Category: Crooked Acres

Edited to add: This made me cackle when Fred emailed me the link earlier. If you watch it, make sure your sound is on!

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Fred’s got a webcam pointed at the eggs, which have begun to hatch. At the moment, one has hatched and wanders into camera view every now and again. Hopefully the others will start hatching soon!

Watch it here.

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Announcement: The Crooked Acres house tour some of you have been asking about will be up (on its own page) Monday. I’ve taken the pictures and resized them, now I have to put them in order and write captions. I think there are close to 100 pictures, and I think there are more outside pictures than inside!

Anyway, I promise. Unless there’s some sort of catastrophe this weekend, I’ll be linking that on Monday and if I don’t, then I forgot and someone remind me, eh?

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When I go out to collect eggs, usually around midmorning (and toss some cracked corn to the chickens), there’s occasionally a chicken sitting in a nesting box. Sometimes they’ve already laid an egg and are just resting from the effort (or so I assume) and sometimes they haven’t yet laid their egg. Most of them just look at me when I reach under them to grab their egg, but there’s this one Rhode Island Red who takes serious offense to my attempts to retrieve her egg. She scares me a little, with the noises that she makes, because I don’t like to be pecked by the damn chickens.

The other day, I happened to have the camera with me, so I made a movie. Enjoy the obnoxiousness. (The movie probably would have been a little less herky-jerky if one hand hadn’t been holding the bottom of my shirt out to hold the eggs I’d collected. I forgot to take the egg basket out with me, of course.)

Note to Fred: I NEED a Flip Video!

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The second shirt makes you look like one of the sentry guards on Gomer Pyle USMC. And as for that picture; it seems to me that it was seen on an older one of your sites some time ago.

I’ll have to Google around to find a sentry guard picture to see what that looks like – or maybe I don’t want to know!

I’ve never used that picture before and it’s not really “older” since it was taken on August 24th, but it’s entirely possible there was a similar picture (with a too-tight button-up shirt) in the past. I took a quick look through the pictures on my hard drive and didn’t see anything similar, which doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, just that I didn’t save it on my hard drive.

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Snort! Am I the only one who thinks you (in the last pic) and Zoe have exactly the same expressions on your faces? LOVE IT!

Well, now that you mention it….

(I have no idea why that picture came out in black and white!)

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My cat Bubba has to get a steroid shot too. He licks the base of his tail until it’s a HUGE raw spot. Then he gets all moody and starts trying to have sex with his sissy, Missy Mamas. I tell you…being a cat parent is hard!

I am imagining a cat with a raw spot at the base of his tail, twitching his tail and deciding that the ONLY thing that will make him feel better is if he gets it on with his sister, and the mental image is making me laaaaaaaugh.

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I thought you were going to say you bought that fugly painting! I was glad to hear you thought it was ugly too.

Oh, no way on earth I’d buy that thing. I just kept going back and looking at it because I was so amazed that someone painted it, and that the antique store thinks they’ll sell it (and they probably will!), and that someone might buy it. If it was ugly in an interesting way or a funny way, I might consider it, but no. That thing is just ugly in an ugly way.

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The Silkie will grow up to be seriously beautiful if it looks like the one on your link. It also says it has black flesh! Do you think that combination will result in a long and happy life at Crooked Acres? When I’m eating chicken breasts I wouldn’t be too enthused with black meat.

Actually, the Silkie wasn’t really bought to be a meat chicken. Silkies tend to be small, and we figured that the Silkie, along with the Rock Star and the Featherheads, will most likely have a long and happy life. They’re so small that they’re not really worth eating (also, the black flesh of the Silkie would be off-putting, to say the least) and we didn’t think they’d be much on the providing-eggs front (though the Featherheads are laying pretty regularly, tiny white eggs about half the size any of the other girls lay), so we consider them entertainment.

They’re very entertaining, especially when the Featherheads’ feathers grow to cover their eyes (we try to trim them back regularly) and they can’t see anything. When that happens, and then we go out with treats for them (and you KNOW the damn chickens get a treat at least once a day!) and the rest of the chickens are squawking excitedly, the Featherheads have this particular “WHAT TREAT? I DON’T SEE ANY TREAT IS THERE TREATS PLEASE GOD HELP ME I DON’T SEE ANY TREAT” shriek that goes through your brain like a spike.

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Do you still use your Roomba? You haven’t mentioned it for a while and I was just wondering since you talk about vacuuming – just not specifically with the Roomba. I bought one at the beginning of summer and love it, now I need a robot to do my laundry and cooking.

I use my Roomba regularly, at least three times a week. I tend to use it mostly in the kitchen, laundry room, and dining room, though I run it occasionally in the bedrooms because it’s particularly good at cleaning under the beds so I don’t have to. The batteries in the virtual walls died in the past few days, and I started the Roomba in the kitchen and went to run errands. When I got home, I found that it had run rogue – since there were no virtual walls to stop it – went into the laundry room for a few minutes, did a spin around the dining room and then went down the hallway and perhaps into the front room for a while before coming to a stop in the guest bedroom.

I do love the hell out of my Roomba. It doesn’t do a spotless job, but it certainly keeps the mess in the kitchen to a manageable level so I don’t have to vacuum every day of the week!

