Happy solstice! High point of the season for me, and today was a two party day. My sister has reached the point where a good b-day present for her is merging the blog style comments branch into ikiwiki and installing linux on yet another laptop. So we had a little installation party with cake and Carcassonne. Except for wireless it was a success. Since I outsourced the other present to the UK, perhaps someone can sort out Christmas by telling me how to get Intel 5100 wireless working in Debian? ;-)

At the solstice party tonight, all three of the recent inhabitants of the bottom of Wortroot washed up on the porch, each of us looking a bit scraggly (especially the current resident). Jeremy told this story:

His friend decided to drive his SUV down the driveway to the farm, without consulting with him first. (This driveway was blasted out of the hillside by amateurs, using dynamite, in an earlier era of life at the farm. It has been basically unmaintained since, progressively more eroded and rutted, and over the last 20 years only the Yellow Truck (with no brakes) has had free reign over it.)

He got down the hill ok, and he passed the small field, and then he got to the narrow place. (Where the creek is eroding the driveway away faster than we can cut into the hill to widen it.) And Jeremey told him to stop, but he kept on going.. sliding right off the driveway, and rolling the SUV into the creek.

(The creek here is, now that I think of it, exactly as wide as your average SUV is tall, and in a gully exactly as deep as your average SUV is wide. It must have fit perfectly.)

They tried winching it out. That didn't work. They didn't even think to ask neighbor Jimmie to once again haul a vehicle up the driveway. His tractor couldn't have gotten this one out. They had to rent a "small backhoe on treads, like a tank" to do the job.

Ok, maybe you have to have lived there to appreciate this. :-)