete with every peice imaginable, gravy boats, sugar bowls, platters, salt and pepper shakers, the whole deal. I suspect they were probably quite valuable. They were very old and had that gold trim on them. I was just sick over loosing them.

I got up the next morning and headed straight to the bathroom as always, and walked right into the next disaster. The bathroom ceiling had colapsed. It was just about the biggest mess I had ever seen, sheetrock, fiberglass insulation and that blown in insulation was covering everything in the bathroom. All wet and nasty and stuck to everything. It's taking hours and hours to get it all cleaned back up and of course with the big hole in the bathroom ceiling, it's a real pain to take a shower unless the weather gets warm, no way to heat the bathroom, it all just goes up and out.

So, I'm sitting there trying to pee and in comes the old man to tell me the goats are out next door. I mean, I don't even get to finish my urgently needed first thing in the morning potty break for crying out loud! Off to chase goats, and by the time we get over there they have gone back in. We get back in the house, haven't been there 10 minutes when the neighbor lady out at the other places calls and says the other goat herd is out over there and in the road. So even though my bathroom is covered in soggy insulation and my kitchen floor is totally covered with broken glass, we are off to chase more goats.

And the amazing thing, while I dreaded all morning long what it was going to be like if and when I ever made it down to check the dogs, when I finally got to the kennel, it was in absolutly amazingly good shape. I had one pen with 2 dogs in it that I had to move to another pen as it had some standing water in it. They still had a dry house and over 1/2 of their pen, so even that wasn't too bad. I really figured I'd be facing a lot worse. Still can't figure out how I lucked out down there!

Sorry to be such a whine bag, but man, life sure can be a bit--- sometimes.

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Could always move to Destriot , and if I remember correctly your horses(?) would love that Detroit air, and ouch what rip off right there. Of course I wouldn't be surprise as cable and ISP have ot jack up the coasts just to pay off the bills for HDTV and of course installing fiberoptics to replace the old stuff etc etc. Remind me why I shouldn't go back to dial up service??

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yeh, *******think, think, think, think******** Living in the middle of a national forest leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to technology. We just got touch-tone phone service. AT&T is not available here yet, as are none of the big ISPs. Cable TV is available, but cable internet access is cost prohibitive in our small community. Something like $60/month. Like, our telephone service has doubled in the past 2 years. Michigan government taxes us to death for telephone service and tacks on more charges for the 911 services. New puter is on my wish list, but somehow travel seems to come first when budgeting expenses. When I have traveled enough perhaps I will afford a new puter, but until then it is on the back burner as is the hope we will catch up with the rest of the world of technology (fat chance).

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