Thursday 13 (Thirteen) for April 27

13 Muppets in Order of Trustworthiness

1. Kermit – I can’t say enough about the integrity of this muppet. He’s kind, sings pretty good, and he’s green!
   
2. Bert – Put aside all the “Bert is Evil” negative propaganda, , Bert is a nice guy who makes a great roommate to Ernie. With all that he has to put up with, I’m amazed that he still has a good sense of humor. Although I suspect he votes Republican, anyone who loves pigeons is a good guy in my book.
   
3. Big Bird – He’s an eternal 4-year-old with a heart of gold.
   
4. Gonzo – I have a thing for percussionists, and Gonzo plays to gong to officially start the Muppet Show.
   
5. Fozzy – He’s always trying to improve himself and his act on the Muppet Show. Even though he’s a comedian, I still consider him trustworthy.
   
6. Elmo – Another eternal 4-year-old, I suspect that if you told Elmo a secret, he’d try to keep the secret for as long as he could. But his enthusiasm would get the best of him, and he’d burst.
   
7. Grover – He taught me the difference between Near and Far. I’ll never forget him for that!
   
8. Ernie – He might have been higher on the list, except for his shady dealings when trying to buy a Q. Perhaps being a rock star (“Rubber Duckie" was released as a single in 1970 and reached the top 40 on the Billboard charts) corrupted him.
   
9. Oscar – He may live in a trash can, but I suspect he holds lots of secrets down there.
   
10. Count – He’s a vampire, need I say more? But at least he dresses nice.
    
11. Cookie – If he can’t be trusted to not eat the letter M, I don’t know what I could trust him with.
    
12. Miss Piggy – Her relationship with Kermit does not give her the same trustworthiness status that he holds. She’s likely to karate-chop you at any minute.
    
13. Animal – Okay, he’s a percussionist, but he’s crazy!
    

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UPDATE: Mysterious Mound

During our various mushroom hunts, we have learned quite a bit about our land. During one of our excursions, I was able to show my husband the mysterious mound. After much debate, we have realized that the mound is probably not on our land, but just outside the territory line. We’d have to get a GPS to confirm.

We agreed that the best thing to do is to leave the mound alone and hope for the best.

Sorry to disappoint all of you CSI fans out there, but the investigation is on hold. Perhaps it will become a Cold Case. I just hope it doesn’t require the skill of a Medium.

Thursday 13: My 13 Favorite Song Lyrics

The lyric "One life, with each other, sisters, brothers" came top of a poll of 13,000 British people by music channel VH1. I’m not sure where these people are or what qualifies them to chose top lyrics, but I have to disagree on a few. So, here’s my list of top 13:
Please see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4915848.stm BBC Article

and MTV Lyric Poll

(artist/group - song: "lyric")

1. Beck - Loser: “And my time is a piece of wax fallin’ on a termite who's chokin’ on the splinters”
   
2. They Might Be Giants – Hall of Heads: “Roll out that special head - This is our favorite one - Please don't try to leave - Don't leave the hall of heads.” (Just about any They Might Be Giants lyric should be on this list, but this is my current favorite.)
   
3. The Smiths - How Soon is Now?: "So you go, and you stand on your own, and you leave on your own, and you go home, and you cry, and you want to die." (Actually on the VH1 list, and I have to agree that this is a great lyric and song.)
   
4. The White Stripes - Seven Nation Army: “Don't want to hear about it, Every single one's got a story to tell, Everyone knows about it, From the Queen of England to the hounds of hell.”
   
5. Pink Floyd - Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2): “We don't need no education, We don't need no thought control. No dark sarcasm in the classroom, Teacher, leave them kids alone.” (Secretly singing this one all though school.)
   
6. Outkast - Hey Ya: “Shake it like a polaroid picture” (How brief, yet descriptive.)
   
7. Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit: “I feel stupid and contagious, Here we are now, entertain us.”
   
8. Frankie Goes To Hollywood - Two Tribes: “When two tribes go to war, A point is all you can score”
   
9. The Beatles – Yesterday: “Yesterday, All my troubles seemed so far away, Now it looks as though they're here to stay, Oh, I believe in Yesterday.”
   
10. Radiohead- Sail To The Moon. (Brush The Cobwebs Out Of The Sky.): - Maybe you'll be president - But know right from wrong - Or in the flood you'll build an Ark - And sail us to the moon” (Packaging all the hopes and dreams we have for our children to do better then us in one song.) The album, Hail to the Thief, is my all-time favorite.
    
11. The Police - Synchronicity I: “A connecting principle - Linked to the invisible - Almost imperceptible - Something inexpressible - Science insusceptible - Logic so inflexible - Causally connectable - Yet nothing is invincible” (Their album, Synchronicity, is my second favorite album.)
    
12. Sting - Russians: “We share the same biology - Regardless of ideology - What might save us, me, and you Is that the Russians love their children too.” (Written during the mid-80’s and during the cold war, these lyrics still ring true today, even if they so-called “enemy” has changed.)
    
