It’s that time of year! If you want a holiday card from Crooked Acres, go here and follow the directions. I will absolutely send cards to other countries. If you’d like to send me a card (definitely not required, but always appreciated), you can send it to PO Box 565, Madison, Alabama, 35758.
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I gotta know about the eggs and gravy too. Share a recipe, please? I have never ever heard of this before.
Though I’ve never made giblet gravy myself (I’ve never made any kind of gravy, actually, unless you consider opening a can to be “making” it), the recipe was probably along the lines of
this one. And it is really, REALLY good. Yeah, it’s got chunks of liver and stuff floating around in it. But that’s what makes it so good!
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Oh, and I’ve never not had giblet gravy when we have turkey. I didn’t know that everyone doesn’t have it.
I suspect it might be a Southern thing. I’d never heard of – let alone had – giblet gravy before I moved down here.
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You seem to get so much accomplished in a day. It seems you just get up and start doing what needs to be done! I can’t seem to do that anymore. Do you ever run out of energy, or decide, “Hey, I’m just going to take a short nap”, and wake up 2 hours later? You are like the energizer bunny!
I really am SO not the energizer bunny. I do roll out of bed and get the everyday stuff (litter boxes, cleaning up the kitchen) done, because if I just lay in bed and try to read or go back to sleep, the bossy bitch in the back of my head nags me “You really need to get those litter boxes cleaned out, you really need to get the laundry started, how long has it been since you vacuumed, anyway?!” and it drives me nuts. And many times I get up with the intention of cleaning the litter boxes and starting laundry (or whatever) and then going back to bed, but most of the time once I’m up, I’m up. With my old age comes the wisdom that if I don’t do it now, it’s just going to be a bigger pain in the ass to do it later, so it’s best to get it done and over with. I spend plenty of time surfing the web, reading, and watching TV during the day, believe you me. I haven’t taken a nap in quite some time, though – I tried Thanksgiving afternoon, but just couldn’t fall asleep. There’ll be time for napping when I’m dead! 🙂
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Had I been there, Fred would have needed a ‘sissy girl bitch’ jelly option.
The jalapeno jelly is the “sissy girl bitch” option – it’s not in the slightest bit hot, and given that I’m very sensitive to spicy stuff, you can take that to the bank!
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You don’t really write too much about how you are dealing with life without the Spud. Are you at the point where you are used to her being gone, or do you find yourself missing her like crazy at times? Actually, that’s how it’s been for me over the years with my own two daughters leaving home – sometimes I don’t even think about them for a day or so; other times I do miss them. (Until they show up at the door for a visit … then I realize how easily we have become accustomed to being empty-nesters!)
I think that the fact that the spud only lived here for a couple of months before she moved away makes it less strange that she’s not here. If we still lived in the other house, I imagine I’d be surprised every time I went upstairs and didn’t find her at her computer or in her room. I miss her a lot, but we text and email pretty regularly. Every now and then I’ll hear a creak from upstairs and think it’s her moving around, before I remember that, oh yeah – she’s probably moving around in her room, but her room is also 1,131 miles away, give or take. We’re definitely used to it just being the two of us here – the two of us plus 7 (plus 2, plus 4), that is – and we’ve certainly gotten into our own little routine.
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Is the spud ever coming home to visit???
Last I heard, she’s planning on coming down next summer before school starts. Y’all need to keep in mind that she’s not “away at school” and this is not “home” to her – the child has moved away permanently. She’s living with her father and stepmother, and she’s got a life. She’s got jobs, she’s got a boyfriend, and she’s 1,131 (give or take) miles away. It’s not like she can drive an hour or two, spend a day, and drive back. She can’t just pick up and be gone for a week or two – it takes planning. So yes, she’ll be back to visit.
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Why don’t you guys just buy a cow to save money on milk? You’ve got plenty of room, and she can join the other present and future animals on “the farm”.
Let’s do some math, shall we? All numbers are approximate:
1 cow: $600 (or 1 cow and 1 calf, around $1,000)
Fencing for the back forty: $1,000
Barn: $2,500
Electricity run out to the barn: $300
Total: $4,400 – $4,900
Given that we spend about $10 a month on milk, it would take about 36 years to recoup the initial costs of buying a cow and that doesn’t take into account the amount of money we’d need to spend on hay to feed the cow. It would probably be more cost-effective for us to buy a small middle eastern country to save on the amount of money we’re spending on gas.
