A little help from my friends.

Al Michaels has volunteered the use of his farm and cattle trailer for the final hours of the pig - which will be much easier than trying to rig something up at our place. Tammy Michaels is making a cake, and bringing a vat of hot German potato salad (and a small batch of the vegetarian version for me). And Tammy actually planted an entire extra garden of corn so she could bring it to the party! (Okay, after our summer drought, the corn won't actually make it in time - but I'm in awe of the generosity and forethought.) I just had to give them a shout-out for all their help.


While cleaning the coop and burning trash yesterday - my labor on Labor Day - I had the inspiration to move the tent down to the back of the property, under the Grandmother Oak. I paced it off and am sure that we have a nice flat 40 x 30 space down there. That puts us a field's width closer to the path down to the Meadow Valley chapel, and puts us adjacent to the bonfire, and opens up the upper field for parking - which was going to be a major headache, with cars relegated to the lawns of several generous neighbors. The only catch will be electricity. We will have electric lights for the tent, and we'll need power for the Nesco roasters and coffee maker and entertainment stuff. I told Rick I wanted to move things down, and he threw up his hands at the thought of trying to get 50 amps of power down there. But I know my sweetie - he'll walk away grumbling, and then have a beautiful solution worked out two days later. :)


Meanwhile, Dan is on the train and should be here in 30 hours or so, and Alicia might just make it after all. And I've got table cloths and napkins and all that stuff staged and ready as soon as the tent & tables get here on Thursday. We've confirmed delivery of the port-a-john. I'll have to check with Rick to see when the roaster will be here. And apparently I need to pick up 8 bags of charcoal for the roaster, which somehow hadn't occurred to me. And 2 lbs of butter for the tables. And figure out what to do about salt & pepper - maybe just have a couple of them on the table by the food? And, and, and . . .


Okay, I'm going to just relax and think peaceful thoughts. It's all going to work out beautifully, because this is not a demanding group and we're all going to enjoy ourselves no matter what.