4/16/07

I’m getting my ass whomped by the Cute Overload and I Can Has Cheezburgers kids when it comes to Best Animal Blogger at the Blogger’s Choice Awards, but I can’t complain, because they’re two of my favorite sites and they RAWK.

* * * We watched Blood Diamond Saturday evening, and as I told Fred during the movie, I think Leonardo DiCaprio is a really good actor, I think he’s very good-looking, and I’ve liked a lot of his movies, but for some reason, on a personal level I just really do not like the guy at all, and I have no idea why that is. It’s a mystery. So we watched the movie, and afterward, with a super-sized helping of White American Guilt hanging over my head, I shut down my laptop computer (one of three computers in the Madison house at the time, and one of two I personally have access to while at the Smallville house) loaded it up in my cheap car (one of three that belong to the three members of our household), drove twenty minutes from one house that we own to the other house that we own (you know, the house that we dumped half our savings – an amount of money we could probably live off for the rest of our lives in some third-world countries – into over the course of five months), listening to my iPod on the way, walked into the aforementioned second house that we own, to be greeted by two cats who live on our porch in a house of their own, then walked through the front door into a warm, well-lit front room to be greeted by six spoiled rotten cats who have more soft, cozy, warm places to sleep than entire families of humans in some countries, walked back to the kitchen, where I have enough food to eat for a couple of weeks if I could get off my lazy ass long enough to cook it, cleaned out the litter robot I paid $300 for because I can’t be bothered to clean out the litterbox myself multiple times a day, took down the kitty snacks I paid too much for, so that our cats could be spoiled even more (and so one of them could eat too much and then go barf it all up on the floors we paid thousands of dollars to have refinished so that we could have beautiful, pristine floors right up until we moved in and the cats went racing down the hallway, leaving scratches behind), ran clean water from the tap in the kitchen to wash dishes, turned the heat up to 72 so I wouldn’t be too cold – god forbid! – put on my expensive (but it cannot be denied, very cute) boots to slog out to the back yard to open up the chicken coop (a building with more space than some families in Mexico have in their entire living quarters) and check on the chickens to be sure they hadn’t keeled over dead from the sound of thunder, all the while talking on my cell phone (one of three belonging to the three people in our household, and let’s not forget we have a landline at the Madison house, too) with Fred, and after I was done talking with him, I watched the latest episode of Lost (downloaded from iTunes for $1.99 on high-speed internet whilst at the Madison house) on my laptop, then washed my face, brushed my teeth (did I mention I can get clean drinking water on demand from no less than five different sinks in the house?), took off the cheap cubic zirconia ring I wear on my ring finger (because the diamond babykilling engagement ring Fred gave me nine years ago is too big for me, so sits in my dresser unworn), and crawled into my nice warm bed, made with expensive (to me), clean sheets and two comforters, a bottle of clean drinking water next to me, and I slept like a baby. It’s a rough fucking life. * * * Saturday it rained. And then it rained. It rained a little more. And when it was done? It rained, just for good measure. Fred wanted to get the chicken yard finished up, but when the rain was clearly not going to let up, he gave up and we ended up spending the majority of the day hanging out in the house snoozing, playing games, and reading. Fred’s taken up playing Snood, because he is a rat bastard who cannot stand to let me have a game I love without his ass jumping on the bandwagon and beating every single one of my high scores. I hate him. But he has a nice ass, so I guess I’ll keep him. At one point he’d had enough of the Snood and the snoozing, so we sat down and played Yahtzee. Now, in my defense, I had never ever played Yahtzee in my entire life, so I wasn’t completely sure of the rules until about halfway through the game. Which is when I realized that we were playing an old person’s game. “You don’t really like this game, do you?” Fred asked. “I do not. Maybe because I’m not 100 years old,” I said. “We’re never going to play this game again, are we?” Fred asked. “Not for another sixty years!” We ended up leaving Smallville a little after 2, and went to Madison, where I puttered about online and Fred took a bath, and then we went to an auction. We left after a couple of hours without buying anything, but there’s an auction next week we may check out. There isn’t anything we desperately need, but I’m keeping an eye out for a vanity (or a small desk to use as a vanity) to put in my bedroom, I’d like to put a table under one of the windows in the living room, and there are a few other small things I’d like to get, but there’s no hurry. Sunday, it rained again in the morning and early afternoon, and we went to Lowe’s to pick up some screws and hooks, and ended up leaving with a lot more stuff than we’d gone in for, AS USUAL, and my Fat Smug White American Overspending Got-Too-Much-Goddamn-Stuff-While-In-Other-Countries-Men-Are-Walking-Around-Without-FEET guilt reared its head briefly, but I stifled the bitch with a smoothie from Starbucks. We got a runner for the downstairs hallway. It cost us about $30 (for 13 feet), but the ends need to be finished. We bought an edging kit at Lowe’s, and we’ll see how that goes. Fred did a lot of stuff outside, then got so cold he had to come in and borrow some body heat from me, and then we snoozed for a while. We woke from our nap to find that the sun was coming out, so Fred spent the rest of the afternoon working on the chicken yard. I have to say – it was a pretty damn relaxing weekend, all in all. Any weekend where we spend most of it in Smallville is a good one. * * * This is Oscar, so named because she looks a lot like an ostrich (this picture doesn’t do her justice). She’s the runt and adorable. I want to pick her up and squeeze her. One of the Buff Orpingtons. We find that the Buffs are the least skittish and most friendly and curious of the chickens. Fred likes to pick them up and pet them, and they actually put up with it for a few minutes. The finished chicken coop. Fred did everything but paint it, and I think the thing is solid enough to withstand a direct hit from a tornado. Newt and Maxi explore the back forty. Newt checks out the garden. Hopefully he’s not trampling any new seedlings. Newt finds it important to keep an eye on the chickens. For protection purposes, of course. * * * Previously 2006: No entry. 2005: The freakin’ notify list. 2004: You could take notes, motherfucker. 2003: Okay, okay! Just please stop asking! 2002: I guess I was a doofus even way back then. 2001: DO NOT, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, EMAIL AND ASK IF I HAVE ANYTHING ON THIS LIST, STILL. I DO NOT 2000: I had to refrain from picking her up and squeezing her to bits.]]>