9/7/07

“Ah hets little sisters.” Spanky likes to hang out on Fred’s bed. Where annoying little sisters are NOT. I take exception, y’all, to those of you who “knew” we were going to keep Stinkerbelle (previously known as Maryanne). Y’all “knew” we were going to keep Rambo and Jodie, and you “knew” we were going to keep JoeBob and Myrtle, and you “knew” we were going to keep Sugarbutt… Okay, well. If you “know” we’re going to keep every cat that comes across the doorstep, obviously you’re going to be right SOMETIMES, I suppose. The evening after he brought Stinkerbelle home, Fred said “We have TWENTY-ONE animals under our care!”, and then he had the utter nerve and gall to turn and look accusingly at ME. Like the only reason we have the chickens or the Stinkerbelle is because of ME. The cool thing is that when I called the shelter manager to tell her that Fred was going to pick Stinkerbelle up and bring her home, she said “Well, I just got off the phone with this lady who’s interested in adopting her and Spanky!”, and I called Fred back to tell him that if he hadn’t picked up Stinkerbelle, he shouldn’t. But he had, and I could hear her howling in the background, and there was NO WAY ON EARTH he was going to take her back, so I called the shelter manager back and apologized, because what can you do about a man in love? But the woman who wanted to adopt Stinkerbelle and Spanky ended up adopting Spanky and Gilligan instead! Yes, Spanky and Gilligan had been sitting in that cage at the pet store for three weeks or so, unadopted, and then in one fell swoop they got adopted, and we brought Stinkerbelle home. Pretty good for kittens I was absolutely positive would be unadoptable due to their feral nature when I first saw them, ain’t it? Poor Tommy is taking the brunt of the Stinkerbelle love, though. She follows him around and harasses him, and he’s patient with her, but I note that he’s spending a lot of time outside, and whether that’s to get away from her, I can’t say – but I suspect “yes.” The night before last, I was laying in bed reading, and Tommy was in the cat bed on the end of my bed, and she was laying in the cat bed on the trunk next to my bed, and she woke up and saw him, and jumped from the trunk to the bed and climbed into the cat bed with him, and he vigorously groomed her for at least ten minutes, then he decided “Okay, done with this. Bye!”, and jumped onto the trunk to settle down into the cat bed. She waited perhaps thirty seconds, then followed him. So he jumped back onto the bed, and she followed him again, and he made a noise of annoyance, and ran off. She looked after him, considered it, and then flopped over in the cat bed and went to sleep. Right now, she’s laying on the doormat next to the back door waiting for Tommy to come back inside. She hasn’t figured that whole “outdoors” thing out – I think the flap on the cat door, and Frick running around outside scare her – but when she does, we’ve got a collar for her, ready to go. She’s a bratty little thing, but I’ll admit – I kinda like her.

