Author: Robyn

Reader Paula sent me a link to Suzanne McMinn’s blog a few months ago, and I checked it out and liked it and added it to my links list and Google Reader feeds and have been reading it ever since. The other day, just after Fred harvested the very last of our yellow squash and zucchini before yanking up the squash-bug-infested plants, she (Suzanne McMinn, that is) posted a Summer Vegetable Pie recipe. Since it involved things I had on hand, I decided to give it a try.

I originally intended to make chicken soup for dinner on Tuesday night with a side of Summer Vegetable Pie, but after discussing it with Fred, I decided to just add some chicken to the pie and we’d have that as the main dish, since Fred’s not a chicken soup lover. (That’s because he has no soul. HA! HA!)

Instead of substituting a cup of chicken for a cup of vegetables, I just added the chicken to the pie since I have a deep-dish pie plate. It ended up needing to be cooked an extra ten minutes (though in retrospect, an extra five would have done).

It was FABULOUS.

Two thumbs up for McLovin pie!

Fred had me worried, because he’d read somewhere that old roosters can be “gamy”, but to my relief after three or four hours of simmering on the stove, the chicken was not tough at all, and not gamy at all. WHEW.

For dinner last night, we had another round of chicken and rice casserole and oven-fried green tomatoes. We’ll have more Summer Vegetable McLovin Pie tonight, and more chicken and rice casserole tomorrow night. That’s four meals off one chicken, if you’re keeping track, and there should be a couple of lunches left over from that, even.

I find that, oftentimes, a crappy day starts with events that happened the night before. Getting the crap ball rolling, so to speak.

Tuesday night, after sitting down to watch TV early – it rained Tuesday afternoon, which kind of put the kibosh on Fred’s plans to weed the garden, which meant he had nothing to do and announced at 5:30 “I’m ready to watch TV whenever you are!” – we realized shortly before bedtime that the reason we were both so hot and sleepy was because I was cold when we sat down to watch TV, which made me turn the thermostat from 73 to 75, and it’s amazing the difference those few degrees will make, ain’t it? We were both HOT and sleepy at bedtime, and I got the plate of yummins for the upstairs kitties – it’s how I lure most of them into the kitten room so I can shut them in for the night – and when I went upstairs everyone but Kaylee went running into the kitten room to partake of the yummins. She can usually be lured out from under the bed (she’s the one smartypants who seems to understand that bedtime means she has to be locked in the room with her mother and siblings and cannot wander the house at will* but that night she would not be lured, and finally I was like “Fine! Stay out all night, see if I care, and I hope you don’t want to snuggle with your mommy or sisters, because I’m not getting up and letting you in that damn room in the middle of the night!” and went off to brush my teeth.

(Fred lured her out and put her in the kitten room when he came upstairs. He’s so handy.)

Then we got in bed and Fred was all whiny about “I’m hooooooot.” and “I hope I don’t toss and turn because it’s so hooooot.” and fidgeting and moving around until I was all “Goddamn! Would you lay still!” and then Miz Poo climbed up in bed with us and began her SO VERY ANNOYING rubbing-her-nose-on-everything-in-sight until I pushed her off the bed, then she jumped back up and did it again, so I got the can of compressed air off the bedside table (that you guys ALWAYS think is whipped cream when you see it in pictures, pervs) and pointed it at her, and she was all “Oh! I think I heard something downstairs I need to investigate, bye!”

So after a little while of boring, desultory, sleepy conversation, Fred said “Are you ready to go to sleep?” and I said “Yeah.” and Miz Poo jumped back up on the bed like “Hai guys! Is it time for the sleepin’?!” and Fred got up and headed for the door and then I felt something wet spray across my face and I exclaimed “Goddamn! What the hell was that?” and Fred said “What?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Something wet sprayed across my face!” I wiped my hand across my face and smelled the wet stuff and it smelled like nothing in particular, and then I heard a cat hit the floor.

“Is Miz Poo on the bed?” I asked.

“Yeah, I see her. Someone dark just jumped down,” Fred said.

“Well, I think Miz Poo [who is known to have an abundance of saliva when she’s particularly happy] shook her head and sprayed spit on me,” I said. “Can you turn the light on so I can make sure it’s not vomit or blood or something?”

Fred turned the light on, and I looked and he looked and he said “Uh.” and I said “GOD. DAMN. I AM GOING TO KILL A CAT.”

Because there was a puddle of pee on the pillow on the other side of the bed, dripping gently down onto the bed. Someone had peed upon the pillow and then casually strolled off.

