12/17/09 – Thursday

Challenger’s House is having a raffle! Check out the great prizes above. The drawing will be on Sun December 20th. Tickets are $5 for 1 or $10 for 3 – you can call Challenger’s House (256.420.5995) and buy your raffle tickets that way.

The money, of course, goes to a very good cause!

 

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Much in the way all the food blogs were annoying me by featuring pumpkin-based recipes in November, they seem to be featuring gingerbread-based recipes this month and GUESS WHO DOESN’T LIKE GINGERBREAD?

(I swear to you, I am NOT a picky eater!)

At least I’m slowly catching up on my blog reading – if I click on a food blog entry and see that the title involves gingerbread, I just click “mark as read” and keep on rollin’.

 

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I think I’ve mentioned before that I have a large number of Gmail addresses. One of them, which I thought to sign up for back when Gmail first came around, is robyn.anderson at Gmail.

(You may certainly feel free to email me there, but I check that email perhaps once a month, so don’t expect a speedy reply, if I ever send one.)

Every once in a while, some other Robyn Anderson has a moment of dumbassery and gives out my email address as hers. I had a flurry of emails last Fall from the classmates of a Robyn Anderson in Canada who was apparently a college student majoring in early education. I got copies of their projects, I got copied on discussions about study groups. It took about a month before it got through to all her classmates that I was not the Robyn Anderson they sought.

I have gotten statements from American Airlines regarding some Robyn Anderson in Texas and her frequent flier miles. I was able to LOG ON as her, but there was nothing very interesting going on, and I marked those emails as spam so I don’t see them any longer.

A couple of weeks ago, I got the following email:

Hi, sweetie–here is the phone number in our room: (deleted), room 1005. Hope you have a great week! Love you. Mom

If I didn’t LOATHE talking on the phone so very much, I might have called her, this other Robyn Anderson’s mother, and asked her to convey to her daughter that if she’s going to give out her email address, she needs to DOUBLE CHECK the fucking email address and make sure it’s the right one she’s giving out.

(Or maybe I’d call and say “Mom? It’s Robyn. I’m PREGNANT!” or “Mom? It’s Robyn. I just won the lottery!” or “Mom? It’s Robyn. I have 20 cats in my house right now!”)

I didn’t, though. I simply said I’m glad you made it, but you’re not my mother. 🙂

I think what I’m saying is that we Robyn Andersons? We’re a ditzy bunch.

 

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Yesterday, between making more crates for storage (I am a crate-making fool, indeed I am), I cleaned the garage (or rather, organized the piles of crap out there) and boiled chickens.

We are trying to get a handle on the chicken population – which is to say, we’re trying to reduce the number of chickens we have, and I personally would like it if we only had one chicken yard rather than the two we currently have. Fred, on the other hand, seems determined to make shutting up the chickens at night a 2-hour job. He was set on building another (small) coop and putting it in the back yard for the, as we call them, “misfits.” The “misfits” included Charlie with her crippled-up feet, the Crested Polish chickens, and the Silkies. Then he wanted to turn the blue coop (which is the smaller coop, if you’ve lost track) into the Black Copper Marans yard, to keep them separate from the other chickens, so we could sell their eggs since their fertile eggs sell for more than plain old mutt chicken eggs do.

Then, of course, we have the big-ass coop out in the back forty.

Currently, we have something like 40 chickens out in the back forty and another…20? Maybe? in the blue coop. We’re eventually going to go to an all Light Brahmas flock, because they get to be pretty big birds, and they are fairly tasty as well as pretty good layers (from what we can tell).

All this babbling is just to tell you that Fred processed 13 chickens on Sunday and I decided to can them. Of course, before I can can the meat, I have to cook it and then debone the chicken, and I prefer to cook the meat by boiling them, and 13 chickens is a lot to boil, so I spent all day boiling two chickens at a time in the kitchen. It took about two hours for each set of chickens (one in my huge pot, one in the dutch oven) to be done, so I’d take them out of the boiling water, put them in a bowl, and set the bowl in the fridge to cool so I could eventually debone them. Today, I’ll doing the actual canning.

My god, am I completely fascinating you, or what?

So mid-afternoon, I was standing in the kitchen, about to fish a chicken out of one of the pots, and Hydrox came lumbering in. The kittens like to come into the kitchen when I’m in there to howl at me because MY GOD THEY ARE ALWAYS STARVING WHY MUST I STARVE THEM TO DEATH? I circumvent the howling most mornings by giving them a bowl of chicken broth, and it generally takes them all day to finish off half a pint of chicken broth. They come in, start to howl, get sidetracked by the bowl of broth, and by the time they think to howl again, I’m out of the kitchen and there’s no one to howl at.

(This is my own homemade and canned chicken broth – it is literally water that a chicken has been boiled in, no salt added, no veggies added, just chickeny-tasting water. Except for Miz Poo, every cat in the house enjoys a slurp or two as the day goes on.)

Anyway, Hydrox came in to see if howling at me would net him any kind of food, and as he walked toward me, already howling, I fished the chicken out of the pot with two big serving spoons, and then I lost my grip on the chicken, and that damn chicken landed on the floor.

Hydrox stopped and stared, and I swear to you, I have never before seen a kitten’s face light up like that. It was as though every dream he’d ever had was suddenly coming true, and his stubby little legs were a BLUR as he tried his hardest to get to that chicken before I could grab it.

Luckily, I was faster than he was, but he was still kind of lucky because a few small pieces of chicken fell off as I lifted the carcass off the floor, and I let him have them.

And if you don’t think he spent the rest of the day following me around hoping that another chicken would magically fall from the sky, you know nothin’ about nothin’.

 

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The Cookies have recovered from their traumatic night at the vet’s and are alternately running around like their tails are on fire, and collapsing in heaps of sleepy cuteness.

I bought this toy, which you hang from a door, at Petsmart last weekend. It’s hanging on the closet door in the Cookie room (during the day, all the cats wander in and out of that room), and every once in a while I hear the sound of leaping kittens as they rediscover the toy hanging there.

Pouty Miss Pink.

This “being cute” business is exhausting work.

Violet and Gus.

Veruca and the hugest ears in the house.

Gus finds it important for all household members to be clean. Except those stinky little kittens; he figures they can take care of themselves.

 

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Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring
Banana phone
Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring
Banana phone
I’ve got this feeling, so appealing,
for us to get together and sing. Sing!

 

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Previously
2008: Yes, we only currently have about three beds for each cat. What’s your point?
2007: He really is a pretty chicken, and I look forward to seeing what his babies look like.
2006: No entry.
2005: No entry.
2004: Fred leaned down and SNIFFED MEESTER BOOGERS’ ASS AGAIN.
2003: And then we got to stand around while the woman, clearly not the sort who can walk and chew gum at the same time, fumbled with her credit card, NEVER ONCE PAUSING IN HER INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT CONVERSATION.
2002: Tell me, for I am clueless when it comes to these things.
2001: Like I said, if you’re going to mix lights, go all the way, people.
2000: No entry.