Welcome Back!

For Christmas of 2012 we had an addition to our family, a wonderful pig!  Fisher Hobbs came to join our family!  A talented, meteorological pig, Mr. Hobbs was useful as well as decorative.  Unfortunately, the weather he was so good at reporting was also rather hard on him.  After only a year outside decorating the yard and reporting the weather, his finish was really showing some wear.  So when fall came around, in order to protect his finish, he went in the basement so it wouldn't get any worse.  That was quite the effort; he is made of cement, you will recall.  So, because he was so heavy, it got really easy to just leave him down there; hauling that little pig up those stairs was quite the effort.  The little porker is roughly 17" x 13" x 8" but in that compact shape he weighs 62 pounds.  Actually, I was surprised that was all.  It felt like more than that to me.  But the scale said only 62 pounds.  I'm not sure what kind of paint Erdbeere used when she first painted him but he was looking pretty sad when we brought him in.    

 Definitely showing some wear.   

But a close inspection showed it was just peeling and flaking paint, not damage to the cement.  So, after all these years, I decided it was time to spruce him up and get him back outside.  Ugh.  That meant getting serious about getting him back up those stairs.  Unfortunately, our summer last year ended up a little crazy and the oinker never made it up the stairs that year.  Had to wait until the next summer, this summer.

The first step was hauling the 62 pound porker back up the stairs.

It was actually Brombeere who brought Mr. Hobbs back up the stairs.  We had been talking about it one morning and then she suddenly appeared with him in the kitchen.  I was a little surprised.  

Once upstairs, he found a new purpose: holding down a rug we had on the deck.  The wind was forever trying to lift and move the rug across the deck but Mr. Hobbs put an end to that.  The pig's got skills!

Mr. Hobbs spent the rest of the summer on the deck, doing a mighty fine job of holding that rug down and keeping it mostly in place.  Before he went to work the wind actually blew the rug clear off the deck a time or two.  But never again, as long as Mr. Hobbs was on the job.

Another thing Mr. Hobbs did, as he was busy holding down the rug, was constantly catch our attention.  After so many years of having a dog around and letting them out the back door for potty breaks, we kept seeing Mr. Hobbs, as we'd walk through the kitchen, standing by the door.  It kept making us think we needed to let the dog back in; that's just how all the dogs have always done it: stand by the back door and wait.

Mr. Hobbs didn't get his make-over this year.  We've already had snow and the temperatures are low enough now that nobody wants to spend the time outside painting in the cold.  Besides, most paint likes to be applied when it's warmer.

The snow melted off pretty quick but still, winter has arrived and warm days would be unexpected at this point. While he will spend the winter outdoors, faithfully reporting the weather, he will not get painted this year.  That will have to wait until next year after it gets warm again.  Good thing he's a patient little pig.