Good lord, what a weekend. I got up early Saturday morning because I was covering for the Saturday morning cleaner at the pet store. I got there to find that there was only one cage of kittens – there’s been an upper respiratory infection issue going around with the cats at the pet store, so the shelter manager decided that the kittens needed to be cleared out of there (going to foster homes to be treated with the proper medication), and the woman taking the last cage of kittens hadn’t picked them up yet. So I spent some extra time with those kittens and cleaned out their cage and a couple of the empty ones that needed it, and was out of there in about an hour.
I stopped by the grocery store on the way home to pick up the few items we needed, then I got home and ate breakfast, did a few things around the house, and then Fred and I loaded up the car with a pet carrier (just in case), and headed for Lacon Trade Days. Lacon Trade Days is basically just a big outdoor flea market where they sell just about anything you can imagine.
Fred has gotten it into his head that we need to have a turkey, no I mean we NEED TO HAVE A TURKEY RIGHT NOW, despite the fact that we have nowhere to put a turkey. We intend to put a turkey yard where the garden is right now (we’ll be moving the garden spot out to the back forty), but instead of waiting until we have a place all set up for turkeys and THEN going to get a turkey, Fred is a man on a mission and HE WANTS A TURKEY.
“Where do you plan to put this turkey?” I ask whenever he brings it up.
“We’ll put it with the chickens!” he says.
“No we won’t,” I say. I’m adamant that I don’t want to just throw a turkey in with the chickens because (1) That will stress them out and I DO NOT WANT MY GIRLS STRESSED, and (2) Who the hell knows what kind of illness a new bird might introduce to the flock?
Fred just shrugs me off and tells me, basically, that he’ll worry about that when he has to worry about that.
So we got to Lacon and we made a pretense of checking out the booths along the way for a few minutes, but we pretty quickly gave up and made a beeline for the best part of Lacon Trade Days, the back part where the animals are kept. There were a lot of chickens, a lot of bantam chickens (what’s the point of a bantam? They lay teeny eggs and they don’t provide a lot of meat. They sure are cute, though.), a lot of kittens and puppies, but no turkeys. Not a one!
In the end, we bought a couple of boxes of cookies for the pigs and then headed home. We took the scenic route home which took us by an antique store and so we stopped and went inside to browse and we determined quickly that it was pretty overpriced and had a few scary-ass items.
I couldn’t help myself, I had to go back several times and look at this picture. I don’t know if it’s the horribly rendered faces, the way the dog is about to fall off the swing but apparently doesn’t care, or the huge calves on grandma, but it just really boggles the mind.
I ended up buying a set of six small glass bowls. We have some small glass bowls that we use all the time for various things when a regular-sized bowl is bigger than we need, and you can’t have too many small glass bowls, I always say.
We stopped for lunch and then headed for home. It was kind of overcast and drizzly out and Fred had no pressing tasks, so he watched some TV, snoozed, and surfed the web. I went upstairs where I lay on the bed with Kara, Zoe, and Kaylee, read for a long time, then snoozed for half an hour or so. Then I read some more, and eventually made my way back downstairs.
We watched The Ladykillers that evening, and I cross-stitched for the first time in a LONG time, and it was just generally a good day.
Sunday morning I slept in ’til almost 6:00 (seriously, that’s the latest I’ve slept in ages) and was awakened by a loud crash from downstairs. When I got down the stairs to see what had happened, it turned out that Stinkerbelle had somehow knocked all the shit off the mantel in the front room, including shattering the small milk bottle I’d been using as a vase for a set of fake sunflowers.
Fred cleaned that up, while I went back upstairs to take my shower. I got a load of laundry going after, hung it out to dry, started a second load, and then Fred and I hit the road.
This time we were headed to Dog Days Flea Market in Tennessee, the same place where we got the pigs last weekend. This time we were on the lookout for cheap watermelon for the chickens (those birds can strip a watermelon to the skin in a matter of hours) and, of course, turkeys.
We found the watermelon, we found the turkeys, but in the end we didn’t buy the turkeys. Instead, we bought something else.
Yes, more chickens. Seven Rhode Island Reds (we really, really like the Rhode Island Reds; they’re curious and friendly and docile and grow to be pretty big), one Ameraucana, and just for shits and giggles, one Silkie. They’re about a week old, cost $1.50 each, and are currently residing in the brooder in the garage.
And yes, we’ve got another twenty eggs in the incubator that should be hatching around the end of the week.
I think we might be chicken hoarders.
The rest of Sunday was pretty low-key. I finally got around to cooking my tomato puree down into tomato sauce. I finally bottled several quarts of the Family Secret Tomato Sauce a few weeks ago and we gave it a try for dinner Friday. It was okay, but the fact that you have to add lemon juice to the sauce before canning it adds a flavor to the sauce that neither of us particularly cares for. I decided that I’d just make tomato sauce out of my tomato puree, put it in the freezer, and we’d use the tomato sauce to make spaghetti sauce (or whatever) when we needed it. I ended up with 10 quarts of tomato sauce in the freezer, which is not particularly good for an entire summer’s worth of tomatoes, but considering that we didn’t get nearly as many tomatoes this summer as I would have liked (story of my life), it’s not bad.
Truth be told, we don’t use THAT much tomato sauce in the course of everyday eating, anyway.
I got the laundry put away, vacuumed the house, we ate a late lunch/ early dinner consisting solely of foods grown here at Crooked Acres, and Fred began preparing for next year’s garden by tilling a patch of land in the back forty near the pig yard.
Saturday’s overcast, drizzly weather was followed by a lovely cool, foggy Sunday morning. The fog burned off by mid-morning, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky for the rest of the day.
I’ll take a few more weeks of that weather, please.
Lately, Kara, Zoe, and Kaylee have been screaming to be let out of the kitten room earlier and earlier, which means I have to get up earlier and earlier to let them out. I decided Friday night to just leave them out and see how it went. I figured that if there was a lot of fighting or if they kept me up all night, I’d just go back to putting them in the room at night.
It’s been three nights, and so far so good. Zoe likes to curl up behind my knees and sleep for at least part of the night. Kara comes up and checks in with me three or four times a night – sniffs at my head, waits for me to pet her, and off she goes. I have no idea what Kaylee does with herself at night, maybe she sneaks downstairs and snuggles with Spanky, who knows? They did race around for a while in the middle of the night Saturday night, but not for too long, and they didn’t keep me awake so I’m going to continue letting them have 24/7 access to the rest of the house. After three nights of freedom, I have a feeling they’d object strongly to being locked up again, anyway.
I also stopped the morning Yummin’! Time! and am continuing with the evening Yummin’! Time! for the time being.
Smilin’ Joe, in the back yard.
Previously
2007: No entry.
2006: I think that “Proven to be beneficial to livers” should be Fred’s new tagline.
2005: Give me some of that, Barbara Bush, you ignoramus.
2004: No entry.
2003: Because believe it or not, it never once occurred to me that the Walton family was comprised of hillbillies.
2002: Look, I drink a gallon of water a day. I need to know that I can pee when I need to, so stop rolling your eyes at me.
2001: No entry.
2000: Can I tell you how much I loathe Bret Easton Ellis?