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While I can and do wholeheartedly agree with “never enough small glass bowls,” I AM curious as to whether or not there’s ever “enough chickens.” IS there such a thing on Crooked Acres?

Honestly, I don’t know. I feel like we might be getting to that point, especially with the 20 eggs that are due to hatch in the next few days. Fred has told me twice in the past week that in his mind the perfect amount of chickens to get us through a year would be 100, but I’ll be damned if I can remember his reasoning. He counted chickens last week and came up with 47, so… I guess we’re halfway to our goal?

Seriously, if we get too many more chickens I’m thinking we might want to just give up and fence in the back forty for them so they’ll have enough room!

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**Once I was at a museum and my husband asked if we could do something (I can’t even remember what) and I responded, “Okey Dokey Pokey!” A woman spun around and strongly expressed her disgust that I said that, and to a grown man! It still makes me smile to think that I could make someone soooo affronted!**

What happened next?! What did you do?!!

Yeah, Leslie. What did you do?

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Hey Robyn. Just wondering if you were planning on watching True Blood on HBO? I started reading the Sookie Stackhouse series b/c of you and I loved it! I’m so excited for the show! And Anna Paquin looks just like the Sookie I had pictured in my head…weird.

Not only did I watch the first episode, Fred was even willing to watch it with me! He loves vampires. I liked it a lot, and though I didn’t think Anna Paquin looked like Sookie to me before I watched the show, I’ve since changed my mind and I think she looks just like Sookie. Funny how that happens, isn’t it? I also didn’t think – from seeing the commercials for the show – that the guy playing Bill was all that hot.

I’ve changed my mind about that, too.

Fred didn’t like the show nearly as much as I did – he would like some violent deaths, please – but since the first episode ended on a good cliffhanger, he’s willing to keep watching it.

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On the whole bitey cat issue (most of them seem to do it) I heard a theory once that our petting them can cause static electricity, like when you brush your hair in the winter and it stands on end and that even though we can’t feel the electricity cats can because they are more sensitive and they are biting us because they’re getting little shocks and want it to stop. I have pet my cat during the poor excuse for winter we have here in Florida, in bed at night and sparks fly off her fur which freaks her out. It could be that or it could be that cats are just bossy and like everything on their own terms.

I think that “Cats are bossy and like everything on their own terms” pretty much covers, well, EVERYTHING when it comes to cats!

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Your new pigs are so much cleaner and pinker than the last two. Is it because they’re new, or because they’re girly-pigs, or some other reason I can’t think of? I guess maybe this is a question for Fred.

I’ve noticed that they aren’t getting as dirty as the boy pigs did. I thought that maybe it was because it wasn’t as hot, but it’s been pretty hot over the last few days, and the girls do go into the wallow to cool off (though they don’t hang out in the wallow; they just get in, get wet, get out), but they don’t roll around in the mud. The boys used to get absolutely caked with mud, and the girls really don’t. Maybe they’re girly-girls and just don’t like to get super messy!

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Did you know that spiders have six to eight eyes? That’s four to six more than are showing up on your scary spider! I KNOW! Creeps me out just thinking about it.

The day comes that I come face-to-face with a spider and see six to eight glowing eyes glaring at me is probably the day Fred finds me face-down on the lawn, dead of a heart attack. I don’t like to think of spiders having that many eyes. WHY do they need so many eyes? NO ONE needs six to eight eyes, that’s just a crime against nature!

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Season 3 [of The L Word] was a rough one for me, and the fourth season is really, really boring so far. (I hate Jenny so much. I want to beat her.) I just downloaded the fifth season, but am taking a break from the show mid-season 4 because…ugh. (I had to take a break after the third season too.) So I’m watching “The Secret Life of the American Teenager,” which…whoa. Why are 16-year-olds having sex? Am I baffled by this because I’m not an American?

I think, unfortunately, that a lot of American 16 year-olds are having sex these days. I don’t know that they’re having as much sex in real life as they’re having on TV (or perhaps I’m just an optimist), but they’re definitely having sex.

I’m sure that if they increased the amount of abstinence-only sex education available to teens, premarital sex would stop, like, immediately. Ahem.

(If I might quote the brilliant Donna Martin regarding teaching your children about safe sex, “If you build a pool, and you know your kids are going to swim, you can build all the fences you want. But if you know they’re going to jump in the pool, don’t you think you should teach your kids how to swim?” Donna Martin? Totally graduated!)

Okay, I got a bit off the subject, I guess. This “The Secret Life of the American Teenager” show: should I be watching it?

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I’m going to pimp out your comments and request people click and go to my site. Partly for the two tributes I’ve done but even more so to click on the link at the end of my 2nd post to go to the page that will have the link to Project 2,996. And check out the other tributes.

Maybe some of you will be willing to do your own tribute. There’s still so many names out there that need doing.

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My monkeys are going to the pet store today. ::Sob::

“You mean someone’s going to adopt me and take me home and spoil me rotten? SUCKERS!”

Kara will be staying here until the huge number of kittens have (hopefully) moved on through and been adopted. I’ll be curious to see if not having the kittens around will make her spend more time downstairs, because most of the time she and the babies have been hanging out upstairs with the occasional foray downstairs to look around.

