Fire and Furniture...

What are neighbors good for? A lot of things... including providing lots of free entertainment and recently, free furniture. Any way you look at it it's a lot of free, especially from Mike (our next door neighbor).

Mike has been great (and Evelyn, which is his lovely wife). He's provided tons of information about the goings on of Aberdeen and the plant life around us (as well as info on helicopters that the RAF uses and places he's been- including Florida and the place they filmed Fried Green Tomatoes). He is a wonderful man full of great stories and lively conversation. Sometimes it's hard to pull yourself away and you can stand there for hours hearing all about whatever he feels like talking about. It's been nice to have someone to talk to. He also makes tons of homemade wine from odd things. He's brought over two bottles for us to try (one strawberry and one blackberry) but he also makes some out of the local flowers (which I'll talk more about and add a picture later..) with lemon and orange, and also he makes some out of dandelions. I'm interested in trying them all and figuring out how to make wine out of weeds. It's pretty interesting.

Anyway... the other day we were bringing Cris and Tony home from the airport and there was a fire in the field across the road in the bush. The road was blocked by the fire truck and the whole street was out and about watching. I'll fill you in on the reason for the fire if you ask (it's pretty funny...) but I can't put it on here- I don't want to get anyone in trouble. The firemen didn't ask any questions about it so all is good.

Then today, we were getting ready to go to Costco to grab a few things and there was a van blocking the road. I walked over to Evelyn and Mike's house to see if they could maybe move it to the side and I found out why it was there. Evelyn's aunt had passed away and her family was delivering her furniture to their house. Evelyn didn't want it (they already have furniture) and was going to chop it all up and put it in the huge pile that we are saving up for Guy Fox day (remember remember the 5th of November). However, I quickly made it clear how crazy it was to do that (there's a lot of older furniture) and they started bringing over stuff to our house. So now we are the proud new owners of a really old wardrobe, vanity table (although they had already broken the mirror so it doesn't have one anymore), twin bed (the kind that moves up and down and vibrates if you want it to- way cool), two small bedside tables (they are in our bathrooms now), and a tv. Tomorrow they are bringing over a settee (think loveseat) and two fireside chairs. Rock on. I love free stuff. We could use the furniture since we had two empty rooms pretty much.

Lets see... tomorrow we are going to some castles I think, who knows what else.