I should add that we
are talking about getting a cow – or a cow and a calf – but for slaughtering and eating, not for milk. Beef: it’s what’s for dinner!
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We got a 9 month old male kitten yesterday, and because we didn’t really have a room to close him in, we had to introduce him to our two year old skittish female cat pretty much right away. The new kitty, Henry, was a stray until recently, so he is not used to having food regularly. Whenever we put out food, he snarfs all of it in one sitting. My female kitty, Hallie, we’ve always fed by keeping a bowl out for her to graze on in small amounts over the course of a day, as is her custom. Because of the new kitty, I’ve had to take her food away so that he won’t eat it all. Meanwhile, my poor Hallie hasn’t gotten any food. Have you encountered a situation like this with your cats, and if so, what did you do? We can easily deal with Hungry Henry by feeding him a few times a day, but I want to make sure Hallie eats too, and she is not a cat that eats a lot at once, and won’t eat food if you set it out for her- she has to go back to it in her own time. Any advice would be most appreciated!
I’m going to throw this one out to the readers, because I have no idea. I would have suggested that you take her in a room by herself at meal time and give her her own bowl of food, but since she’s a grazer rather than an all-at-one-time eater, that wouldn’t really work. Readers, do you have suggestions?
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I saw on Miz Poo’s Catster page that she does the same thing my Yuki does. She drags her fuzzy fishing pole through the house and howls. What is it about that action that makes it some kind of maternal thing?
I have no idea on earth what causes that behavior, but good lord, when Miz Poo gets going, I want to kill her after the first 45 minutes of howling. What I want to know is this: Does anyone have a male cat who drags a toy through the house while making that keening noise, or is it only females?
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Have you ever seen a cat want some sort of food so bad that it made them gag? My cat Monkey apparently salivates at the mention of whip cream, or the sight of a little red bowl, and starts gagging. At first I thought she had something stuck in her throat. But she does this everyday.
I have never heard of that! Very weird.
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Do you know what happened to the guy from novanotes.com? His site is still there so somebody’s paying for it to remain up but he hasn’t updated in over two years!
Oddly, I was just checking out his page recently and noticed that he hadn’t updated in a long time. I have no idea where he’s gone to. I think you should email him and ask what’s up. 🙂
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I wanted to ask you what company do you use for making your Christmas cards?
We used
Vista Print. Their prices are far and away the best I was able to find, I got my order quickly (ordered on Monday, received ’em on Friday, I think), the quality was excellent, and the cards are huge. If there’s a better place to get photo cards, I’d love to hear about it!
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We use a Pyrex measuring glass thing (the ginormous ones) for our gravy. Do you think that’s white trash? Hee!
You say “white trash” like it’s a bad thing. What’s sad is that I don’t even
have a ginormous Pyrex measuring cup, just one single two-cup measuring cup. Clearly I need to go shopping!
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Frozen milk?! OhhhEmmmmGeeee!!! You are amazing!!! I never even thought you could do that Duh. It always seems that no matter how small of a container I buy, we only use 1/2 of it before it goes bad. Do you freeze it in the container or do you measure it out say like by the cup so you can just thaw what you need?
Don’t be too impressed with me – I only know you can freeze milk because my sister told me at some point in the past. You can freeze it in the container (but you need to pour some of it out so that the liquid has room to expand). I don’t think it would hurt anything to freeze it in single portions, either – whatever works for you!
And by the way, several people mentioned that the milk is fine for drinking once it’s been thawed out. I was under the impression that it was kind of grainy (for lack of a better word), but apparently not. Given that I never drink milk, you can understand how I didn’t know that!
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I just discovered that you can cook a turkey from frozen! Did you know this? Did everyone but me know this?? I had always been told to thaw first!
I had NO idea you could do that, but I guess it makes sense, since you can cook most meat from a frozen state. I’ve always worried about thawing the turkey before cooking, too – I may try cooking the extra turkey I got when I got the Thanksgiving turkey, and see how it turns out.
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You used to have an occasional cat video. Will you be doing that again soon?
I probably will – my issue is that I need to download something to make my camcorder work with my software, and I need to figure out what needs to be downloaded. I have stuff on the camcorder ready to be made into movies, it’s just a matter of doing it!