* * *
Last weekend, Fred was out working in the garden, and he called from his cell phone to ask me – I was in the kitchen peeling and chopping tomatoes for another big batch of salsa – to come out to see something. I don’t remember what he wanted me to see, but I do remember that he decided he was going to pull up the sweet potato. A few months ago, we stuck toothpicks in a sweet potato and put it in a cup of water. When it grew roots, we eventually (after putting it off for far too long) planted it in the garden. We didn’t know if we’d planted it right, but it grew flowers and looked very happy, and grew a lot. We didn’t think we’d gotten any sweet potatoes from it, so Fred decided to pull it up, since it was sprawling so much that it was encroaching on other plants in a big way. Imagine our surprise when we found that we’d gotten…. A big-ass bowl of sweet potatoes! I’m trying to convince him that next year, we should have a little plot of land devoted to growing sweet potatoes. I like sweet potatoes a lot, and they were so amazingly easy to grow that there’s no reason we shouldn’t grow more next year. And speaking of the garden, BUG ALERT!!! The garden is slowly starting to peter out. Fred pulled up the green beans over the weekend, mostly because we have more than enough green beans to get us through the winter. Lesson learned for next year: pole beans, not bush beans. Bending over picking them hurts his back. The tomatoes are starting to peter out, too. The ones we’re getting are so small that it’s almost pointless to make sauce out of them – you just don’t get enough from each tomato to make the peeling and chopping worth the effort. The okra are producing more slowly, though they are still producing, and probably will for at least a few more weeks. At this point, the garden is a LOT less work than it was this time next month, and I ain’t complaining. The peppers – bell, jalapeño, and habanero – are coming in quickly, and I have more than I know what to do with. Fred wants me to make more salsa, which I’ll do this weekend, but we won’t be using ALL those peppers we’ve got, so we’ll have to figure out something to do with them. Funny that we have so many peppers when he’s the only one who’ll eat them.
* * *
Despite the fact that I put hummingbird feeders out at the beginning of the summer, I never saw very many of them, and at the end of June my father-in-law said that we wouldn’t really be seeing hummingbirds until around the beginning of August. So I took the hummingbird feeders down and stored them in the laundry room until the end of July, whereupon I cleaned them, filled them with fresh hummingbird food, and soon enough, the hummingbirds started showing up. We’ve got three hummingbird feeders – two on the front porch, one on the side door leading into the computer room – and all three of them get plenty of action. I don’t fill the feeders up more than about a third full, and that seems to be enough, since the feeders aren’t empty when I clean and refill them every morning. My favorite part of the morning is taking down one hummingbird feeder from the front porch, cleaning and refilling it, then taking it back out to the porch to hang and get the other one. No matter what time of the morning I do it, by the time I come out to the porch with the second cleaned-and-refilled feeder, there are at least three hummingbirds flitting around chasing each other off, and squeaking angrily. Hummingbirds are seriously cute, and I want one as a pet.
* * *
It disturbs me that it’s now dark when Fred leaves for work at 6:00 every morning. I know the days start getting shorter after June 21st, but it’s just lately that it’s become obvious, especially now that Fred has to go out to lock the chickens in their coop at 7:30, when it seems like just a short while ago he was doing it closer to 8:30. It’s hot enough to be summer still (though it’s supposed to cool off this weekend), but the days are short like Fall. And the end of this month, we’ll have owned this house for a year. How is that possible?
* * *
* * *
Previously 2006: Say, any of you boys smithies? Or, if not smithies per se, were you otherwise trained in the metallurgic arts before straightened circumstances forced you into a life of aimless wanderin’? 2005: I didn’t get any pictures of it, but last night the stank coming off Rambo’s hindquarters was so strong that we finally gave in to the inevitable and gave him a bath. 2004: No entry. 2003: No entry. 2002: No entry. 2001: IT’S NONE OF YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS WHO IT IS. 2000: Am I not an ass-kicking WalkAerobics diva?]]>

21 thoughts on “9/7/07”

  1. We chop bell pepper and freeze it and then just take out what we need to cook with. The jalapenos, my MIL slices and cleans them and puts them in jars and pours a vinegar mixture over them. We eat them with cheese squirted down the middle. Yummy. If you don’t already have a recipe for this let me know.

  4. Thanks for the beautiful card you sent from Maine. Someone has been a busy girl making salsa and putting up veggies for the winter. Maybe I’ll come and see you this winter and we can eat up some of those veggies..Ha Ha! I really enjoy reading your journal and seeing the great pictures. Those are some ferocious looking buggggs. nanamama 😉

  5. I’m in awe… how can it be one year already? It just dawned on me that I’ve been reading your entries for years now. I need to start posting more comments!
    I bet those sweet potatoes taste wonderful. When I was a kid we grew our own potatoes and the taste is unlike anything you could buy in the store. Who knew that potatoes had FLAVOR!

  9. Laura: That was the face I made when I saw all the sweet potatoes! 🙂
    Amy: I don’t actually add red food coloring – I bought several boxes of the stuff you just add water to so Fred wouldn’t have to boil the water & sugar while I was in Maine, and it’s colored red. Now I’m just using up the rest of it before I go back to water & sugar.
    ChristineQ: I’m not sure I have enough patience for that! 🙂

  10. That last pic of Stinkerbelle is an award winner. You should submit it somewhere! Certainly you should think about copyrighting your photos so that some lame-ass plagerizer doesn’t come along and download your great pictures and win awards and acclaim with them, when it could have been YOUR awards and acclaim!!
    Congratulations on your accidental sweet potatoes! YUMM!