“YOU FIGURE OUT WHO DID THIS!” I yelled at Fred. “You go figure out who did this, because I am going to KILL HIM.”

“How the hell am I supposed to figure it out?” Fred asked.

“GO DOWNSTAIRS AND SEE WHO’S ACTING GUILTY!” I bellowed, and I started stripping the bed. Fred went downstairs and reported that Tommy was on the couch where he’d been all night, Stinky was up in her cat tree, Sugarbutt was sleeping on a chair in the dining room. Spanky was off being good somewhere (we knew it wasn’t him, ’cause it had been a dark cat on the bed, not a light one). Joe Bob was hiding somewhere, and Mister Boogers was strutting around acting like an asshole.

Mister Boogers has been known to occasionally pee on things when he’s displeased – he peed on Fred one night – but he’s never EVER peed on MY bed, none of the cats have, so I was seeing red.

Until I went back upstairs to see if Joe Bob was hiding somewhere up there, and I pulled back the shower curtain, and I realized that the kittens had pulled the bathmat into the tub, thus covering up the drain, thus making it impossible for Mister Boogers to pee in the drain which he LOVES SO GODDAMN MUCH TO DO, and thus requiring him to register his displeasure in a way that we’d sit up and take notice.

I was still pissed, but somehow a little less pissed now that I knew there was some kind of reasoning behind the bed peeing and it wasn’t some random act of peeing. I don’t know. I’m grasping at straws and reasons not to kill that little fucker, I guess.

So I put the peed-upon pillows on the side porch (yes, I could have sprayed them with Stink-Free and I’m sure they would have been fine, but I wasn’t fine with the idea of laying my head upon pillows that have pee particles bouncing around inside them so off to the trash they went. I need new pillows anyway.) and the dirty laundry on the washer, and then I sat angrily in front of my computer and surfed around for an hour or so, and then I went to bed on my nice clean sheets, under my favorite comforter and I slept like a log.

‘Til 4:45, when I heard an odd sound and, upon taking out my earplug I realized it was the cat water fountain in the bathroom, and that the water level had gotten low enough that the pump inside was making that annoying grinding noise. We have this waterer in the upstairs bathroom and this one downstairs in the laundry room near the food bowls, and they’re both pretty popular, in fact when I let the kittens out of the kitten room in the morning, Kaylee goes directly into the bathroom and slurps up water like it’s going out of style. So I rolled out of bed, dumped a couple of cups of water into the waterer, which silenced the grinding noise, then went back to bed.

I woke again at 5:15 and after a few minutes of trying to go back to sleep admitted there was no more sleep to be had, and rolled out of bed. Fred heard me and came upstairs, and told me to come with him. He’s been telling me that the little roosters are starting to find their voices, and it sounds awfully funny when they try to crow. I followed him into the chicken yard and watched the little chickens run out of their coop and flap their wings and stretch and just generally act like little cuties.

Finally, one of the little speckled roosters crowed for us and I agreed that it was pretty damn cute.

I came back inside and posted my entry and then went upstairs to take my shower and get dressed.

All went well until about 7:00, when I decided it was time to get off my ass and make that Jalapeño Jelly I’d been putting off making. I got the jalapeños and green peppers chopped and blended and mixed them with the vinegar and sugar in the big pot, and I was cleaning up the kitchen while keeping an eye on the mixture on the stove because the recipe says that it boils over easily, and I’ve found that to be true. So I’d clean a little, then check on the pot. Clean, check. Clean, check. I was standing at the sink rinsing out a rag when I heard a loud hissing sound, and I turned to find that not only had the mixture come to a boil, it had come to a FURIOUS boil and it was pouring out of the top of the pot like a fucking fountain.

“SHIT!” I yelled. “SHIT, SHIT!” I grabbed the pot and put it in the sink, then I took the pot of simmering water (for sterilizing canning lids and rings) off the stove, and then the liquid that had poured out of the pot rushed onto the still-hot burner and I grabbed a rag to start soaking some of the liquid up.

And then the liquid caught on fire.

OF COURSE IT DID.

I thought for an instant of smacking at the flame with the rag I was holding, but immediately knew that to be a bad idea because there was so much liquid that it would go splashing everywhere and would cause a lot of fucking damage. I grabbed the fire extinguisher and stood and watched to see what the fuck would happen.

(Okay, that’s a lie to placate Fred. I didn’t grab the fire extinguisher. SHUT. UP. You weren’t here, WERE you? So SHUT UP.)