Local readers, if you’re in the market for a cat or dog, PetSm@rt on Univ3rsity Drive is having an Adoptathon all weekend. Zoe and Kaylee will be there for that (and then staying on if they’re not adopted, since they’ll be in a permanent cage) (but hopefully they’ll be adopted this weekend!!!), and other local shelters will, I believe, have animals available as well.

Here’s a short movie starring Kaylee and Zoe (with Kara in the background). They think the brush is made for biting, not brushing.

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Previously
2007: Human eggs, scrambled, taste just a bit too humany, if you ask me.
2006: I sense I’m being royally fucking screwed over by the goddamn advantage-taking photographer. Who’s probably lighting his cigars with $100 bills as he drives around in his limo.
2005: Ants ain’t fuckin’ welcome here, if you hadn’t guessed.
2004: No entry.
2003: What above the Bumsen is up with that?
2002: It’s the front yard or bust, baby.
2001: That’s pretty much how we all felt.
2000: That’s the price of getting old, my friends.

Guess who I got to see yesterday? The kittens formerly known as River and Inara (they’re Nate and Dora now).

I was afraid that they’d run from me, since they’ve been in their new home for two weeks now. They were a little cautious at first, but then they let me pet and hold them, and they ran around and played and just generally put on a show. They kill me with how cute they are – they’d run off and play, but if we walked into another room, they’d be “Wait! Where my Momma and that lady go?!” and come find us. Luckily, I didn’t squeeze them to death, but it was hard not to.

They are definitely very happy in their new home and with their new Momma and big sister (who pretends she cannot STAND them, but is clearly very entertained by them), it was so good to visit with them and their Momma!

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I’ve been told the bitey during petting thing is a dominance issue. Not sure how to cure it though. The strays that have tried that with me usually end up just not getting petted, or else immediately put down and left alone, which did seem to cure one of them of it. Another reason I think it’s a dominance issue is that the same cats that will bite at me don’t bite at my husband. Any cat behavior experts out there?

When a cat gets overwhelmed by petting, I stop them by blowing in their face. The majority of them HATE that and will stop immediately. Sometimes they’ll try biting again, but if blow a puff of air in their face, they’ll usually give up and either calm down or (most often) run off. But in any case, here’s an explanation for it:

OooOOooo! I have the answer to the bitey cat question. I was reading a book by Dr. Bruce Fogle called “The Cat’s Mind” and he talks about bitey cat. He says that cats like to be petted because over the years they’ve been bred so that their development has been sort of stunted in a permanent kittenhood state. Petting is a lot like what momma cat does when she licks her kittens so they really dig that. Except cats as a breed aren’t really social contact creatures (like dogs are) so it kinda freaks them out to have prolonged contact like a marathon petting session. So while the pettins feel really good, they also wig the cat out because lots o’ touching triggers their fight or flight response. Thus, the cat will hang around until he/she MUST LEAVE ARRRGH! bite and take off.

I’m adding that book to my wish list, it sounds like an interesting one!

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BTW… squirrels really like the suet cakes for birds… You need to get the butcher to save some of the hog fat so you could render into lard to make homemade suet cakes…

I wish I’d thought of that – though to be honest, that sounds like more work than I’m willing to do for some suet cakes. I have a feeder hanging on one of our trees, and I fill it with peanut butter suet balls, and those damn squirrels are always out there picking at the suet through the screen of the feeder. I’m pretty sure that the birds never actually get any of the suet balls! I do have a suet feeder on another tree (it’s bird-feeding central in our side yard!) that the squirrels don’t seem to care for, and there’s usually a woodpecker hanging upside-down eating the suet. I sure do hate the smell of suet, though – when I need to fill the suet holder, I put on gloves to handle the suet because if I don’t, my hands smell like old grease for the rest of the day and NOTHING gets that stink off!

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When do we get the house tour promised so, so long ago? Huh??

It’s on my mental “to-do” list, I swear it! I need to just stop worrying about whether the house is clean and picked up and just take the damn pictures already!

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My mom describes Asians as “Or-ree-EH-ul.”
My mom-in-law call vitamins “The Minrels.”
Instead of the word “themselves” my husband says, “theirselves.”
My daughter calls the killer whale, Shamu, “SHUH-moo”, and Spiderman, “SPIDER-mun.”

Once I was at a museum and my husband asked if we could do something (I can’t even remember what) and I responded, “Okey Dokey Pokey!” A woman spun around and strongly expressed her disgust that I said that, and to a grown man! It still makes me smile to think that I could make someone soooo affronted!

I am weirdly fascinated by “Or-ree-EH-ul.” I feel like I have a stuffed-up nose when I say it out loud. Heh.

And for god’s sake, of all the things to snarl at someone about! You’ve gotta assume that that woman was either having a bad day, or is one of those people who goes around waiting to be offended.

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I have a friend that says “basketti” for spaghetti and “vodika” for vodka. Too funny.

Danielle (the spud) and Brian always said “pasketti” when they were little and I do believe Debbie and I picked it up from them, at least for a little while.

