Things I Missed From Home While I've Been Away

Ok, this one is for PGL, who is bored and snowed in or iced over or whatever.

Things I missed from home (did I say 9 days and a wake up yet?):

1. Mowing the lawns (PGL may recall why lawns is plural) and then sitting in the yard, drinking a beer, admiring the results. The way that the neighbors refer to the patch of grass across the road, which is actually leased by a farmer but he lets the neighbors do what we want with it) as "Basiljaz's cricket pitch" because I tamed it from waist high weeds to a well manicured (well, mostly) lawn. And now I'll have to start over.

2. Chopping wood for the wood burner in winter (except in the dark, holding a flashlight between your knees because you forgot to do it in the morning).

3. Hearing the cows/sheep/horses making their respective noises in the area.

4. The way our neighbor forgets the dog's name (she hears us calling him "Jaz Man" and thinks his name is Jasmine).

5. Fritz's Weiners http://www.fritzswieners.co.nz/products.html. Spicy Bratwurst, baby. I order 30 at a time and keep them in the freezer. They taste especially good at the Showgrounds with a beer.

6. Seeing the snow on the mountains in winter.

7. Walking over to the store for dinner and not having to drive home.

8. Going to Leeston to buy a roast, which the butcher cuts to order, ties up with string and makes suggestions about how to cook it.

9. Spring lambs while they're alive. (You may know them as wrapped in shrinkwrap for $14.99 a pound - but I knew them when they "were this big"! And ALIVE). There are hundreds of them in the area (pretty much everywhere we go) in late winter, early spring and sometimes I stop on the side of the road to watch them. And every time we see them in winter, the Kiwi says "God, they are lambing so much earlier than they used to".

10. Weather reports in winter that include warning about moving stock to lower elevations.

11. No matter how hot it may get during the day, it almost always cools down to a comfortable temperature at night.

12. The way we can see our breath inside the house first thing on a winter's morning (We See Dead People).

13. The 2:30 am train, and how everyone makes a comment if it was late this morning (the strange thing about living so close to a train track is that trains don't bother you or wake you unless it is late.

14. That Jaz Man/Jasmine has his own room with a futon to stay in during the day.

15. How the firewood smells when it gets delivered and dumped in front of the woodshed. You can smell it in the house.

I've remembered these things fondly while I've been away. I'm reasonably sure I'm going to curse them when I get home. And I'm thinking fondly of winter because it's so frickin' hot here right now.