Wordless Friday

I know....I know it's supposed to be "Wordless Wednesday", but I didn't have my act together on Wednesday. You got a problem with that?

1. Lily and Jeanette when they were really little.
2.Barrett, Jason, and Barrett's beloved Gator.

3. Laverne, my lone guinea. She is mean as hell! She chases my rooster around on a daily basis, and attacks any poultry that comes close to her while she's eating.

4. Gunther

5. An extreme close up of Louie

What I Did on My Summer Vacation from the Internet

• I discovered that I am actually a damn good housekeeper if I don't have the call of the computer constantly beckoning me.
• I started potty training Barrett. I had low expectations, but he superseded them. He is wearing a DRY pull up right now. Mama so proud!
• I found out what happens when you leave a diet coke in the freezer and forget about. I do not dare anyone to try this experiment. I have yet to clean the diet coke icicles hanging from the top of my freezer.
• I watched a lot of the History Channel. I may have learned something.
• Barrett began his refrigerator obsession. He is currently working on my high-tech duct tape locks. I have approximately ten minutes before he starts sticking his grubby hands in the leftovers.
• I got to hang out with my super-cool niece, who is ten. It's so nice to have a girly girl around in this sausage fest. She goes back to Virginia Thursday :-(
• We learned that Gunther will move really fast if you hold a spoon full of ice-cream in front of his face.
• I became engrossed in the show "Jesse James is a Dead Man". I think it's a side-effect of living with a bunch of boys.

I think that's it.

Lightning

The ding dongs who installed our internet did not ground our modem. We had some bad lightning storms on Thursday night. Lightning burnt out our modem. .....of course. It will take several days to get someone to drive out to the sticks and fix it for us.

So, my friends, there will be no ME for a few days, or a week. Try not to cry!

He Looks Like You

Right after I had Barrett, I spoke to my dad on the phone. I told him that the baby "looks like you". I think he thought that I was paying him lip service, but I wasn't. He was several states away, and unable to discern for himself whether the kid looked like him. Barrett STILL looks like my dad more than anyone else. Sometimes he gives me certain looks and my dad is all that I can see. This isn't a bad thing, but maybe it would be if my dad was a jerk, and I didn't enjoy being reminded of him. My dad is a cool dude, he's friendly, and generous, and wonderful, so it's not bad to be reminded of him on an hourly basis. Also, my dad isn't ugly, so it's not so terrible to bare his resemblance. My mother will have you believe that, in the late seventies, every woman on the east coast was beating on his door. She, of course, beat put every woman as the winner of his heart. It's a lovely fable.

My dad came to visit recently and my mom took some shots of the Barrett and my dad hanging out. Aside from their appearance, they also share a love for potato chips and "King of the Hill". The whole potato chip thing is odd. I craved potato chips more than anything else during my pregnancy, and then Barrett made it clear very early that potato chips are his most favorite of all foods. So......these pictures were taken while they were eating potato chips and watching "King of the Hill".......naturally.

*Note the identical expressions in the first picture. They are VERY serious about potato chips.

Birth Announcement

Patty had her baby late yesterday afternoon. It's a boy! His name is Wyatt. Both mom and baby are well. Patty loves him, and she is proving to be a very good mama.

My Very Own Cakewrecks

Last year, for Barrett's first birthday, I constructed an elaborate barn cake. It doesn't look like much, but it took me eight hours to complete. At the end of that eight hours, I realized that the barn was REALLY slanted, as though it was on a fault line. The party goers made me feel better by claiming that they had never seen an old barn that was perfectly vertical, so it was "authentic" and not just crappy construction.

For Barrett's second birthday, I scaled back and just made a "normal" cake. I was doing fine until I put my second layer on, and it split into four pieces. Of course this happened at eleven p.m. the night before the party. I thought I was sunk. I kept thinking about all of the episodes of "Ace of Cakes" in which they salvage $3000 cakes that have encountered major catastrophes. The solution I came to was to just flip the entire cake over, so the broken layer was on the bottom.

I am now having major anxiety about having to make a cake for Gunther's first birthday. I have over three months to stress about it. I have no idea what kind of cake I will make, but I'm sure I will find a creative way to goof it up.

Tuesday Night TV Sucks

Every Tuesday Jason and I have the same conversation.
Jason: What do we watch on Tuesdays?
Me: There is nothing good on Tuesday. This is the night that we watch "America's Funniest Home Videos" for three hours straight.
Jason: Oh yeah.

I had stopped bothering to find anything to watch on Tuesday, and had set a timer for the channel to switch to ABC Family every Tuesday at seven. I was horrified last night when the channel switched and some lame-o teen drama was on. What am I supposed to do now? I think the ABC Family execs have a letter coming their way. I need my weekly dose of people falling off trampolines, and cats making noises that sound like words. Darn.

A Kid and Kids

Barrett does not have many young human friends, however he is rich in animal friends. He and the baby goats love to play together. Their favorite game is "king of the mountain", which involves them trying to push one another off of the highest surface in the goat pen. It's incredibly cute to witness them all in action.

Many thanks to my mom for the great pics. Barrett found my camera in the diaper bag and it is now in a coma. I have no idea what kind of horrors it experienced, and I will probably never know. I needed a new camera anyway, but it may be a couple weeks.

An Old Friend

I was uploading pictures from my mom's camera this weekend when I stumbled across this goody taken a year ago. That's Claire, the most beautiful chicken that I have, and ever will own. Claire had a tragic flaw....well actually she had two tragic flaws. 1.) She could not see through her lovely hat of feathers. 2.) She was dumb as dirt.
In the time that I had her, I had to rescue her about 548 times. She would follow the chickens away from the hen house into the pasture and then lose track of her friends and get lost. Her solution was to walk around in circles and make a noise that sounded like: "eat me....eat me...eat me". Soooo....I would come scoop her up and take her back to the hen house.
One time she was gone for two days and I was certain she was gone forever. Then one morning Jason found her nested in the middle of THE ROAD on his way to work.

In the week or so before her disappearance, I had thought that she had wizened up. She would mainly just hang around the hen house, often sitting in the doorway while her friends were away. I began calling her "the gate guard". One Friday afternoon she decided to follow the other chickens down to the creek bed. She never came back. My husband looked for her, only to find a bunch of her feathers. We suspect a bobcat got her.

I guess her beauty came at a cost. I really loved her, though.

Plague to My Brain

Does anybody remember when Willie Nelson got busted for possession of marijuana and mushrooms a couple years ago? Here is the story in case you don't keep track of Willie and his ups and downs.

Is that not shooting fish in a barrel? Did that hillbilly cop think he was being a hero by busting SEVENTY THREE year old Willie and his buddies? I think any tour bus that got searched would have a whole lot more stuff than what they found on good old Willie's bus....eh...unless it was the Jonas Brothers. I hope that loser cop enjoyed his fifteen minutes of fame by busting Willie Nelson. I'm sure he wasn't clever or interesting enough to find fame any other way, so he had to be the man that brought down Willie Nelson.

Hillbilly cop, Willie has brought joy to millions of people and has raised millions of dollars for charity. What have you done?

Mr. Nelson, If you're reading this, please come visit me!

I love you, Willie!