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I’ve watched “America Unchained”, it was on tv here in the UK a few months ago and it’s pretty interesting. I enjoyed it a lot but then I’m a sucker for documentaries anyway. The guy who did it is a British comedian and he’s got a pretty dry sense of humour imop. Worth watching anyway.

I went to add it to my Netflix queue, and it’s not on Netflix! What’s that about? I thought EVERYTHING was on Netflix!

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Will the new pigs use the old wallow, since it’s full of the other pigs, uhh, stuff?

Yeah, as gross as it is, the new pigs are using the wallow. Fred scooped as much of the nasty green stuff off the top of the water as he could (I told him I think we need a pool skimmer to remove the green nastiness effectively!), but the new pigs don’t seem bothered by it at ALL. They don’t actually, uh, wallow in the wallow, they seem to just kind of get in long enough to get wet, then get back out again.

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I never heard that phrase (“said my piece and counted to three”) until I saw O Brother Where Art Thou? a few years back. My husband and I say it now.

and

“I’ve said my piece and counted to three.” Too funny. O’Brother is one of my all-time favorite movies. That line, and when Holly Hunter responds to George Clooney’s question, “Why are you telling our gals I was hit by a train?” and she says, “Lots of respectable people have been hit by trains.” Cracks me up.

O Brother is probably one of our favorite movies. There are so many lines in that movie that just crack me up. I was never a George Clooney fan – I mean, I didn’t hate him or anything, I was just mostly “Eh. George Clooney. Whatever.” – but he was just so perfect in the movie that I started to really like him. Every line in the movie is just a masterpiece.

I always half-hope when I say “I’ve said my piece and counted to three” (which I apparently messed up – it’s “I’ve spoken my piece and counted to three in the movie, according to IMDB) that Fred will counter with “She counted to three. Goddamnit! She counted to three. Sonofabitch!”, but he hasn’t. YET.

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Did we change from “who’s ready for the snackin’?!” to Yummin’ time?!

“Who ready for the snackin’?!” is for the permanent residents. “Who wants de yummins?!” is for the fosters. The fosters get their snack at a different time than the residents, so I don’t want to get the residents all riled up by yelling “Who ready for the snackin’!” when they won’t get anything.

I might need a life.

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So when you say the kittehs are not giving you the love, may I ask if it’s… um… they’re just not that into you, or is it that they aren’t that sort of kitteh?

It’s more that they just don’t like the snuggling and the being-kissed. They’ll give love, it’s just in their own way, usually consisting of slumping against me and allowing me to pet them, or (in Zoe’s case), climbing up under my shirt when I’m laying on the bed with them and smacking at my stomach. There’s love to be had, but when it involves snuggling or kissing, they’d rather get that kind of love from Kara. Brats.

My cats, on the other hand, will start purring if you kiss them on top of their head – especially Miz Poo, Mister Boogers, Tommy, and Sugarbutt. Joe Bob, too. And Spanky. Really, all of them except Stinkerbelle. I’ve never tried kissing Stinkerbelle on top of her head, because I strongly suspect that she’d respond by clawing my face off and then swishing off down the hallway to rub against Her Boyfriend Tommy.

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I cannot imagine the pecking order fights in your house. It’s bad enough in mine and I only have 3 cats. Of course, two believe they are top cat and hence the fighting. They tend to conduct their power wars during the middle of the night. I just love being awakened by a cat screaming and the thunder of running cats. I’ve actually had to put one cat in “time out” several times because he just don’t know when to stop. Five minutes in the bathroom by himself does wonders.

These days, the pecking order fights almost always include Joe Bob or Stinkerbelle, and both those cats have got some big, bad lung power. If you hear a hellcat scream from the other end of the house, you can rest assured that it’s one of those two. If we can identify the offending party (very often Mister Boogers, SHOCK) we’ll usually put him out in the back yard until he calms down a little.

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My comment is really for yesterday, but it being a holiday and all I treated it like a weekend day and didn’t read your blog. When I don’t go to work my routine’s all messed up. Anyway, the pic of new little pig standing in the trough should win some kind of prize. It’s wonderful and should be framed! Really!

Yeah, I have to agree that’s a pretty good picture. It’s like she’s posing in a beauty pageant, you know how they walk to the microphone, say their name and where they’re from, then walk over, pose, and then walk back to their “spot”? She’s totally posing before she walks back to her “spot”!

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How many chickens are there all together now? I seem to have lost track, but then there were some sitting on eggs. Wow! Quite the chicken farmers y’all are turning out to be.

I don’t know the exact number and neither does Fred, but it’s in the area of 50. We also have 24 eggs in the incubator (the eggs we bought in Tennessee from an Amish man), due to hatch in a couple of weeks, and Fred’s candled them the other day and thinks we’ll get between 16 and 18 chicks from that batch.

I think we might be chicken hoarders.

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That spider was S.C.A.R.Y!!!!!!!!!!!!! How big was it??????? Those eyes made me scream on the inside. YUCK.

I might be remembering wrong (that thing creeped me OUT), but I think, legs and all, it was about the size of my hand.

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You know, I remember that my Mom used to wash our shower curtain liners every so often, but the last time I tried to do that, the liner came out full of holes from the machine, and I had to go buy a new one. Do you have to use a gentle cycle?

Yeah, you definitely need to wash it on the gentle cycle!

