The Many (Surprising) Sides of Stump

Nature is starting to flex its muscle a little bit. After a full week of cloudy/windy/warm/mediocre-in-every-way weather, it's finally starting to look like Alaska outside. Its down to 2 degrees, and the sky was really clear all day, as it usually is in the coldest part of winter.

Sancho could somehow sense that things were different, and he was unusually placid in the morning. I stepped out to reignite the war with the hot tub, which if you will recall from yesterday's events, had been sidetracked into a skirmish with a spigot on the south side of the house. Stump had suggested that "spirits were taking the gruelies", which I immediately discounted as another example of the crazy alien babble that Stump regularly allows to escape her mouth. I got in touch with the Old Man (he was on a boat halfway between Maui and Lanai, with his leg up on the railing at the front, much like George Washington crossing the Delaware. In one hand he held the phone, calmly explaining how to solve my problem, and in the other he held a harpoon, scanning the horizon for sign of whale in the hopes of making a kill in the failing light, so the starving elders of the village might have some comfort), and he told me that Stump was quite correct. There is a diminutive banshee that lives inside that spigot. You have to sucker punch it in the face with a pipe cleaner before the water will flow. This is an artistic rendering of a banshee.



This information was so surprising I had to go ask Stump how it was she knew all this about the spigot. Turns out, Stump is a postgraduate art student! How wacky is that? I tell ya what, life is stranger than fiction sometimes. Here are two of Stump's pictures:



We ended up spending most of the day discussing Sancho. We were worried that we had become too close to him, and if that was true, was it us that had lost our humanity? (I guess in Stump's case, her stumpiness) Or had Sancho lost his dogness? We had just reached the peak of intellectual discovery only possible between two minds honed with the most precise knowledge when Sancho farted and pawed the door to go outside. We realized that we are going crazy, and three degree weather or not, need to get out more. So we went for a walk. Here are some photos from the daily journey. Notice the jet contrail reflecting the sunset in the first photo. The moon is just starting to make a comeback after being noticeably absent for so long.