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Aren’t you doing Netflix?
We are. The problem is that we’re doing the 4 movies at a time Netflix, and I have two discs of The O.C. in the garage waiting for me to find my get-up-and-go and get out there and watch them while exercising. The other two discs I got from Netflix this week, one was Stephen Tobolowsky’s Birthday Party, and the other was Rescue Dawn, and I knew that with the long weekend we’d be watching more TV than we usually do (we start watching TV earlier on the weekends), so I got movies at the movie store to tide us over.
(We watched Hairspray last night, by the way, and Fred liked it enough that he said he wanted to own it. Given that he was a bit resistant to watching the movie in the first place, I’m glad he liked it that much!)
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Is this what it’s like in the Ander$on household at snakkin’ time?
It’s very close to that! The cats circle and howl, but no one actually grabs hold of the can. Sugarbutt gets his face right in there when I open the can, though. You’d think he’s starving to death, the way he gulps down the canned food.
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Put a yellow collar on tommy so you won’t be snookered anymore.
It’s not a problem during the day, because he wears the electric collar fence from about mid-morning until it gets dark. I would buy a collar (and I think yellow would go strikingly with his black fur!), but I think what we really need to do is pay attention to what the hell we’re doing. If you really pay attention, it’s not that hard to tell Tommy and Miss Momma apart, and we’ve been better about it since last time we let him out. If it happens again, though, I really might get him a collar. I’d hate to lose Tommy!
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Is it on YouTube, or did anyone tape it and love me enough to send it to me?
That’s regarding the Oprah episode with the hoarder. You can see some footage and pictures
here, but I’m not seeing anything on YouTube. I’ll keep an eye out and if it comes back on in reruns, I’ll be sure to mention it. (It would not be legal, I think, to suggest that it’s possible to
download the torrent, so I’m highly recommending against that.)
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I watched part one and couldn’t wait to see part two. I thought the husband was some kind of zombie automaton. I was also surprised they only got $13,000 for that stuff. They must have sold it for a quarter apiece! I thought they were going to get $50,000. from selling all that crap. Anyway, I think the Mom will go BACK to hoarding. She just seemed so emotionally fragile. What do you think?
I agree that it’s amazing that they only got $13,000 for all that stuff. For those of you who didn’t see the shows, the stuff they took out of this woman’s 3,000 square foot house – just the stuff that they decided could be sold in a yard sale – filled a 10,000 square foot warehouse. The woman had thousands of purses. What I think is that the people who bought that stuff got a serious bargain, considering how much of the stuff had never been used.
I think that if the woman doesn’t get some kind of therapy (and it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that Oprah’s providing she and her husband with a therapist), she’s going to eventually go back to hoarding.
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What has happened with Jack Frost?
Jack Frost was recently adopted for the fourth (I think) time. He was adopted and returned twice after the initial return. Apparently ol’ Jack is rough on furniture, and the people who adopted and returned him weren’t down with that. The last guy who adopted him emailed the shelter manager for advice and seems to have really bonded with Jack, so hopefully he’s found a home for good!
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Are you watching the new Amazing Race? I was trying to think of people who would be good contestants. Even though I haven’t met you in person, you and Fred are the only people I could come up with. Have you ever thought about it?
We are absolutely watching The Amazing Race, it’s one of our favorite shows. I would LOVE to be on that show, but I’m afraid that (1) I could never get Fred off the farm for that amount of time, and (2) With his gimpy foot, gimpy knee, and gimpy shoulder, Fred would always be in pain from all the running and challenges. I think we’d make a good team (and would have a LOT of fun) if we could get past those obstacles!
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Robyn, since Fred wanted cows until YOU wanted cows…couldn’t you just pretend to change your mind and say that you now want goats? Ya think that will make him not want them, all of a sudden?
He’s too smart for that wily ploy. I’d say “I’ve changed my mind. I want goats!” and I’d probably have two goats sitting in the living room (so they could stay warm ’til Fred got a barn built for them) within two hours.
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Why haven’t we seen the painted shed yet? AHEM.
I was waiting for Fred to put the finishing touches on it. You can see pictures of it
here.