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I wash my shower liners, too, but I hang them right back up in the shower from whence they came. Hanging them up outside to dry sounds like too much work!

I hate dripping water on the hardwood floors, which is the only reason I hang them up on the clothesline before I take them through the house to hang them back up in the bathroom.

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What’s with cats and their stainless steel brushes? My cats play with ours too. They insist on trying to bite it – bristles and all. I have to hide the brush in the tissue box on the end table so they don’t see it. I keep it on the end table so when they are sitting with me and they are all sheddy, I brush them. I swear I’m going to get the Furminator – but since we are ending the shedding season, I might put it on my wish list.

There’s got to be something about the pointy little ends of the cat brush that makes cats want to bite them, because every cat that I try to brush with that brush ends up grabbing and biting it.

I love the Furminator. LOVE IT. I just got it out the drawer the other day for the first time in ages, and went out to the back yard and brushed Tommy and Mister Boogers with it. There was SO much fur flying around the back yard when I was done, you could have easily made another cat with it! The Furminator is just AWESOME. I highly recommend it!

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Have you seen the Am. Funniest Home Video of the college boys and the praying mantis. One of the boys pretends he’s boxing it, the praying mantis takes his foolishness for about 10 seconds and then jumps at him. The shrieking and running that ensues is priceless. I’m sure the young man needed a change of underwear once the camera was off. Big bad frat boy 0 praying mantis 1.

That sounds very familiar – I’m sure we’ve seen it.

Recently there was an America’s Funniest Home Video of a couple of women and a very small child, and they saw a frog (or a toad) on the sidewalk, so they stopped to look at it, and then the toad jumped at the small child, all ::SPROIIIIIING!!!:: and landed on the child’s leg, and they all screamed and the woman holding the child’s hand picked him up by one hand, the abject TERROR on that child’s face made us laugh until we wheezed. We actually saved it on the DVR so we can watch it whenever we want. We also saved the episode of AFV that had a woman and a bird – a cockatoo, maybe? A big bird, anyway – and she’s patting the bed and saying “Jump, Kramer, jump! Jump, Kramer, jump!”, and the cockatoo considers for a moment and then starts jumping and it makes us laugh our asses off.

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When you know you want “pork” for dinner, do you let it thaw just that day? And do you thaw it in the frig or on the counter? My mom always used to thaw meat on the counter and it makes me insane. I’m OCD about my meat and how long it’s been “sitting out.” I’m always curious as to how other people take care of this instead of going to buy meat every time you want it, which is what I do. Which is NOT cost effective OR time effective, but I’m a freak.

It depends on when I know we’re going to want to have pork (or beef, or whatever). If I know the night before that we’re having, say, pork chops for dinner the next day, I take the pack out of the freezer, put it on a plate and leave it in the fridge to defrost. If I don’t know until that morning that we’re having pork chops for dinner, I leave the pack on the counter (on a plate) to thaw. If I forget to take the pork chops out of the freezer until mid-day, I’ll put the whole pack in cold water in the sink, and it usually only takes a few hours to thaw.

I know you’re not supposed to thaw meat at room temperature, but I’ve been doing it for 20 years and my mother always did it that way, and we’re still here to tell the tale, so I imagine I’ll keep on doing it when I need to!

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I noticed that last year’s entry talked about ants in the kitchen. I have little, black ants in my kitchen that I CANNOT get rid of. Did you ever find a solution? I’d love to hear it!

The only thing that worked for me was cleaning the damn counters off (with my favorite cleaning spray) and never ever leaving any kind of food out. Oddly enough, we didn’t get any ants this year, despite the fact that we keep a bucket on the counter in which we toss scraps and egg shells and things of that sort for the pigs, and I don’t think I’ve seen a single ant inside the house this year.

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Was suggie stretching or does he always sleep with his toes spread out?

He was stretching. I actually grabbed the camera because he was laying with his head hanging over the edge of the bookcase, but he heard me move and lifted his head up, looked at me, then put his head back down, stretched his toes, and went back to sleep.

I had to go squeeze him and kiss him on top of his head after I looked at that picture. I sure do love my Suggie.

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Yoga kitteh is surprised that you’d interrupt her during such a crucial exercise. Sideward Facing KittenDog with a Twist is a difficult position and requires concentration!

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What I love about this picture is how evil Tommy looks in the background and how completely unaware Mister Boogers looks. He has NO IDEA the evil that lurks behind him!

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Previously
2007: I wanted to take a BATH in the stuff, I wanted to stick it in my purse and take it home, I wanted to marry it.
2006: Mister Boogers seemed to disapprove of the land, and at one point the seller of the land started having a discussion with Mister Boogers, only instead of “Mister Boogers”, he referred to him as “Curtis.”
2005: No entry.
2004: No entry.
2003: It’s a good day, indeed.
2002: FUCKING telemarketers.
2001: I turned to Fred and said “He looks all dilemmanated, doesn’t he?”
2000: Trip to Tennessee.

We’re in the process of moving all our sites over to a new server. If things look wonky around here this weekend, that’s why. Fred’s going to move my site over Friday evening or Saturday morning, so things should be all set by Monday.