  11. Poor little Stinkerbelle, she just wants the lovin’.
    Have you seen or even heard of Slacker Cats on ABCFamily? It’s a cartoon for adults and it’s on Monday nights at 9(central) and it’s so damn disturbing and hilarious at the same time. Anyway, there’s a girl kitty that just wants to be friends with the two main boy kitties and they’re not exactly nice to her in their attempts to get away. Tommy leaving and her following made me think of them.

  12. I have a recipe for jalapeno pepper jelly, if you’re interested. It’s easy. We also use jalapenos to make a healthier version of jalapeno poppers (baked, with no breading). Very yummy and the baking helps mellow out some of the “hot, ow, ow, hot!” sensation in your mouth.
    My husband planted about 40 pepper plants (5 varieties, 3 of them HOT) and I’ve no idea what we’ll do with them all. The deer eat the tomatoes and shun the peppers. Go figure.

  13. you don’t need to add food coloring to the hummingbird sugar water… in fact I think it’s healthier for them if you don’t.

  14. Lisa: I don’t; I’m just using the stuff that comes from the store, that already has coloring added. When I mix up my own sugar & water, I don’t add coloring.

  15. My parents have had two feeders in the backyard for at least fifteen years. I’m so impressed that you 1)clean your feeders daily (we’re lazy and wait ’till they empty) and 2)boil the sugar/water together (we just stir ’till it dissolves). Also, in all our years as ‘red stuff’ (technical term) distributors, we’ve yet to kill a single one with food coloring. We get eight-nine at a time at the feeders, especially at dusk (probably sunrise too, but I’m not up for that). It sounds like this is already happening for you, but as they get even more familiar with your yard and area, they get territorial about the feeders. This is fifty kinds of awesome to observe. They’ll stake out positions in your yard from which they’ll quietly wait for an interloper to approach THEIR feeder. Watching one pissed off hummer divebomb another one’s ass while angrily twittering is a considerable source of entertainment for us (perhaps this isn’t something I should readily admit…hmm). I can’t wait for you get one who’ll come to the feeder while it’s still in your hands, so amazing!

  16. I won’t say I told you so because I am just so stinkin’ happy you kept her! She’s a special one, you can tell, the last time I said you were going to keep one you did. I can tell when the lurve is getting TOO BIG! heh 🙂

  17. Yesterday, I finally picked up my mail and there was the postcard from Maine. Love the map thing!!!
    The postage stamp on the mailing side looked so much like Mr. B that I have to wonder if that’s why you used it. The hate in the eyes was there!
    Congrats on the sweet ‘taters! Are they much different from yams?
    LOVE the new version of “Anderson Gothic,” in your new logo. Did you or Fred think of it?
    Sammi

  18. We like to cut the peppers in half, clean them out. Roast them until tender. Fill with cheese – we love white cheddar or jack cheese, but in the interest of not collapsing from a heart attack or gaining 300 pounds, I fill them with fat-free cream cheese for a high protein snack.
    You could also roast them and jar or freeze them for later.
    YUMMY!
    Gina

  20. You said you were in the kitchen “peeling and chopping tomatoes” and when I read that, I completely dropped the L. “She WHAT? She’s peeing in the kitchen? Jesus GOD! Don’t they have BATHROOMS?”
    Also, just so you know, you don’t have to use the red food coloring for the hummingbird food. Heh.
    Oh, Robyn, wish me luck. Again. MORE luck this time. Also all of Robyn’s wonderful readers? If I have like a zillion people wishing me luck (even if you don’t know what it’s for) it’s BOUND to go well, right?? (I have thrown up from nerves four times in the last 24 hours, so if you can’t wish me luck, send me some fucking Valium, k?)

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