Happy birthday, baby!
Friday night a man and his daughter or granddaughter stopped by to buy some eggs and ask about buying chickens. We have recently begun talking about selling chickens because have I mentioned we have something like 150 chickens and more hens going broody every day? So Friday evening we put out a “chickens for sale” sign. By the time these people stopped by, we’d brought the signs in and Fred was in the shower when they knocked on the door.
I HATE HAVING TO DEAL WITH STRANGERS, HAVE I MENTIONED THIS? When the knock on the door came, I ran into the bathroom and hissed at him to MOVE HIS ASS, but he apparently felt the need to take a long and luxurious shower, so I answered the door. The daughter/ granddaughter was the English-speaker, and she asked for two dozen eggs. I went and got them, handed them over, and then she asked for another dozen. When I brought that dozen out, she handed over the money and then asked about chickens for sale. I told her to hold on, that I’d get my husband, and then I went into the bathroom where Fred was STILL NOT DONE WITH HIS SHOWER and I hissed “Good christ, what are you, a teenage girl? GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE SHOWER AND GO DEAL WITH THESE PEOPLE!”
It turned out that the older gentleman wanted a chicken for stewing, he and Fred (with the daughter/ granddaughter translating) discussed what we had available, and left it that he’d stop by Sunday morning around 8 to get one of the roosters.
We had a pretty relaxing, uneventful weekend, which is just the way we like it. The people who came and bought eggs for hatching and the rooster from us last week had an incident involving a cat and the eggs breaking, so they came back and bought another dozen (at a discount). A few days later, she emailed Fred and told him that the rooster (who they’ve named Furlough, since if they hadn’t bought him, he was headed for freezer camp this weekend) had come up on their porch. She heard him out there, and opened the door to see what he was doing – and he strutted inside the house and hopped up on her husband’s lap!
Fred, being a freak, began worrying that the rooster was lonely (they have hens, but they’re being responsible chicken owners (unlike US) and keeping him separate from their hens for a few weeks just in case), and in the end he offered them a couple of our hens in exchange for a couple of cuttings from their weeping willow tree.
They agreed, and made plans to stop by Saturday morning.
Before I got up Saturday morning, Fred went out and chose two hens, then put them in the back yard so they’d be easy to catch when Marty and Loretta (not their real names) showed up. Now, I know y’all know that the cats have access to our back yard through the cat door. And longtime readers will remember that our original 12 chickens started off with regular access to the back yard, so our cats had been around chickens, and those chickens had been around the cats.
These hens, however, had never been around the cats and Kara had never been around chickens. The hens reaction to Kara was pretty much the same as Kara’s reaction to the hens – “What the hell is THAT?”
Marty and Loretta showed up just as I was sitting down to breakfast, so I ate and then went out to chat. Fred had already caught the hens and they’d put them in a box (I missed the show on that, so I’m not sure how much trouble the hens gave Fred. I prefer to believe he had to chase them around a lot.) We stood around and chatted for half an hour or so, and at one point the conversation lagged, and it was a comfortable silence as we all stood and gazed at the momma chickens and their babies in the maternity chicken yard.
“Heh,” Fred said suddenly. “This is one of those long, uncomfortable silences, huh?”
We stared at him.
“Not really,” I finally said, “I think we were all just watching the chickens…”
He babbled something about how silences make him uncomfortable so he feels the need to fill them with talk. Or something. I don’t know exactly what he said, I was watching the chickens.
We talked a while longer, and then they headed home with their new hens and we puttered around the house.
Around noon, Fred asked if I wanted to go to the movies, and I had my boots on and was in the car before the sentence was completely out of his mouth. I like to go to the movies – Fred rarely does. In fact, we usually go see about one movie a year together, and I figured this would be it.
We decided to go see Terminator Salvation, but after some consideration (and given that Terminator Salvation had just opened and thus was guaranteed to be packed), we decided to go see Star Trek instead. Since we had some time to kill, we stopped by the bakery thrift store to pick up some bread ($1.30 a loaf for whole wheat bread!), swung by Walgreen’s to pick up some candy for the movie, and then went to the mall. We basically walked from one end of the mall to the other and back again, just killing time ’til it was almost time for the movie to start.
When Fred was getting our tickets, the lady behind the counter asked if we had a Gold Crown Membership (or whatever the hell it’s called) and Fred said no, but then I said “Yes we do! Wait!” and dug it out of my purse. My membership card got us a free small popcorn, so despite Fred rolling his eyes at my excitement, we got the small popcorn and went into the theater.
(I only ate a few bites of the popcorn and brought the rest home for the pigs and they thought it was the best! thing! ever! But then, they have that opinion on just about every food in existence.)
The movie, I’ve gotta say, was pretty good. Just before it started, a row of geeks sat down in the row right behind us and snickered inappropriately through the entire movie (I say “inappropriately”, but I guess they were likely snickering at dorky inside jokes), but it was still a good movie and I recommend it, even if you’re not a Star Trek fan (I’m not).
When the movie was over, we decided to go for dinner at Chili’s. I realized, glancing at my phone, that I’d missed three calls, and since that’s more calls than I usually get on my cell phone in the course of two hours, I called and listened to the voice mails. It was the shelter manager – her first call was to ask if I could possibly take four newborn baby kittens (their mother basically gave birth and then got hit by a car, I think), her second call was to let me know that she’d found someone else to take them (I shook my fist at the sky and howled “Nooooooo!” when I heard that one), and her third call was to ask me to give her a call.
