5/11/09 (Monday)

I cannot for the life of me figure out how to set the banner image so that it’ll resize itself on your monitor no matter what size you’re viewing my site, so for now I’m leaving the banner as text-only.

I don’t know, I don’t think I completely hate this particular design. I’m tired of trying to mess with it though, I’ll tell you that. This is how it’ll be for the time being – do you totally hate it? Is it horribly ugly?

Edited to add: Fine, y’all want your cute banner, so it’s back. Those of you who can’t see the whole thing, I’ll fiddle with it… at some point in the future!

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

 

On Mother’s Day morning, I started off the day by sleeping in ’til 6:30 (I know!) and then when I went downstairs to see what Fred was doing that sounded all messing-up-my-kitchen-y, I found that he was trying to stuff a dead (cleaned) chicken into a too-small bag and was in a bad mood about the fact that it wouldn’t fit.

“You’re not using the right bag,” I said reasonably.

“I couldn’t find anything bigger!” he said, struggling with the dead rooster and the freezer bag.

Last month, I bought a bunch of freezer storage bags to put processed chickens into, because the big ziploc freezer bags aren’t big enough for most chickens. When I got the box of bags, I put them on a shelf on the bookcase in the kitchen, where they’ve been sitting ever since. Except, to be fair, usually when Fred processes chickens, I’m there with the bags for him to drop them into, so he didn’t necessarily know where I keep them.

So we got the two processed chickens (roosters) bagged up, and I put them in the garage.

“The knives weren’t sharp enough at all,” he said, continuing with his bad mood. “So I had to take a gun out there to get the Buff rooster. I couldn’t find the knife sharpener ANYWHERE. I looked in all the cabinets!”

I looked over near the knife block where I last remembered seeing the knife sharpener. It wasn’t there, so I looked in the drawer where I keep the extra spatulas and serving spoons and assorted crap, and it was on top. When he came back inside, I opened the drawer and showed it to him.

“It’s right here,” I said.

“Oh, okay,” he said.

I am 93.7% sure he won’t remember where it is.

He went back outside to clean up his killing station, and I spent the next ten minutes scrubbing down the sink and the surrounding counters. I washed the knives and set them on the counter next to the sink to dry. Then I went upstairs to get my dirty laundry, and when I came back downstairs, he’d brought a cutting board and bucket inside. The cutting board was sitting in the sink, conveniently leaning over the clean knives, dripping blood and goo on them.

I cleaned the cutting board, scrubbed out the bucket, and re-washed the knives. Then I scrubbed down the counters around the sink.

I put the dishes away, and got out my Kitchenaid mixer to start a batch of bread. When I looked down into the mixing bowl, I saw the familiar yellow sprinkles down the side of the bowl.

“Whatcha doing?” Fred asked, coming back in from outside.

“I was going to start a batch of bread, but I have to wash the bowl and beater first, because SOMEONE SPRAYED ON THEM.” I fumed as I washed.

“Happy Mother’s Day!” he said with a big, cheesy grin.

I finished washing the bowl and put it to the side of the sink to dry, then went and got his dirty laundry, and began separating all the dirty laundry into piles*. I started a load of laundry and then dried off the mixing bowl and began mixing the dough for bread. Fred came in from the computer room and said “I think I’m going to make an omelet!”

He puttered around the kitchen, finding an onion to chop, mushrooms to open, and a bag of shredded cheese in the refrigerator.

I was mentally beginning today’s entry along the lines of “Fred celebrated Mother’s Day by making an omelet. For himself. I had a bowl of Cheerios. I bet an omelet would have been good.” when he said “I’m going to make a scramble (ie, an omelet with all the insides just mixed into the scrambled eggs), want me to make some extra for you?”, which ruined the beginning of my mental entry.

Bastard. He ruins everything!

(The scramble was mighty tasty, for the record. Hard to beat onion, mushrooms and cheese mixed up with scrambled eggs.)

While I ate breakfast, I texted back and forth with the spud and emailed my mother.

When the bread dough was ready to be formed into loaves, I called Fred into the kitchen to make rolls out of the dough (last time I tried to form rolls out of the dough, they ended up all different sizes, most of them too small to use as sandwich rolls). I left the rolls to rise, and then he and I broke into the wedge of Horseradish Cheddar that Readerfriend Jean had given us.

That was some GOOD stuff; we ate it on crackers. You could taste the horseradish, which I like a lot (horseradish reminds me of Florida and raw oysters and now I’m craving a trip to Destin.) We brainstormed about the many ways we could eat the cheese (on meatball subs being the idea most popular with us both), then he went outside to do something, and I went upstairs to take my shower.

I announced, when I first got up, that in honor of Mother’s Day I was NOT going to get dressed. Then I amended that to “Well, maybe I’ll get dressed around noon”, but in the end I wore my nightgown all day long and I’ve gotta say, that was one comfy way to spend the day.

Maybe I need to make a trip to the muumuu store. They make muumuus with 3/4 sleeves?

The rolls were done rising, so I put them in the oven and then proceeded to make a yellow cake. It was a recipe I’d run across recently on a site where I run across a lot of recipes, and of all the recipes I’ve tried from this site, two have turned out really good, and the rest have been total snoozers. (And no, it’s NOT Pioneer Woman’s recipe site.) So I made the yellow cake and I made chocolate frosting to go on top, and Fred tried the cake when it was done and he said “Eh.” I got all mad at him and he said “What? Just because I don’t LOVE the cake doesn’t mean it’s a failure on your part! It just means the recipe wasn’t that great!”

But still.