13. Talking Heads – Once in a Lifetime: “My god!...what have I done.”
    
    

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Eureka! Morels!

They must have popped up overnight, or we just didn't have our "Mushroom Eyes" on, either way we found 60 beauties last night. With the help of some of our friends who helped us spot these tasty mushrooms, we were finally successful. We had a wonderful and easy dinner of morels cooked in butter over noodles. As long as we can keep poachers away, we should start seeing more on different areas of our property!

The Hunt for Morels

Okay, I admit it. I was excited about the morels. We have gone mushroom hunting for 4-5 evenings in a row. We have not found one. Our neighbors, on the other hand, said they found 100. Perhaps it's the way our land faces--we don't have much East-facing hills. Or, perhaps, our mushrooms are late bloomers.

But it's good exercise and the dog loves to tag along with us. We're learning more about our property and about how much trash people throw out.

We're still holding out hope that we will find a plethora of these mycological wonders in the near future.

Morels!

Friends had just found a few morels on our property. Looking forward to a bigger and better search for these wonderful and rare mushrooms. I'll take a picture. Morels.com

The Boobie Tree

We took this picture the other day. We saw this tree out of our bedroom window. It looks just like a female bust! Well, except for the long branch growing out of the left breast.

Thursday Thirteen (13) for April 13!

13 things that made my brain hurt recently

1. Remembering the movie from 1984: The Last Starfighter – About a guy who spends too much time playing a video game and gets recruited by an alien to help fight their war. He actually gets to live his video game fantasy.
   

2. Trying to remember all the words in “On Top of Spaghetti”.
   
3. Seeing Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. I get a little tear in my eye just about every time he sings his final song.
   
4. I realized how much I actually like Barry Manilow.
   
5. Why do parents speed through the school parking lot to drop off/pick up their kids? Do they just not care about other kids?
   
6. Aerogel – That substance that was recently in the news for helping capture particles from a comet and return them to earth. I recently got to see the stuff and it’s like nearly-transparent Styrofoam. It’s 99.8% air but still considered a solid.
   
7. Trying to remember all the characters from The Jeffersons. Mr. Jefferson has been a black neighbor of Archie Bunker in All In The Family. The show was a spinnoff that turned out to be very successful in its own right. I freaked my husband out when I remembered that Mr. Jefferson was in the dry cleaning business.
   
8. My 5-year-old sometimes sings songs I didn’t know he would remember. I realize that I occasionally play Nirvana and The White Strips in the car, but I just didn’t expect to hear him singing “Lithium” or “Seven Nation Army” when he is playing Legos.
   
9. Assassinations of hip-hop singers. Is it the lifestyle that makes them sing about violence, or is it the violence that makes them sing? Why sing about how things are but then perpetuate it at the same time?
   
10. Why hasn’t President Bush been impeached? I mean, he exaggerated facts about weapons of mass destruction in order to justify going to war, performed illegal wiretapping on US citizens, and he authorized leaking the name of CIA operative in order to get back at someone who didn’t support him. Didn’t our last president get impeached for something a lot less worse that didn’t actually get thousands of people killed?
    
11. Arnold Schwarzenegger is governor of California. It still blows my mind!
    
12. How much you can love your children, especially in the spring when everything is just so beautiful.
    
13. Whatever happened to colored toilet paper? It’s all white now. When and why did this happen?

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Bandit has Arrived

We have adopted the puppy, Bandit, from a local animal shelter. As I mentioned in an earlier post, his mother was killed by a car when he was just 1 week old. He has fed by hand by a generous lady from the vet clinic and shelter. She kept him at her home until the other day. I could tell that she really hated to see Bandit go, but knew he’d be going to a good family.

Bandit is doing well, and has really taken to my son. They play together, walk together, play together, play together, and play together. Besides the typical puppy problems (i.e, messes), Bandit is doing great at home. I can already tell that he will make a great farm dog.

The cat, on the other hand, does not like this new situation.

Nicky, the Cat

One night when we were still living in the construction trailer, my son mentioned that he heard a kitty under the trailer. Sure enough, a very hungry and small kitten had appeared. It was a little gray ball of fluff, and it didn’t have a tail! It was completely ferial, and wouldn’t come anywhere close to us. But it was hungry and we had food.

The next night I decided to go Cat Fishing. I had found a cage, and attached the lid to a stick and the stick to a string—the typical kind of trap. Inside was some sardines. After a while of sitting by the fire with the string in my hand, the kitten eventually went into the cage and I captured it. Boy was it wild! For such a little thing, it made both me and my husband jump from it! I wanted to capture it so that I could get a good look. It’s definitely a Manx (tailless or nearly-tailless) and seemed to be in good health.