I called her, and she reiterated that someone else was taking the newborns, but she had some older kittens that needed a foster home and would I be interested? I told her I could take them, and she said she’d let me know, but that likely I could pick them up at the vet on Tuesday after they were tested. So later today, we may have more fosters!
We came home and settled down in front of the TV for the evening and that was about it for Saturday.
We did even less on Sunday. It was raining again – I’m not complaining about the rain, though, because at least it’s not been constant, and it’s not torrential like it was for most of March and April and part of May – so Fred sat around bored and I made some blueberry oat bran muffins and cleaned and organized the kitchen. Fred had gone out to the big coop at 5:30, grabbed up the rooster that the guy who’d stopped by Friday evening was going to buy, and put him in a cage so he wouldn’t have to chase him down when the guy stopped by.
8:00 came and went, 9:00 came and went, and when the guy who was supposedly going to buy the rooster hadn’t shown up by 10:00, Fred set the rooster free, and we went to the feed store where we buy some of our cat food. We took a leisurely drive home, then when we got home I did more rearranging of the kitchen and went through the house putting stuff away.
At one point in the afternoon, the rain stopped and the sun came out, so Fred went out and started cleaning out the brooder in the garage, then asked if I could come out and give him a hand when I was done with what I was doing. I went out a few minutes later, and we rearranged a lot of the crap in the upstairs of the garage, then he got the brooder up there.
Now that the littlest chickens are out of the garage (they’ve been moved to the smallest coop) and the brooder is cleaned and put away, Fred really has no excuse to not start staining the cabinet we had made for the kitchen. I sure would like to get the damn thing inside the house.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BABY, NOW GO STAIN THE GODDAMN CABINET!
I don’t think we got any real rain Monday morning, though it was gray and overcast. I slept in ’til after 7 (!), and then Fred and I decided to get out of the house to go to the flea market in Tennessee. We took my car instead of the truck, knowing that if we took the truck we’d buy something we didn’t need (“Oh look, more chickens! Don’t we need chickens?”), and we also deliberately didn’t take any animal carriers with us either, despite the fact that Fred thinks we need turkeys.
(We do plan to get turkeys at some point, just not until we have a lot fewer chickens.)
We were gone for a couple of hours, and on the way home we stopped to get a few groceries and hit the movie store. The pickings were slim at the movie store, but we found a few things to rent, and headed home.
Naturally, since we were both prepared to pile up on the couch and watch TV for the rest of the day, the weather turned nice. Fred puttered around outside, worked in the garden, and did other things I didn’t pay attention to. I puttered around the house, did laundry, cleaned the kitchen, and cleaned out and straightened the pantry in preparation for the day when the cabinet will be stained and in its rightful place in my kitchen.
The weather worsened mid-afternoon, so Fred came inside and we were both sitting at our computers when we heard what sounded like a shotgun blast. A bolt of lightning hit very close to the house and fried the cat fence – we were going toward the back door to see if any trees had been hit when I spied a small piece of the transformer laying in the middle of the laundry room next to a bottle of soda. That thing came apart so hard that it knocked over a full two-liter bottle of soda when the piece of the transformer went flying.
Luckily, we happened to have a replacement for it, so Fred got it up and running, then I shut down my computer and unplugged it, and made him shut his down too (he scoffed “Lightning’s not going to strike twice!”, but I haven’t backed my shit up in ages, so I wasn’t willing to take the chance).
While the storm finished up, we went into the living room and watched Awkward Emo Girls with Stilted Dialogue and the Tortured Not-All-That-Good-Looking (really, what the hell are those teenage girls going ON about?) Is-That-Sweat-Oh-I-See-You’re-Glittering-in-The-Sun-Who-Was-In-Charge-Of-Special-Effects-THAT-Day? Vampires Who Love Them Twilight.
I went into the movie knowing it would be no great tour de force, and I was right, but I’ve gotta say – we tried watching Choke earlier in the day, got 45 minutes in, and turned it off. At least I was able to sit through all of Twilight, even if it was just ’cause I was waiting for certain things to happen (the stopping of the runaway vehicle, the glittering, the baseball game. Fred would like to know – if the vampires could run fast enough to catch a ball like half a mile away, why are they bothering with a regulation-size field?).
A little while into the movie, we decided that the storm was over, so Fred plugged all his computer-related stuff back in so he could look at the cast list, which is when we discovered the the wireless router had gotten fried in the same lightning blast that killed the cat fence transformer. We watched the movie ’til almost 8, went out and put the chickens up, then went to Wal-Mart and got a new router. I finished watching Twilight while Fred hooked up the router and then he joined me for about the last ten minutes of the movie.
He took today off, but the weather looks like it’ll be gray and overcast all day and we rented Rob Roy, so I suspect most of the day will be spent puttering around the house before we end up on the couch to watch the movie.
Previously
2008: No entry.
2007: No entry.
2006: He’s such a liar.
2005: But by the time I was about three words in to the text message to the spud, I was using “u” and “2″ and “gd” with abandon, and it STILL took me 4-fckng-eva 2 get th gd msg typd n & snt.
2004: I started to answer her, when I realized to my horror that Fred was leaning forward, CUPPING HIS HAND TO HIS EAR to illustrate that he hadn’t heard what she said.
2003: “I breathe oxygen!”
“Me too!”
2002: No entry.
2001: No entry.
2000: Our first trip to G’burg.