It sure would be nice if we had, like, a week or two without torrential rain. It rained so hard last night that the back forty was nothing but water (and oddly enough, the dogs thought it was AWESOME). At least it drained off quickly and it’s not supposed to rain today. For the last couple of weeks (or so it seems), we’ve had a lovely, sunny day and then a rainy day, sunny then rainy, and so forth. Fred’s itching to get the new shade structure built on the front of the big coop, but the water level is too high, and he can’t set the posts. Also, he wanted to plant the garden next week, but it’s too wet to till. It’s driving him a little crazy, all this wet weather.
It’s actually supposed to get down to freezing again early next week. Ugh.
We watched Slumdog Millionaire, started it Wednesday night and finished it last night. To be honest, when the movie started I was like “Oh, I don’t think I’m interested in this…”, and I was flipping through a magazine, but as the movie went on I got more and more into it, and in the end I have to say – that’s one damn good movie!
A quick tip that may save you time/trouble – if the only thing that is making you want to switch cable tv providers is price….call your current provider and say, i’m gonna quit you because this place can give me the same service for $25 less. Escalate it to a supervisor if need be, and I’m betting that you get your $25 discount and don’t have to wait for a new provider to come out and install the dish, etc etc. 🙂
It usually works, and i would imagine in these times it might work even better.
I thought that the only thing making us want to switch was the price, but I found out that apparently Dish N3twork offers all High-Definition channels and Dir3ct TV doesn’t. Or something like that. I honestly don’t ever notice whether something’s in High Def or not – it’s all the same to me. But in the end we’ve got High Def – which makes Fred happy – and a lower cost, which makes us both happy. So it’s all good!
Do any of your cats, drown their “victims” in the water bowl? Gus has started to put the milk lid rings into the water dish which is scary. My mom’s kitten has taken over a Beanie Baby cat as his friend/victim. He daily puts his buddy into his water dish – usually more than once a day. So far, my mom has had the wet bb dropped on her head from the bed’s headboard in the middle of the night and a mark left on the headboard in the outline of a wet bb. I sure hope Gus doesn’t start drowning his victims and bringing them to me in bed. Yikes.
I’ve heard that sometimes cats put things in their water dish so that they can see where the surface of the water is – but if they’re dunking their toys and then bringing them to you, god knows what that’s all about!
In our first house, I used to find toys in the litter box ALL the time. I figured it was the cat version of reading on the toilet.
About Big Love. I just read that it WAS picked up for another season. On February 5, HBO announced that it was renewed for a 4th season, set to premiere in 2010. YAY!!
Yay! Only, now that I don’t have HBO, I’m going to have to wait ’til 2011 to see it! Boo!
So, am I the only one who searched for mywifeisaravingbitch.com? I’ll just slink away now.
I checked to make sure it wasn’t a real site before I mentioned it. Heh.
I came across this link the other day, and tried making the bread, it was awesome! I though you might like to give it a try with your bread making adventures.. at least with this one you don’t have to do anything, it just takes time!
Here is the link to the article – and the link to the bread recipe.
The only reason I haven’t made the No-Knead Bread yet is because I actually don’t have a dutch oven or other heavy covered pot in the right size, if you can believe it. That’s the next thing I need to get, I think!
I don’t seem to have spraying cats, I have door molding shredding cats. Drives me crazy! Got a fix for that?
How about this Sticky Paws double-sided tape stuff? I put some on the back of Fred’s office chair, and the back of the couch, and it seems to work pretty well, actually! (If your door moldings are painted, though, I’d probably be worried about it pulling the paint off.)
Also, forgive me for not knowing but I did not know you had a brown tabby. Is this a new addition or perhaps Mr Boogers in camouflage?
That’s Kara – the mother cat who gave birth to kittens almost a year ago. Fred fell in love with her, so we had to adopt her – last Fall, in fact. She brought our permanent cat resident count up to double digits. ::sigh::
Your photos of the new kitties have made me long for a kitten. I told my husband and he gave me a dirty look. But we have only 4 cats. That’s nothing, right?