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Speaking of Rosamunde Pilcher – My all time very favorite book EVER is “The Shell Seekers”. I read it at least once a year – I usually find myself craving to read it again in the spring, and I’ve worn out at least two copies. The funny thing is, I couldn’t get into ANY of her other books, or her son Robin’s, even though everyone else seems to like those better. Any love for “The Shell Seekers” out there?
I actually own The Shell Seekers, but haven’t read it yet!
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What is Fred going to do with goats anyway??? Besides take yuk yuk videos of them fainting of course. Are you going to milk them and make your own goat cheese? Goats milk is supposed to be, umm, robust?
That is an EXCELLENT question. When asked why he wants goats, he mumbles and stutters around, and in the end it’s pretty clear that he wants to have them JUST TO HAVE THEM. When told that goats stink, he hastens to make sure you know that it’s only billy goats that stink, that the nanny goats don’t, and we just wouldn’t get billy goats. And then he says we could sell goats for meat (there’s apparently a population around here that will eat goat. I am not included in that number, thanks.), but if we only have female goats, how would we breed them, I ask you? And yeah, he’s mentioned milking them to make goat cheese, or using goat milk to make soap or lotion, and who? Who, I ask you? Who would be making the cheese and the lotion and the soap? Hint: NOT HIM.
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1. What has the Spud said, if anything, about your weight loss? 2. Ditto for your Mother. 3. Ditto for your in-laws. And 4. Do any of them treat you any differently now? (5) Also,since you appear to the rest of the world to be a different person now that you weigh what your average person weighs, do you think you behave any differently than you did when you were a “large woman”, both in private and in public? I ask these ?s only because your appearance is that of a completely different person than that of several years ago. (6) What has changed on the inside? (I guess that would be #5, heh.)
1. “You look good.” (or something along those lines) 2. “You look good.” (or something along those lines) 3. Ditto. 4. Nope, not at all. 5. I didn’t think I act any differently now than I did before, but just to make sure, I asked Fred who said “No.” and for a second opinion I asked my sister, who said “I think you act exactly the same, with more energy.” I don’t believe I act any different in public, either. 6. I don’t think anything has really changed on the inside. I’m forced to deal with what’s going on in my life rather than stuffing it down with food and that’s not always fun, but other than that, I’m really the same as I was before.
I really don’t get many comments from anyone about my weight loss anymore, because at this point it’s old news. The first year after surgery was the biggest change, but since then it’s not so much a big deal. I’m okay with that.
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I know you get your hair colored fairly frequently. I have never colored my hair because I’m afraid I won’t like it, and if I start I will have to constantly do it and also cause I’m paranoid about getting dye in my eyes. Any hair dyeing catastrophes? I’m getting a little gray though and think I’m gonna have to take the plunge. Ever hated it or do you always stick to what you know? Ever get it in your eye? Ever since I read on the box it can make you go blind I’ve been reluctant as that would be my luck!
If you’re thinking about doing it yourself, you could start by trying some of the
semi-permanent dye that washes out in five to eight shampoos – that way you can see how it looks, and if you don’t like it, it’ll wash out. I’ve never had any hair dying catastrophes that I can remember – I generally stick to the same color, and have for years (though earlier this year I went a little bit red, and in direct sunlight it looked like a red that doesn’t actually occur in nature). I don’t love having to have my hair done every five or six weeks – it’s really freakin’ boring to sit there – but at this point if I let my hair go natural I’d probably be close to 75% gray, and I’m too damn young for that. (On a side note, ten years ago I declared that when I was 40, I was going to go natural and to hell with all the gray. Now that I’m a little over a month away from 40, I think I’ll wait ’til I’m 50!) I’ve never gotten dye in my eye, but the dye isn’t really that liquidy – as long as you’re paying attention to what you’re doing, you shouldn’t have an issue with getting it in your eye.
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After killing a squirrel and eating it right next to the steps, Newt decides it’s time to clean the gore off his face where everyone can watch him.
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Previously
2006: No entry.
2005: I think I need to go eat some deviled eggs to assuage the pain.
2004: And I just glared at him and thought to myself
Just because you’re too stupid and scatterbrained to read and watch TV at the same time doesn’t mean I am, jackass.
2003: “Purring? You don’t like the sound of them purring?”
2002: No entry.
2001: No entry.
2000: Just a little more knowledge o’ Robyn y’all can add to your notes.
1999: No entry.]]>