Update on the Plywood Palace Move

El Jefe here. Move successful. XaLynn burned out, worn out, tired. She is beautiful, especially in her patience with us.

New place is awesome with challenges. These include: Mice (yeah, I may have forgotten to fill her in on the ubiquity of the common field mouse in houses like ours), the dog's fascination with rolling in all the exciting new faeces of all the exciting new local wildlife, the supposed depredations of the local pack of coyotes (40-60lb??? The tracks were large enough. Recently killed a foal? The Pirate is on the case with her pink .22lr Cricket Rifle), strange smells that are like the "Fresh Earth" cover scents some people think are useful for deer hunting arising from the Lovecraftian pit more formally known as "the Michigan basement," long treks (40minutes plus) to church and martial arts classes with late bedtimes for both Pirate and Princess, and the extrication from the "short term lease."

We also had an interesting discovery that the river appears to be altering its channel and may suddenly separate about 8 acres from our 46.7. Princess and Pirate were devastated at the idea of losing 8 acres of worthless "swamp" that they never even knew we owned.  I put "swamp" in quotes because the granolas might not recognize that as a synonym for "wetlands". A few days later, though, a lawyer friend explained that this state follows the common law rule that accretions and erosions will slowly change boundaries, but if a river suddenly jumps its course you own on both sides of the new channel to the middle of the old channel. I'm cool as long as I can hunt and log the 8 acres of bottomland.

XaLynn and I are both working on our lists of stuff that has to be done, short - medium - long term. I think it will be cool to post them both at the same time to compare his & hers priorities. I doubt that she is going to place "build man cave and home office" sufficiently high.

On the good side, the awesome side, XaLynn and I spent our first morning doing devotions and prayers in the upstairs room with the roof deck and east facing windows watching the sunrise. When we started this, I told her it would be an adventure and that we'd be depending on God to see us through all of it, but especially the more interesting adventure parts.

Also on the awesome side, I took the Pirate hunting for the first time. Of course, her pink .22 rifle was unloaded, and she was really mad that we didn't kill at least 20 coyotes ("because they killed a foal, Daddy!!! Make them dead!") on her first time out. The Princess also wants them dead, but for other reasons that I'm not going into here. Notably the "worthless" (according to XaLynn) dog herded both the Princess and the Pirate away from the trail leading to the back fields right at the time the Princess noticed a pack of 5-6 coyotes or dogs or coydogs or whatever traveling through the brush way down. That's God's work, because even I will admit that the dog's first response to danger is bark then flee. The girls will be staying around the house unless they're with us until they're big enough to deal with wild dogs or coyotes. I'll let XaLynn write more on that later.