3-4-08

When I didn’t recognize a line he quoted from Alien (a movie I saw maybe once, and was probably not paying that much attention when I did), Fred said these words:

“My vast intellect is wasted on you.”

The pigs reported that he tasted “Too humany.”

 

Yesterday was bright and sunny and in the 70s, and about midmorning, after I’d taken some food (salad, carrots, grapes, bagel) out to the pigs, and after I’d filled the bird feeders and checked for eggs, I was walking across the back yard and I looked down at Sugarbutt, who was following me, and I said “It’s awfully windy out. It’d be a good day to do laundry!”

So I came inside and tossed a load of clothes in the washer.

An hour later, when the clothes were done washing, I took them outside to hang them on the clothesline, and that is when I realized that there was a shitload of paper and styrofoam blowing around our property and the property of the next two houses over. Recently, trucks for a local cable company have begun parking in the parking lot of the little strip mall across the street and down a little way. When I’d gone out to check the mail earlier, I’d noticed that some boxes with the cable company’s name emblazoned across them had started to blow across the land next to the strip mall parking lot. Apparently the boxes and styrofoam and paper had continued their journey across the road and onto our property.

I glanced across the street and saw that a man in a cable man uniform (you know the outfit I’m talking about) had come out and was picking the stuff off the land next to the parking lot. I figured that once he’d finished with that, he’d continue across the street and pick up the rest of his shit.

When I finished hanging out the clothes, the man in the cable man uniform was gone. And there was still shit all over our property and the property of the next two houses over.

I was a tad peeved. I started stomping around the property closest to the back yard picking up cable company work orders, pieces of styrofoam, plastic bags. When my arms were full, I stomped inside to get a garbage bag so that I could continue the cleanup. Fred happened to call at just that moment (to find out what the pigs were doing, naturally), and I bitched and ranted and raved to him. He told me to stop picking the shit up and sit tight while he made a phone call.

Unlike his wife, Fred does not back down from make phone calls wherein he says “Please come pick up your shit, thx.” He is, after all, the son of the man who called to complain that his trash had not been picked up on trash day and when the trash people were all “::Shrug::, I don’t know what to tell you! You gotta wait ’til next trash day!” he responded by saying “You come get this trash within the hour, or it’s going to be all over the mayor’s lawn, and you can explain to HER why that is.” (PS: Trash was gone in ten minutes.)

So he called and they were all apologetic (and freaked out when he said that he was holding a “receipt” – I myself would have referred to it as a “work order”, but same difference, I s’pose) and swore they’d send someone out to pick it all up.

Four hours later when he got home from work, no one had shown up to pick up the shit. He called and gave them hell again, and they promised they’d send someone out to take care of it. As of this morning, no one had bothered to show up, and most of the trash blew through our property onto the nursery property behind us.

The older I get, the less tolerance I have for fucking littering. I tossed my share of fast food cups out of car windows when I was a kid, but GODDAMN it pisses me off to drive down the highway to Closeville and see the median all shitted up with garbage. When we lived in Madison, there was an old man who’d walk up and down a nearby big road, picking up garbage. I can totally see myself getting fed up with all the fucking litter and spending my days walking up and down the median of the highway picking shit up.

Now there’s a career goal.

 

The pigs are doing well. Fred took down the hog panels on Sunday so they could have access to their entire pig yard (you keep them in a small area at first so they know where “home” is, apparently) and they haven’t gone too far from their shelter. Yesterday morning I saw neither hide nor hair of them until after 9. They came out, rooted around and ate for a while. When I went out there at 10:30, they’d gone back into the shelter for a nap.

It’s a rough life, I’m telling you.

I took them some leftover salad, grapes, carrots, and a bagel and put it in their food… dish. Trough, I guess? I spoke and called to them, and eventually the little one lifted his head up, sniffed, and said “We are napping, go away pls.” and burrowed back under the straw.

Ingrates.

For dinner we had Fred’s favorite meal of all time – scrambled eggs and homefries (cubed potatoes and onions, potatoes precooked in the microwave for 5 minutes before being cooked in a pan) – and because I’m no dummy I made extra homefries, and after dinner we made the rounds, gave the Girlz some leftover scrambled eggs, and took the rest of the leftovers out to the pigs.

Earlier, when he’d gotten home from work, Fred had convinced the little one to take a bagel out of his hand, so he tried to get him to take an english muffin out of his hand, but I think having both of us right there made them nervous, so we gave up on that and just dumped the leftover scrambled eggs and homefries in their food bowl. I can report that the leftovers were a big, big hit with the pigs. They both bellied right up and ate every last bit we’d given them.

These pigs are probably going to be the happiest, most well-fed pigs in the area. Hopefully their happiness will only make them that much more tasty.

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Miz Poo in the sun.

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Previously
2007: No entry.
2006: No entry.
2005: Dumbass things I did yesterday.
2004: I think I need to go back to high school.
2003: “Well, good luck to Daddy on that,” I said.
2002: (You just shut up)
2001: No entry.
2000: No entry.