I would say that having four cats is really not even in the realm of being a cat owner, you amateur. How can you tell you even HAVE cats? You don’t become a real cat owner ’til you’ve got six or more.
True story!
Honey– exactly how many chickens do you have now? You need more?
What? You think 140 is too many for two people? Really? ‘Cause I’d like to see it around 200 in another two months. WE CAN DO IT!
(NOT.)
As far as the purebred flock we’re attempting to start (we got four hatched over the course of the past few days, and we should have another hatch beginning on Monday), for reasons completely mystifying to me, people pay a lot more for fertile Copper Black Marans eggs than they do for fertile “mutt” eggs. If we had a purebred flock and could sell a dozen or two a week (once they start laying), we’d come pretty close to being able to feed all our animals off the money those eggs brought in. “All our animals” including the dogs and cats – that would be pretty awesome.
Newborn Copper Black Marans.
I love to make BBQ sandwiches out of leftover Pork. I chop or shred the pork, mix my favorite BBQ sauce in, and serve it on a nice onion roll or sesame roll. Wonderful with some potato salad and cole slaw (personally, I like my coleslaw ON my BBQ sandwich!
I quote this comment because it made me think, for some reason, of the fact that when I first moved down here, I had no idea on earth that they put coleslaw ON BBQ sandwiches. One day I went and got BBQ for everyone in the office, and I opened the bag o’ food when I got back to work, and threw a fit because there was no coleslaw in the bag. Which is when Fred stepped in and gave me the you’re-an-idiot look and told me that the coleslaw was on the sandwich.
Oh.
you poor thing! I hate the feeling of not being able to move from the mud – I did the same thing last summer at the off-road vehicle park. I felt like a dumbass. But with you wearing your boots, it reminds me of the time that Ramona Quimby got herself stuck and she couldn’t move and there was a picture of a tow truck pulling her out by her raincoat. LOL She coulnd’t bear to leave her boots behind so someone had to come back and rescue her boots too. That sounds like something you might do.
Oh, I was NOT leaving the vicinity of that damn ditch without my boots, believe you me. If I’d had to crawl out of the ditch and then turned around and yanked the boots out, I would have. If I’d had to make Fred go get the tractor and pull them out with heavy chains I WOULD HAVE.
NO BOOTS LEFT BEHIND, that’s my motto! (I paid too goddamn much for those boots to lose them to some stupid muddy ditch!)
There are houses across the road/street from you! For some reason I’ve always imagined an open field there, with the only neighbors being the ones next door.
No, we’ve got neighbors – not as many, and not as close as we did in the ‘burbs, but they’re certainly there. This is what it looks like from the front porch:
Standing on the front porch, looking to the left. That flash of yellow is the sign for the Dollar Store. That white building is a little strip of stores. The red car is on the access road that runs from the strip of stores to the street that comes out right across the road from our ditch.
Directly across the street – an empty field. I hope it stays empty forever!
Turning toward the right.
And to the right. Neighbors across the street (but not TOO close), and across from them (next to us), is the church.
What were all those firemen and such doing while you were wollering around?
I did not even look at those damn volunteers. Fred said he didn’t think anyone was even looking, but it didn’t occur to me to look over and see if they were laughing at me. Probably a good thing I didn’t, ’cause I’m sure I would have given them the finger or some other such classy gesture.
And please tell me you weren’t wearing your super-cute Justin boots when this happened.
OF COURSE I WAS. They seem none the worse for wear, though – I sprayed them off, dried ’em out, and they’re good as new!
Beulah does have an odd eye-to-head proportion/placement thing going on, but I think it’s because she’s still so runty. She’ll grow out of it, and Fred’ll be changing his tune.
Unlike my mother, who still calls my tortoiseshell Cassie “that ugly monkey-faced cat of yours.”
Katherine (who came over to admire the babies yesterday and then watch those damn Housewives of NYC with me) said that she can kind of see where Fred’s coming from.