The cat loved to get close to the fire to stay warm. Several mornings I had come out to see the little gray kitten sitting on a rock practically inside the fire ring, trying to stay warm. Eventually, when the cat got hungry and cold enough, we were able to get it into the trailer at night. Inside, it was a very loving and adorable kitten. It always wanted to be petted and loved to sleep on top of me. But once it got outside, it was a completely wild cat again.

After a lot of debate, we had decided it was probably a girl. Because the cat was so wild, with it’s howling and hissing, we named it Maddie.

I wanted to get it to the vet, but it took a couple of different attempts to get it into the cage. Once at the vet, we discovered that she was really a he. We re-named Maddie a more appropriate boy name: Nearly-Tailless Nick. His namesake is the Griffendor house ghost, Nearly-Headless Nick. We call him Nicky.

When he is in the house, he is the best cat. He always uses the litter box. He is a great companion. He would even wake me up when my alarm has gone off and I’ve hit the snooze button. He’ll follow me around in the morning and keep me company. He’s even caught a couple of mice. But if he escapes to the outside, he’s back to being a fertile cat again. It takes days before we can coax him back into the house.

Now that the dog has arrived, I don’t know if he’ll ever come back into the house. He’s been out for about a week now. I hope he’ll be okay. But we know he doesn’t like the puppy.

Thursday Thirteen for April 6, 2006

13 Silly Names I Have for Everyday Things

1. Eye Juice = Contact lens solution
2. Shit Tickets = toilet paper
3. Pit Stick = Deodorant
4. Butt Wipes = Baby wipes.
5. Poop Tacos = Dirty baby wipes. It refers to what the baby wipes look like when you’re done using them.
6. P.R.B.I. = Puke-Related Belch Incident. Special thanks go to George Carlin for that one. But we use this term on a regular basis.
7. P.R.F.I. = Poop-Related Fart Incident. (Why do a lot of these relate to excrement and excrement-related things? Guess it comes with raising children—if you don’t have a sense of humor about those things, you could get grossed out.)
8. Happy Happy Fun Place – This is an area we have cordoned-off in the kitchen to keep the baby safe. We used to call it Baby Jail, but when the Baby cried every time I put her there, I thought the change of name would help. It didn’t.
9. Ike – A nice way of saying that I’m going to “beat you up.” For example, “You better watch it, or I’m going to Ike you.” This is a reference to Ike and Tina. NOTE: We don’t actually beat each other up. Once you say this phrase, everyone starts laughing and the urge to kill fades.
10. Hit the Bitch – This phrase refers to going to the ATM to withdrawal money. For example: “I’m going to Hit the Bitch and get $40.”
11. BeeBee – This is the Baby’s contribution to the list. This is her attempt to say “Baby”. It refers to anything cute or desirable. She’ll point to candy and say “BeeBee” or she’ll point to a bird and say “BeeBee.”
12. Pee Pants = Diapers
13. Eat the Peanut = Suicide. We have a friend that is allergic to peanuts. Every time he would joke about killing himself, he would say “I’m going to Eat the Peanut.” Believe me, he was purely joking. He’s alive and well.

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The Bee House

Subtitled: How we got our house for such a bargain.

Note: This story is not 100% true. We don’t know all the facts of the matter. This is what we are able to piece together from stories told to us and by some evidence found.

A few years ago, a family lived in Creekistan. There were two houses on the property. In fact, it resembled a small neighborhood. They had lots of dogs, some chickens, and played Bluegrass music. The older folks lived in the house close to the road, and one of their grown children lived in the other house.

They were not rich. In fact, from what I can tell, the people living in the house close to the road, let’s call it House A, were subsidizing their mortgage by charging those living in the other house, House B, rent.

This arrangement seemed to be working fine, until House B became infested with Bees. The bees entered into the house though a hole and made a hive in the insulation. The hive grew rather large.

In order to keep the people in House B on the property, and keep them paying rent, the people in House A decided to build an addition to House A, and have everyone live in House A.

The new arrangement didn’t work. From what I can tell, the family from House B left. Because the people in House A was not receiving rent, they could not afford to stay in House A nor could they pay for the unfinished addition on the house.

Everyone left. Actually, “abandonded” is more like it. They left a lot of things: furniture, clothing, toys, junk, junk, and more junk.

We purchased the house from the bank since the owners had foreclosed.

We got it for a song.

Or should I say, we got it for “Buzz.”

A beekeeper is called an apiarist (say ape-ee-uh-rist). We had tried contacting a local apiarist to move the hive. But it got cold and we did not want to destroy the hive, just move them. We let them remain through the winter. We waited until Spring, which is now! But it seems the Bees have moved on. We hope.

The Bee house is going to be torn down. It is a mess. There are old appliances on the porch. There are piles of clothing in the basement. Everything is covered with bee carcasses.

Whatever history the Bee house had, whatever stories the walls could tell, has been destroyed by neglect of the people previously living there. Mother nature is trying to take it back--and we are probably going to help her.