and I thought MT posted it but DeWitte said 6$ did...regardless, I can't find it in either of their libraries. Luckily, DeWitte remembered what movie this kid was in. Warning...language..but funny as HELL!
We, as a species, are very good at crapping on this
planet..we excel at it without even trying! We've all heard these kind of
stories before, "A Scientist in Ohio has identified the last known living green toed,
blue skinned arachnid moments before her husband yelled "SPIDER!" and smashed it
to smithereens, News at 11".
I always figured, if we do so much damage without
even trying, what would happen if we actually put some of our greater minds in a
room together and make them figure out how to get rid of damn
mosquitoes..there's a species I wouldn't mind seeing swept off the face of the
earth. Granted, I do posses the Magical Super Hero power of getting bitten by
mosquitoes without getting mosquito bites but when I look down at my legs in the
middle of summer and see them covered with fifty mosquitoes, it's still a little
disconcerting.
Nathan came home from school the day before yesterday
and told me they had a mosquito seminar. I thought, "Finally..someone
is on this.". I asked what the plan was.. nuke em', poison em', slip a
mickey into their drink? He looked at me horrified! As if! He tells me that
mosquito's are a natural part of our life cycle and don't I LOVE
herons? Doesn't everybody love herons? I say that of course I love
herons but what's that got to do with mosquitoes? Which I hate more than
mushrooms and we all know where mushrooms live on my hate-o-meter scale.
Well, apparently, he had his head with him on
Monday, instead of keeping it in the box under his bed. He told me that mosquito
larva eat "allergy" and that if it weren't for them, we'd all be swimming in the
stuff and who wants to swim in a bunch of green "allergy"? I pointed out that it was him that
was begging to get into the pool last weekend and it's got all kinds of mean and
nasty allergy at the moment, he'd have to do better than that to convince me. He
went on to tell me that "mosquito fish" eat mosquito larva..some other fish
eat mosquito fish and herons eat those fish..did I want swim in allergy and
wipe out the heron's, too? I told him, not at the moment but if the heron's
eat all the Koi out of my fish pond again, I might change my mind.
I came home and looked it up, out of curiosity
because this "mosquito fish" sounded about as magical as a mermaid. Well,
suprise, surprise, there is indeed a fish called a "mosquito fish" and you can
buy them for your ponds..My pond has a pump so it's not standing water but I
wonder if they'd live in the buckets full of water my neighbors like to keep in
their back yard? If I can't wipe mosquitoes off the face of the earth, I guess
I'll have to do my part and help the mosquito fish because anything that wipes
out mosquitoes is a-ok in my book.
A chicken husband! I've been reading everything I
can get my hands on relating to chicken husbandry for the last two months
and...*drum roll* I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready (If you've
got kids you probably know what that's from).
For years DeWitte's bugged me about getting
chickens. Even with the constant pleading at first just from him, then from the
pair of them, I stood fast and held my ground. They're sell was that the chicken
poop is good fertilizer..which I liked the sound of, and that they'd eat all the
bugs out of the yard..which worried me. They may very well indeed eat every bug
in the yard..but that would leave them pretty open to being food themselves.
Possums, raccoons and lets not forget the Bumpass hounds. I pictured the carnage
and put my foot down..no chickens. Then I changed our diets last September and
miracle of miracles, it took (Not that you could tell by looking at us). So, as of right now, I spend almost $4 a week on
organic, veggie fed blah, blah, blah eggs that aren't even fresh, so I decided
to look into this wacky chicken idea.
Turns out, they don't have to live in the middle of
your backyard where they're vulnerable to all kinds of mean and nasty ways to
die, they can live, quite happily, in a coop. (I'm gonna name mine Chicken
Noodle Coop..an idea that I totally stole but which is so good, I can't not.)
From what I've read, they're fun, they're personable, they're supposed to be as
soothing to watch as a fish tank (and then maybe DeWitte will shut up about the
fish tank thing, too..double bonus. Cats, chickens and a fish tank? Do they think we live on a farm?) AND after a few months, you get fresh eggs
right out your own back door. This whole thing should show DeWitte and Nathan
that if they want something, they should do their homework to get around my
misgivings..I got around my misgivings in only a couple of weeks! (The rest of
the time I spent learning.)
So, I've got my brooders, I've got my heat lamps,
I've got my baby chicken food, I've got the waterers and feeders, I've got my
pine bedding..Now, I'm just waiting for my 25 one day-old chicks to show up. I know
what you're thinking "Damn, Jamie! That's a lot of chickens!"..and you'd be
right to think that. However, I was after a very specific kind of
chick..Ameraucana or Araucana..or the name I like best, Easter Eggers, which lay
eggs like this (I think Lauri must have those kinds from the pictures she
posts)..
Every time I saw an ad for them, I'd call but they
were already gone (Except this one lady that wanted $20 a chick! I think she
must be on drugs..everybody else wants $3-4..For $20 they better lay golden
eggs). So, I had to order from a hatchery online and the minimum number is 25 so
that they can keep themselves warm during shipping. I'll keep 3 4 5 (Then I can
give eggs to our friends!) and sell the rest for what it cost me
to buy them ($3.10 with Marek's vaccination and shipping...$20..that lady just
KILLS me!), which shouldn't be a problem because I've been trying to get my
hands on some for a month...everybody wins!
I just have to make sure that Nathan doesn't get
too emotionally attached (or is there when we open the box for the first
time..dead chicks aren't uncommon) to the ones we're selling because that
wouldn't be any shade of pretty and I can't keep 25 chicks.
When we first bought our house a third of the yard
was overgrown woods, a quarter of is was holes..that apparently were once ponds but the pond part had been long forgotten and now they were just big gaping
accidents waiting to happen and the rest was grass. DeWitte and I both cut the
grass and all was right with the world.