***Note, Sunday: I don’t know what’s going on with the site or why y’all are getting errors. Hopefully it’ll be fixed at some point today!!!***

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Last night Fred was harassing me about something, and I showed this picture to him and said “This is how I feel right now.”

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When you brush Tommy (if you brush him), does his hair come off black, or a lighter color? My black-on-black tabby, Mr.T, sheds WHITE when I brush him. The hair that comes off of him is lighter than that which comes off of the light grey tabby. It’s weird. I wonder if it’s a black cat thing that I’m not aware of, or if my cat is a mutant.

On the rare occasion that I brush Tommy, the fur comes out kind of grayish – I figured that was because he’s got quite a sprinkling of white fur, but who knows?

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I think you should have a poll about who thinks Kara and her kittens are at your house to stay!

Your wish, my command.

Kara and her kittens

Will Kara and her babies end up permanent Crooked Acres residents? Yes. (You are WRONG.) No. (This is the correct answer.) I have no opinion, I just want to take the poll! Current Results

But you should probably know that someone is coming in a few hours to meet Inara and River and see if she wants to adopt them. 🙂

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You did know that Netflix now sells a little black box called Roku for $99.00 that attaches to your TV. Streams all the instant view stuff you want to your TV – no extra charge (except for that $99.00 for the box)!!!

GET THEE BEHIND ME, SATAN!

(Now pardon me while I go convince Fred that we NEED one of these!)

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Ok – I may die now. I’ve seen everything. http://kittywigs.com/

Hmm… those wigs look a lot like the ones Dooce is using on Chuck and Coco recently, don’t they?

I think Mister Boogers would make a smashing blonde.

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I didn’t answer about my favorite kitchen implement earlier, but a great way to chop herbs is to put them in a drinking cup, and then use kitchen scissors to chop them up in the cup.

I wish I’d remembered this last night while I was chopping up basil. I’ll remember it next time, believe you me!

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Is Newt as soft as he looks?

He actually isn’t that soft – his fur is kind of coarse and wiry, but on the up side he doesn’t shed a lot!

He is just as sweet as he looks, though.

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Home made laundry detergent – you’re talking my language 🙂 I’m trying to get a good balance for my HE washer, but I’m looking more into powder. I used to use the liquid/goop kind, though and wouldn’t shy away from it forever. But I’m on a powder roll. How are you liking yours?

I’m liking it – it works really well, and between that and using white vinegar for fabric softener, my laundry’s coming out nice and clean and soft! It’s kind of a pain to measure it out, though. I keep my laundry detergent in old gallon-sized vinegar bottles, and it’s hard to get it to come out sometime. I’m considering trying a powder when I’m out of the liquid I have. Anyone out there make their own powdered laundry detergent, and how’s it working for you?

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The one time I went to one of those parks, an extremely large yak shoved his extremely large head inside my window, ate as much corn as he could possibly snarf from my bucket, then wiped his extremely large and extremely wet nose on my arm. The yaks. I do not love them.

We got zebra slobber all over the outside of the windows. Damn animals and their slobber!

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You guys could buy more land and open your own animal sanctuary!!!!!! I mean, with bigger “exotic” animals in addition to the crew you already have. More zebras! (Do zebras feel like horses?)

I have to admit that I’m a little amazed that we don’t already have tigers or lions (but no bears, please.) running around in the back forty already.

Zebras do indeed feel like horses, though they might be a wee bit softer. Or at least this one seemed to be.

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It would be more interesting at that place if the ‘gators were allowed to run loose, don’t you think? lol

No kidding – when we were driving through, I said to Fred “It’s too bad they don’t have tigers – oh, right.” Duh.

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Aw, how can you not love the Llama? Maybe you could get some Alpacas for Crooked Acres and then sell the wool or even get really ambitious and knit some stuff and sell it. I have attached one of my all time favorite video clips. I dare you not to get this song in your head!

I refer you to this comment from Mia:

Llamas spit. When I was in school to be a veterinary tech we had to work w/llamas at the UofM teaching hospital. Llamas were just getting to be the big thing so they were trying to establish normals for lab values. This meant that we spent a lot of time drawing blood from many llamas. This also meant we spent a lot of time dodging llama spit. It’s not just spit, it’s vomit. They also kick w/their front feet. Fun times. Oh yeah.

also:

More useless llama info. Berserk Male Syndrome. Like Niki P said. Very violent. The males hit sexual maturity and if they’ve been too closely bonded to their human, well, it’s all over. They (the llama) think the human is a llama and that this is a love match. We had one of these at the U. He pretty much scared the shit out of everyone. Good times. Oh yeah.

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Who or what is Bill Phillips??? Is he famous??? Is he a relative??? Does he have a web site??? The picture looks like a narcissistic bobble head.

Bill Phillips is the guy behind Body for Life, the lifting and eating program Fred and I have both tried in the past. I don’t know how active he is in the Body for Life arena anymore (I don’t spend any time on the Lean and Strong forums anymore). We’ve both always thought that he bears a striking resemblance to emus, though, and have referred to emus as “Bill Phillips” for as long as I can remember.

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what is harbl airing? LOL

Urban Dictionary says: [Harbl] is used mainly to refer to the male reproductive organ, although it can sometimes refer to the female reproductive organ.

