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It was sunny and 70 here yesterday, and I am NOT complaining. It was one of those cloudless days where you see nothing but blue sky (in the morning, at least – big white fluffy clouds moved in in the afternoon) and makes me realize “Hey. THIS is why it’s nice to live in Alabama!”
I held t-posts for Fred while he drove them into the ground with a sledgehammer, same thing we did last week, actually – only last week I was bundled up in a very warm jacket and boots, and yesterday I realized pretty quickly that a short-sleeved t-shirt rather than the long-sleeved one I was wearing would have been fine.
There were no breaks in the pig shelter this time around, though. If you don’t read Fred ordinarily, you should read his account of bringing the pigs home, and then yesterday he posted about a thousand pig pictures.
I will tell y’all this – I didn’t get out of the car at all at the place where Fred and Mr. Egg put the pigs in the carriers, I didn’t approach the pens at all, I didn’t go near the carriers (which were on a tarp in the back of the car; I was in the front seat), and yet when we got home, I walked into the house and started to pull off the jacket I was wearing, and realized it smelled like pig shit. I pulled off my jacket and put it on the washer to wash, and realized my SHIRT smelled like pig shit. My pants smelled like pig shit. My HAIR smelled like pig shit. I stripped down and took a long, hot shower and then had to wash everything Fred and I had both been wearing. In fact, I had to wash everything twice, because after the first run-through, Fred’s clothes still smelled faintly of pig shit.
Merely marinating in the stench of bitty baby pigs for half an hour or so caused me and everything I had on me (and with me – including my PURSE) to absorb the smell.
That, my friends, is a powerful stench. And it wasn’t a pleasant one.
The pigs, however, once some of the pig poop was rinsed off them, began smelling quite a bit better. They’re awfully cute, even if they’re scared of us, and they’re pretty entertaining, especially when they start rubbing their little pig butts against their shelter to scratch an itch.
We thought they were both girls, but upon further consideration, Fred thinks they might both be boys. At this point we’re calling them “The Big One” and “The Little One” – the little one’s about half the size of the big one, but the big one’s the scaredest. We’re probably going to end up naming them something like “Ham” and “Bacon”, because supposedly if you’re going to name them, you should give them a food name so you think of them as food rather than a pet.
I offer for your consideration that one of the few named chickens we have was named “Fricasee” after food, and she’s the only chicken that will, I can state without a doubt, die of natural causes.
Playing Scrabble on Facebook last night, I said to Fred, “It saddens me that “Deveuten” is not a word. I’d get 90 points for it!”
When playing Scrabble and Scramble on Facebook, if no word choices make themselves readily apparent, I quickly enter “I wonder if this is a word?”, so I give it a try. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
But apparently “Deveuten” is not a word. Damnit.
(Neither is “Teuwin”. In case you wondered.)
Friday afternoon I made Not Yo’ Momma’s Banana Pudding as recommended by several of you. DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL.
I was worried that Fred wouldn’t like it, because he was all “It DOESN’T have ‘nilla wafers? That’s not BANANA PUDDING, that’s a TRAVESTY!”
Of course I tried the pudding part when I was assembling it, and it was good, but I finished assembling it and put it in the fridge, and we didn’t get around to giving it a try until after dinner.
Fred took two bites of it, and he said “Oh, we’ve GOT to make this for Christmas!” Fred’s almost always the one to bring dessert to Christmas dinner, and to have him say that we needed to bring some next year for Christmas was a clear sign that it met with his wholehearted approval.
That stuff is SO FREAKIN’ GOOD. I cut calories where I could, by using skim milk and reduced-fat cream cheese and reduced-fat Cool Whip (I don’t use fat-free of either of those because they taste like plastic, and you will never convince me to use fat-free ANYTHING, so save your breath), but at a certain point you just have to throw your hands up and give in to the inevitable.
The tasty, tasty inevitable.
My only gripe is that it makes an incredible amount of banana pudding and it seemed like the more we ate, the more there was. We ended up splitting about half of it between the chickens and the pigs because we didn’t want to eat so much of it that we’d get sick of it. I wonder if it’s freezable? That’s an experiment worth trying, I’d say.
We left the house together an unprecedented THREE TIMES on Saturday. First, we went to the movie store because we didn’t have anything to watch. We wanted to get the first disc of The Office, season one. Except that the movie store didn’t have The Office – it didn’t have any seasons of The Office, I don’t know why. We ended up getting three movies and then came home for dinner. I thought we’d end up starting to watch TV early, but after dinner, when Fred was out communing with the pigs or something, I heard a great big loud echoing WHUMP!, and when I investigated, I discovered that the wire shelf in my closet, the one holding all my clothes, had decided to give way.
I took all the clothes off the shelf, which was hanging halfway out of the closet, and Fred came back in, investigated, and declared it was a too-many-clothes-hanging-on-it issue. I went through my clothes, pulled out the stuff I never wear (most of which will end up on the Giveaway page), pulled out more stuff that I’ve been meaning to return to LL Bean, and after Fred fixed the shelf, hung everything back up.
Fred was on the phone with his father and I was hanging clothes up when the shelf gave way again, and I made him come look. We ended up leaving the house a second time to go to Lowe’s, and while we were there getting more supports for the shelf, we bought blinds for my room and a rug to put on the floor in front of the sink.
Home, Fred fixed the shelf in my closet, and I was doing Snackin’! Time! for the cats when he came and asked if we could run to Staples. His mouse, which had been acting up for several months, finally gave up the ghost and since we had no extras around, we had to go buy one.
In the car on the way home from Staples, Summer Nights came on the radio, and Fred was overcome by the music, and he clapped his hands gaily in the air, and can he just clap his hands gently in a non-eardrum-bursting manner? He cannot. I gave him a dirty look, and he pointed his finger at me and said “Don’t start with me!”, and I smacked him upside the head, and he lied in a whining manner about how I’d hit him in the eye. In fact, I believe he whined all the damn way home, because he’s a big singing, clapping, whining dork.
Also on Saturday, I realized that the reason my boots weren’t keeping my feet dry is because they’d split along one side, so I need to get some new boots. I’m considering these.
Annnnd… what else? On Sunday it was gorgeous and sunny, and I didn’t have to do laundry, because I did the laundry on Saturday because it was gorgeous and sunny on Saturday and I didn’t know it was going to be gorgeous and sunny a second day in a row, so there was no laundry to be done on Sunday. I went and got groceries, and I balanced the checkbook and I followed the cats around and incessantly asked what they were doing, and I went out and took a thousand pictures of the pigs (and said about a million times “They are so CUTE!”) and we had steak and salad for dinner and at dusk we walked around the back forty and watched the pigs eat.
And all is well at Crooked Acres.
Bath time for Sugarbutt.
Previously
2007: No entry.
2006: “MmmHMMM, I KNEW that was going to happen, the dumb bitch was lifting shit long before she was supposed to!”
2005: By the way, Erika: who watches your kids while you’re busy reading PEOPLE and firing off those indignant letters?
2004: You all have to refer to me as “Journaler and (soon-to-be-published) AUTHOR Ethan Hawke Robyn And3rson” from now on. I insist!
2003: Ah, you poor damn AOL users.
2002: No entry.
2001: No entry.
2000: See? I always say “Thank you” to the freaking servers at fast food places. Yet all I get in return is rudeness.