I have to admit that I think of Beulah as the feline version of Nance‘s Felina. She’s got the big-headed googly-eyed thing going on, but I still think she is GORGEOUS.
Also, Fred thought that Flossie – here, let me show you a picture of Flossie:
Fred thought Flossie was hideous because, and I QUOTE, “Her markings are asymmetrical.”
Does the Spirea have a scent, and if so, what’s it smell like?
It has no scent at all, actually. Thank GOD it doesn’t smell like Bradford Pear trees in bloom.
(And too bad it doesn’t smell like Winter Honeysuckle, because that stuff smells amazing – a light lemony fragrance that I wish I could bottle.)
Looking at Red Friendly and Charlie got me to wondering how many of your hundreds of chickens have names?
Not that many, actually – the problem is that for a chicken to have their own name, we need to be able to distinguish it from all the other chickens, so the Buff Orpingtons are known collectively as “The Buffys”, but don’t each have their own name.
The chickens who do have names are: Mister Friendly (the speckled black and white chicken born in November, so named because he’s a friendly little guy), Red Friendly (ditto on the friendliness), Michelle the Rooster (named after a reader!), Charlie (named because of her twisted-up toes), George (who looks just like Charlie, but doesn’t have the twisted-up toes), Sassy (the black chicken who leaves the back forty every day to lay her egg in her childhood coop), the Rock Star (which is really more a description than a name), the Featherheads (again – description, not really name), and The Assholes (who are not long for this world – so named because they are so fucking rough on the hens. They’re gorgeous but THEY SURE ARE ASSHOLES).
Chickens who are no longer around that had names (and let me just say, people who say don’t name your chickens ’cause then you won’t eat ’em? WRONGO.): Flappy (the first to be eaten and SHE WAS TASTY), Frick (who died of natural causes – or at least, WE didn’t kill her. We suspect she was eggbound. Easter Eggers lay pretty eggs, but they surely are not dependable layers) and Bob, who I liked a great deal, but you can only have so many roosters in a flock. Edited to add: How could I have forgotten McLovin?? Our first rooster, who lives on in a ton of our chickens. Good ol’ McLovin.
I love wisteria, too! I’ve heard that it takes 7 years to establish itself and start blooming and I just don’t have that kind of patience!
I had no idea it takes so long to establish wisteria! I think it’s so pretty that I’ve mentioned the idea of having an arbor (made of hog panels) placed somewhere, with wisteria planted at the base. I guess I’d better get moving on that!
What is a blow-in?
Those subscription cards they toss in all magazines that fall out all over the damn place. I don’t get WHY they include those even in the magazines you already subscribe to!
The kittens had a visitor yesterday – the lady who adopted two of Kara’s kittens (then they were River and Inara – now they’re Nate and Dora, which I think fits them better!) stopped by to visit, and the kittens handled it quite well. They weren’t skittish or scared of her at all (did I mention that it’s nice to have a bunch who are so friendly?) and in fact just considered her another person to climb on and be petted by (and entertain!).
We had a lot of rain last night, and we were watching TV when suddenly the ceiling in the living room started to leak. I went upstairs to so what was going on, and the ceiling in the closet of the foster room was leaking. We just got a new roof like a month ago! So the roof guy’s coming to investigate the source of the leak, and the kittens will get another visitor.
I hope he likes kittens!
Jasper, appalled.
More kitten pics over at L&H.
“Oh, is it snack time already?”
(Fred was taking the babies out to the brooder and set them on the cat bed while he put his shoes on. They were very popular with Tommy, to say the least.)
Previously
2008: I don’t, for the record, covet the struggle anymore.
2007: At least the floors are clean.
2006: Fred was no help, because he was standing there laughing his ass off.
2005: No entry.
2004: No entry.
2003: Nothing, by the way, pisses me off more than the crap that gets installed with the program you really want – Office 2000, I’m looking at you and your crappy Outlook friend.
2002: Mother Nature is getting ON MY NERVES.
2001: No entry.
2000: So if rainy days and Mondays always got me down, I guess I’d have been suicidal today.