In my last blog, I got us up to Lefors, now to continue the saga.

When we arrived in Pampa, we picked up a car for $500. The trouble, as we discovered the next day, had to do with an electrical glitch due to the worst splicing of a battery cable I have ever seen. To top it off, the splice was uninsulated, so we took care of that right away.

We got in Lefors the following morning, holding off the actual move another day, as we knew we would be sleeping on an inflatable mattress on the floor until further notice, and decided that real beds for an extra night would not hurt. When we arrived, we saw the house, a very nice and humble one story house well out of the flood plain. We went inside, and liked what we saw. It was much bigger on the inside than it looked on the outside, with a living room and LARGE master bedroom at one end, and three bedrooms and a bathroom staggered down the hall towards the dining room and kitchen areas (when we get online FT, I'll try to drum up some pictures). Our landlord invited us to lunch at the senior center, where we met many of the townsfolk (it, like many rural towns in this part of the country, has a significant elderly population). We headed back, and on the way, the girls enumerated how they intended to divide the bedrooms.

Since the house had not been lived in for years, our master plan was to move what we had into the living room and master bedroom and  clean our way towards the other end of the house. There was no stove and fridge, so for the moment, a large ice chest and a two burner hot plate served those purposes. A vanity in the master bedroom was to serve as our temporary kitchen counter.

We found a couple chairs left around the house so that my wife and I didn't have to sit on the floor the entire time; she was as relieved about this as I was.

That night, I had the foresight to buy an inexpensive battery charger to help jump the car, and found it to be very essential the following morning. We had scheduled our gas and water to be turned on at 1 pm, and needed for my wife to be at the house for that, while I ran some general errands to get set up.

Ok, this was the boring stretch, but consider it essential background materials. I'll get to more on our getting established and the people of Lefors in future blogs. As you can tell, my online time is sketchy, but fortunately, there's usually a free computer at the library when I need it, and I always have time to get online whenever the paper's running late (which is frequently, unfortunately), as our paper route is our chief remunerative employment at this time.

signing off,

Gideon MacLeish