It is usually used in the cliché 4chan sentence structure of “I’m in ur ______, ______in ur _______”
I’m on ur radiator, heatin’ my harbl
I’m in ur washmashchine soakin’ my harbl

The idea of kittens spending all their time airin’ their harbls just cracks me up to no end.

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Do the kittens actually get any milk? I’m surprised that Kara would still be producing milk. Still cute as hell, but just wondering…

If I can go by the way they lick their lips after nursing, I’m going to assume they’re getting something, though I doubt it’s enough to live off of.

I agree with those of you who commented about how patient Kara is – she’s SO patient with those kittens. I mean, she smacks ’em around sometimes (in play) and occasionally she can get a little rough with them, but for the most part she is such a sweet, caring Momma.

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Just wondering why you don’t keep the door closed to the guest bedroom and not allow the kids in there. Also, that would cut down on some of the house work, Heaven knows you have enough work to do around there. After all, they have the rest of the house and back yard to roam around in.

Mostly because Kara and the kittens have the run of the upstairs (our cats tend not to go upstairs at all for fear of a smackdown from Kara), but also partly because Miss Stinky REALLY likes to hang out in there (so does Spanky, for that matter) and I don’t think it’s fair to keep her out of her favorite place just ’cause one of the other cats is an asshat.

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What would have been even funnier is if Fred had casually walked into the guest room, turned his back to the camera, and “mimed” peeing on the bed… which is what I thought you were going to say!

He never did that, but he certainly mooned the camera often enough. Don’t get excited, I deleted those clips.

(Or maybe I held onto them in case I need them for blackmail purposes in the future. Mwahaha!)

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I meant to mention this before but forgot until you mentioned the peeing again. After you wrote about it earlier I read about the problem in a vet’s column in our local paper. The vet said that cat’s with urinary infections or other urinary problems for some reason often pee in sinks or other drains. I forgot to mention it because I knew you guys are at the vet’s all the time.

Yeah, the first thing we did when we realized Mister Boogers was peeing in the sink (which Fred documented in this entry) was take him to the vet for tests in case he’d developed a UTI. Turns out, he’s just a douchebag.

I blame Newt, because I believe Mister Boogers saw Newt pee in the sink, and a lightbulb went on over his pointy little head and if he’s peed in the damn litter box since, I’d be very surprised.

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I haven’t seen my real hair in years, but from the little bit that I get a peek of when my roots start to show I think I might be really, really super gray. I’m 50, but I definitely feel too young to have gray hair so I intend to keep on dying it. I wonder when one stops dying one’s hair? Any ideas?

I think the rule of thumb is pretty much when you’re too senile to make the appointment, it’s time to go natural. Hee.

I actually used to say, when I was in my mid-20s, that when I was 30 I’d stop coloring my hair, because it was ridiculous to keep up the charade when you’re so old. (!) Then when I hit 30, I thought “Ehhh, maybe I’ll keep going ’til I’m 45.” Now I’m thinking (once I go and have my hair re-colored, that is) I’ll probably wait ’til I’m 65 or so.

If I could go gray and look half as fabulous as Emmylou Harris, I’d totally go for it. But I don’t see that happening.

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I’ve been looking at tastespotting.com lately and yesterday, there was a picture of chicken feet. After gagging a little, I thought “Hmm, maybe Robyn isn’t afraid of chicken feet”, so I thought I’d send the link to the article!

When chicken feet are attached to live chickens, I think they’re kind of neat. When they’re separated from their owners and being WAVED IN MY FACE, I am not so much a fan.

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I noticed you were reading (or read) “The Girls” and was wondering what you thought about it. I loved it BTW, and had to keep reminding myself it was a novel!

I liked it a LOT. Any book that can make me burst into tears with one sentence gets an automatic four stars from me!

(The sentence: How cruel it must be for a man to live past his soul.)

I liked that the book was written from two perspectives, and that the two sisters didn’t read what the other had written, so the matter-of-fact “I suppose Rosie already told you” and “I’m sure Ruby’s gone on and about it.” made me smile when it wasn’t making me say “Wait – what?!”

It was a very engaging book and I definitely recommend it!

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What will you do with the pig enclosure after the pigs go to piggie heaven? That wallow looks like it would be hard change.

and

Will you guys get pigs again one day?

Yeah, we’re planning to get pigs again in the future, so we’re going to leave the pig yard the way it is. We’re talking about making a temporary “corridor” from the chicken yard to the pig yard, because there are apparently a LOT of ticks out there (Fred had to spray the pigs regularly for ticks) and chickens love to eat ticks.

Fred was recently told that you want to always have at least two pigs, because one won’t grow as quickly as two will – there’s apparently some competitive eating going on when there are two or more pigs, so they get big faster when they have someone to compete with. Fred actually called the man we bought these two pigs from to get more in a few weeks, but I kind of liked having the pigs when they were itty bitty (can you believe these things EVER fit in cat carriers?!), so we’re going to wait a few months ’til we can get some little ones.

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I love the shiny bubble by the first pig…it lends a Disney-esque vibe to the picture.