So after lunch I tried a piece of the cake, and it was the most “Eh” cake I’ve ever had. Snoozersville. Fred took it out and gave it to the chickens, who enjoyed it.

They’re not picky.

I spent the afternoon finishing up the laundry, watched an episode of CSI with Fred (since we switched to the cheap plan at Dish Network, there are certain channels we don’t get, so we tend to NOT have as much TV to watch, which means it’s time to start watching TV shows on DVD from Netflix again.), and making dinner.

We had Light ‘n Luscious Lasagna (though I used sausage from our own pig instead of the kind of sausage the recipe calls for), romaine salad from the garden (the romaine is slowly getting choked out by weeds, but Fred still managed to pick enough for a couple of salads), and garlic bread made with the rolls I’d made earlier.

It was a tasty meal, and a good way to start off the week – especially considering that we’ll probably be eating lasagna for the rest of the week, which means I won’t have to cook again anytime soon.

*Please note that I still am not one of you anal motherfuckers who separates out your laundry into “darks” and “less darks” and “lights” and “whites.” The only time I separate laundry is when I’m doing my laundry and Fred’s at the same time (and the only reason that’s been happening lately is because I can’t hang clothes on the line to dry because of the GODDAMN RAIN. When it stops raining all the goddamn time, I’ll go back to my slovenly non-separating ways.)

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

 

Saturday, neither of us accomplished much. I actually made brownies and a lemon icebox pie, was impressed with neither of them, and the pigs benefited. I guess this really wasn’t a good baking weekend for me – but on the good side, those are recipes I can cull from my constantly-growing “recipes to try” pile.

We were lounging on the couch, half snoozing and half watching TV when the phone rang. Fred’s sister had mentioned earlier in the day that she and her husband might stop by to get some eggs, and she was calling to let us know they were on their way.

We sprang into action, Fred running around the house and picking up, and I grabbing the vacuum cleaner and vacuuming the downstairs. We finished just in time; as I was putting the vacuum away, they showed up. They stayed for about an hour, and they wanted to see the pigs (they’re buying half of one of them), so Fred took them outside to see the chickens, the pigs, the garden, and the fruit trees. Then they came back inside and played with the kittens. I think Fred’s sister would have happily taken both Ezra and Elijah, but her husband was completely uninterested. He wasn’t even uninterested in a needing-to-be-convinced way, he was dead-set against it. To be fair, they’re having a lot of work done on their house, so it’s probably not the best place for a couple of troublesome, nosy kittens to be right now.

They left, and then we went right back to our lounging and slacking. I’d make excuses for our slacker ways, but it was a rainy day and there was nothing that could be done outside, the inside of the house was clean(ish), so slack we did.

Oh, actually I forgot – we did go out when it got dark and moved the 33 two month-old chicks from the blue coop they’ve been sharing with the broody, murderous Mommas, to the big coop in the back forty. It was kind of a pain, slogging through the mud with a box full of chickens several times, but once Fred set each of them on roosts in the big coop, they were pretty quickly at home. Their adjustment to their new living quarters was pretty much painless.

(Fred said “I’m looking forward to late July, early August when all the chickens are in the back forty and there are no baby chickens in the brooder in the garage. I second that!)

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

 

The kittens are doing fine. I mentioned on Friday that Phinneas and Caleb were going back to the pet store, since they weren’t the ones having litterbox issues. When I got to the pet store, I saw a note on the cage they’d been in, one I’d managed to miss the night before, saying that Phinneas had been having litterbox issues and vomiting. Since he was perfectly okay after I picked him up, I’m going to guess that he ate something that didn’t agree with him. I emailed the shelter manager and told her that I hadn’t seen the note the night before, but as far as I could tell, Phinneas and Caleb were perfectly fine, but if they started having issues again, to let me know and I’d go back and pick them up.

Not only did they not have issues – they both got adopted over the weekend! Yay!

Yesterday I was shown without a shadow of a doubt that one of the buff tabbies (I think it’s Elijah, but honest to god I can’t really tell the two of them apart anymore) is A-OK in the litterbox, so I grabbed him up and marked his ear so I’d know that he was the one who was okay. The other buff tabby is NOT A-OK in the litterbox, and for that matter, Beulah and Bessie managed to develop litterbox issues, too, so the bunch of them are on something that will hopefully solidify things.

Since the one buff tabby’s okay, he’ll be going back to the pet store tomorrow morning.

Actually, Beulah wasn’t feeling well at all Saturday morning. I found a puddle of vomit upstairs and reported it to Fred. We assumed that it was Spanky‘s work (the boy has issues), but a little while later Fred told me that Beulah was vomiting. She vomited again, drank some water, and vomited that up. We kept an eye on her, but she didn’t seem to be in distress, just didn’t feel well, slept the day away, and by early evening was back to eating and playing like normal.

Oh, kittehs. How you make us worry!

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

 

Blessed are the pure in het, for they shall see Dog.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

 

Previously
2008: No entry.
2007: Mister Boogers doesn’t have opposable thumbs and finds it too difficult to text anyone – he gives up and stomps off in a huff after texting a few LOLs.
2006: Which to ME means “I’m not interested,” but to the operator apparently was code for “I might be interested. Try harder!”
2005: Now, I don’t know. I think that if your life is SO BUSY that taking the time to put a little pill in your mouth throws your entire schedule off, then perhaps it’s time to reorganize your life.
2004: You can’t have genius every day, y’know.
2003: No entry.
2002: No entry.
2001: SHE WAS FIXIN’ TO GO DOWN THE HILL.
2000: Poor overworked, abused child…