Here it is, 11 years later. The holes
have been filled in, we tamed the overgrown woods and now we've got vegetable
gardens, flower gardens, and a half an acre of grass that needs to be cut every
weekend from mid March to mid October, every single year. Only now, our roles
are much more defined. I take care of all that plants..(Look, I just built this
over the weekend and finished today..
it's my new perennial bed. I put the chicken wire and pea gravel down to keep the voles out. The garden guy on the radio said they don't like their poor whiddow paws to touch gravel, the bastards, I hope they choke on it. Now I just need soil and some plants!) and DeWitte cuts the grass.
it's my new perennial bed. I put the chicken wire and pea gravel down to keep the voles out. The garden guy on the radio said they don't like their poor whiddow paws to touch gravel, the bastards, I hope they choke on it. Now I just need soil and some plants!) and DeWitte cuts the grass.
DeWitte keeps an old farm tractor out behind the
pool. Every time you try to drive it, the back left wheel falls off so fast,
you'd think that the tractor had stuck it's finger in a light socket. While I find that absolutely
hilarious, DeWitte finds it frustrating, so I suggested he sell the tractor and
buy himself a riding lawnmower..only DeWitte won't hear of it. Apparently, he's
emotionally attached to the worthless, ugly, bucket of rust (You might be able
to tell that I am not.). Well, I've been watching him cut grass all weekend, every weekend,
while he could be making me that shelf for my kitchen, building me my chicken
coop (Did I tell you I'm getting chickens? That deserves it's own post.) or any
of the many projects he wants to do for himself, so I didn't give up that easily.
I nagged until he finally gave in.
He went on Craigslist..his favorite new website,
and found a cheap riding lawnmower that runs well and seems to be doing the job.
To pay for it, he went out in the far back yard and brought up about 500 pavers
that used to be a patio, put them on Craigslist and sold them in just a few
hours for a few hundred bucks. I think he's hooked. He's been rummaging around
the garage for other things he keeps but doesn't use (and apparently, isn't
emotionally attached to.)
So, DeWitte got his mower and his ugly tractor, too, and
I've got a new corner of the yard, where the pavers used to be, to put a garden in. I think I'll have him put the tractor over there, let ivy turn it into a
pretty, giant tractor shaped topiary and we'll both have gotten our way.
Marriage..it's all about compromise.
Marriage..it's all about compromise.
We were driving back from my parents house when I
pulled off an exit and heard a single engine airplane that sounded like it was
about to land on my car. I looked up through the sun roof, hoping it would use
the Escalade in front of us as a landing strip and would miss the Mini Cooper
all together..Mini Coopers don't make good landing strips for anything but remote control helicopters. That's when I
realized, it wasn't a single engine plane after all..the sound was coming from
my car.
The sound gradually died down and we continued on
our way. When we were just outside Berkeley, WV, my car made a giant grinding
noise that made me fear for my poor cars life. DeWitte's diagnosis was that the
transmission was about to come up out of the floor of the car and stab us all in
the eyeballs. I pulled over immediately. I can't be stabbed in the eyeballs, I
use those to see with.
On one hand, I was kinda worried about my poor car.
On the other hand, we were in Berkeley WV, I couldn't think of a better place to
be broken down. We stopped in Berkeley on purpose on our way to my parents and I'm
happy to report, it is still the
Gayest Little Town in WV, no matter what that lady that threatened to punch
me in the throat thinks. I saw more openly gay and lesbian couples in one
afternoon than I've ever seen in one place..unless you count the pride parade on
TV, it was a beautiful thing. Plus they have a castle..you
can't not like a place that has a castle.
DeWitte and I got on our respective phones to try
and find a mechanic while Nathan bugged us from the back seat asking if he'd get
to get a guide dog, should the transmission reach it's sinister goal. We found a
guy not too far from where we were and he took us right away. He told us we were
a quart low on oil, my transmission had shavings and where to stop in the next
big town, where they might have the kind of transmission fluid we needed (The
guy rocked, btw, I wish I could remember the name of the shop so that I could
give them their props). We continued to drive, while Nathan shielded his eyes
and DeWitte continued diagnosing the noise with all kinds of mean and nasty
sounding ailments.
The more we drove, the softer the sound got. By the
time we were almost home, DeWitte declared the problem to be just something
wrong with the wheel. That's when I realized that DeWitte diagnosis cars like he
diagnosis himself. He gets up in the morning with a pain and diagnosis himself
with untreatable cancer. He moves around a bit and his diagnosis is downgraded
to just walking pneumonia with maybe a bit of endometriosis. After a little more
moving around, maybe some breakfast, it's downgraded again to bronchitis
with a side of dandruff..then after his shower, he decided he's probably just
getting a cold and should go ahead and get ready for work.
We turned up the radio so we couldn't hear it
anymore, and now it's like it never even happened.
My parents called me Jamie or Jame. My friends, my whole life, called me James. DeWitte calls me Hon, Sweetie or HEEEYYY. Nathan calls me Mom. Nathan's friends call me Mrs. Wilson or Nathan's mom. I talked to one of my old friends tonight (that I was supposed to meet up with this weekend and didn't have time but wanted to have time), and she called me James. Damn..I miss that. Thanks Cheryl!
...try across the street
Not there yet!
movie at school today and this is what he learned...
"If someone tries to take you or talk to you scream or talk as loud as you can and say "This isn't my mom or dad!" but never scream that when it is your mom or dad because then you'd be in trouble."
"If you get separated from your parents, look for people that have kids to ask for help. They've already realized their dream." Me..."What dream?" Nathan..."Their dreams of having kids..that way they won't want to try and steal you."
Yuh.