It also echoes his shape, because Little(r) Pig is shaped like a big round bubble. That bubble, though? It’s pure stink. Those damn pigs actually pee in that wallow – ON PURPOSE – and then they hang out in it all day long, and so you can bet that my nightmare the other night about falling face-first into the wallow was not a pleasant dream.

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Love the pigs! Do they get buttermilk baths?

I don’t know that we can afford that much buttermilk. Plus, they’d probably just PEE in it. Bastards.

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“FOOD!!!”

“COOKIE!”

The pigs were supposed to go to the slaughter house last night. Read Fred’s entry for what’s up with that. (NO, we’re not keeping them.)

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Whenever I hear you call the rooster Michele- I always say it in my head (Mee-shell) like that big guy in the movie “Dodgeball”- Ben Stiller’s “fitness consigliarie” as he called him.

That’s how I pronounce it, too! Great minds think alike.

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i had a weird dream last night.

you and nance were at a grocery store that was closing and i recognized both of you. nance told me your were in labor but needed some kitty litter. you were holding up the checkout line because you were trying to talk fred into allowing you to accept some free flowering vine seeds the checker was trying to give you. then nance told you to stop twittering around and get to the hospital. i asked if it was a boy or girl, and nance said “a little bit of both.” i noticed that you didn’t look pregnant.

when i arrived home, you and fred were seated on my couch and you were suddenly VERY pregnant. fred was rubbing your belly. i asked if you had gone to the hospital.

fred said, “it was premature labor. oh, and she’s having KITTENS!”

then i noticed your stomach was squirming around in a weird way.

my husband asked me “where did you meet these people?”

i told him that you were friends from the internet.

he asked if you were characters from my sims game.

i thought a second and said, “YES!”

then i woke up.

so much for friends from the internet!

and (from last month):

This has nothing to do with your entry, but I know you love to hear about people dreaming about you and Fred. I had a very drawn out dream last night about how my daughter and I went to visit you, but then I couldn’t get onto your computer to buy a plane ticket home and I had to explain to my husband that I was stuck in Alabama. Then we were outside, and you had a gigantic paved driveway with a basketball hoop and a ton of cars (I think you had a lot of visitors). I guess I must have left eventually because then I ended up in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video, complete with my own odd little updates.

and in an email last week:

It’s funny, I had a dream about you and Fred one night. In it I found out that you two really aren’t married, don’t live at Crooked Acres, and are actually running the site as a sociology research project. I think you were really based in New York or some other big East Coast City. In my dream you had finished the blog phase of the research and were shutting down the site and letting us all know what had really been going on. Yesterday I flashed back on that dream and for a minute thought, well I was right after all. Now they are studying our reaction to the removal of our “friends” from our lives. Pretty clever of you two.

I adore it when y’all have dreams about us, because they always crack me up.

And in the first dream? Nance would TOTALLY say something like “A little bit of both”, and I would TOTALLY be freaking out about not having enough kitty litter in the house if I were going into labor. Also, we are TOTALLY Sim’s characters!

Hee.

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I just wondering if you’re having the same problem as I with the new Paw Points (Fresh Step) bags. Now that the code is on the outside, I can never find the number or it goes through a white part of the bag and I can’t read it.

I’m not having any issues, but only because I buy my Fresh Step in the 40-pound buckets, so the Paw Points code is on a card inside the bucket. Have you emailed customer service with a complaint? I’d totally do that, if only because if they get enough complaints, maybe they’ll change the way they do it.

Speaking of, have you seen all the new cool stuff you can earn with your Paw Points?!

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Cumming is a real fragrance. You can buy it a Sephora for (wait for it)… $69.

I have to say, I watched the clip of Alan Cumming on Graham Norton Shelly linked to yesterday:

And I find myself warming toward Alan Cumming. He certainly has a sweet smile, doesn’t he? Man, the price of his fragrance is high. I’d kind of like to check it out, but given that I never wear perfume, it’d be a waste to buy it!

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Alan Cumming has freaked me out ever since I saw him “Circle of Friends”. He’s a creepy little man and I agree with you, Robyn, on the whole ‘bodies in the yard’ thing. Wouldn’t surprise me this much (holding thumb and index finger jammed tightly together). And the Cumming cologne for $69 that’s funny shit.

Oddly enough, I was thinking about that very thing in the shower this morning (what? What deep thoughts do Y’ALL have in the shower?) and decided that it was his role in Circle of Friends that has cast a pall over him for me, ever since.

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A kitten movie I forgot to upload. It’s from a few weeks ago, shortly after I brought home the new laser toy. They found it fascinating for at least a minute and a half!

YouTube link

Stinkerbelle is making some progress with the kittens. They still hiss and growl, but they clearly like being around her, because they follow her around (and then hiss and growl at her).

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Maxi in the sun.

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Previously
2007: “Mister Seller tells me y’all are good Christian people,” she said.
2006: It’s been a year since we found Crooked Acres. Hard to believe.
2005: They are NAS-TAY, and trust me when I say that you’d be better off never bothering to try the nasty things.
2004: No entry.
2003: No entry.
2002: Looking at this hormone-laden piece of meat makes me… well, it makes me kinda drool, actually.
2001: I just smiled and nodded and kept walkin’.
2000: Mustard algae. Why must he doubt me?