I stood and watched to see what would happen, hoping that the liquid would burn off and the flame would go out, and that’s exactly what eventually happened, though that flame got awfully high there for a moment and I worried that it would melt the microwave (it didn’t) or catch the cabinets on fire (it didn’t) and finally the goddamn flame got lower and then went out.

And then I got to clean up the mess. I dumped the mixture out of the pot and cleaned the pot, cleaned the pot that had been simmering and waiting for lids and rings to sterilize, I emptied out and cleaned the hot water canner, I used a spatula to scrape at the mixture that had burned to the stovetop (did I mention there were FIVE POUNDS of sugar in that mixture? It tends to make things a teeny bit, shall we say, FUCKING STICKY when it’s pouring out of a pot and splashing everywhere.) and then I got down on my hands and knees and scrubbed the floor in the kitchen, twice.

Then I neatly put everything away and I called Fred.

“This is Fred,” he said.

“When you get home, please go out into the garden and pull up those goddamn jalapeño plants because I AM DONE. I am never making that goddamn jalapeño jelly again in my life, WHY WOULD I NEED TO, I go through like one jar a year of the stuff!”

I babbled incoherently at him for several minutes, and then he presented a perfect target for my anger.

“Frank (Fred’s coworker, who went in with us on the pigs, and to whom Little(r) Pig belongs) wants to see pictures of the pigs,” he said. “I was going to ask you to go out and take pictures of them.”

“FUCK HIM!” I said. “I JUST PUT UP FUCKING PICTURES OF THE FUCKING PIGS LAST FUCKING WEEK! HOW MUCH COULD THEY HAVE FUCKING CHANGED IN THE LAST FUCKING WEEK?!”

“He wants to see them not all covered in mud,” Fred said mildly.

“WELL THAT’S TOO GODDAMN BAD! HE CAN COME OUT HERE AND SEE THEM IF HE’S SO GODDAMN DESPERATE TO SEE THEM! GOD, I HATE HIM**, HE IS SUCH A FUCKING PAIN IN THE GODDAMN ASS***, YOU ARE FORBIDDEN TO EVER FUCKING TEAM UP WITH HIM WHEN IT COMES TO PIGS OR COWS OR ANY KIND OF ANIMAL EVER!!!”

Then I think my head spun around and I projectile vomited pea soup.

After hanging up the phone, I had breakfast and I had that unsettled and annoyed feeling where I couldn’t quite decide what to do, so I ended up laying on the couch and watching a disc and a half of The L Word for the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon.

(I just finished Disc 3 of Season 2. I adore Shane. I think Jenny continues to be unbearably adorable. Tina kind of annoys the fucking shit out of me, which I know she shouldn’t because she’s so SWEET and all but I want to smack her really hard in the face.)

If I don’t start my period soon, I’m afraid I’m going to go on a shooting spree. This premenstrual shit is FOR THE GODDAMN BIRDS.

*Before you ask: I lock Kara and her babies in the foster room at night so Miz Poo can come upstairs and sleep with me. If I let them stay out all night, Miz Poo would be too scared to come upstairs and if she tried Kara would face her down and some sort of slapfight would ensue with lots of growling and hissing and I LIKE MY SLEEP.

**I don’t hate him.

***He’s not all that much a pain in the ass, I will grudgingly admit.

The kittens are 15 weeks old today (at some point I suppose I’ll have to stop counting weeks and start counting months, huh?) and I’m starting to think we’re going to have them ’til they’re grown. Adoptions are going incredibly slowly for the shelter and room isn’t opening up and no one’s shown interest in adopting the little brats. I love them to pieces, but the older they get, the more traumatic it’s going to be when they leave the only home they’ve ever known and go to a new home, you know?

Ugh. I’ll just try not to think about it…

(And, no. We’re NOT keeping them!)

Smilin’ Joe.

Previously
2007: Pictures from around Crooked Acres.
2006: But I’ve been secretly calling it hepatootis to myself.
2005: No entry.
2004: Hawaii recap.
2003: No entry.
2002: Around the neighborhood.
2001: “SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE!” I yelled.
2000: All hail Dumbass Bitchypoo.

I might be easily amused, but I think this video is AWESOME.

Thanks, you guys, for your tomato-saucing ideas. I got an email from reader Michele, who ordered me to get one of these RIGHT NOW. Since I’m obedient, I went and ordered one immediately. I told her that if it works as well as she says, I’ll name a chicken after her.

Speaking of chickens, in my comments yesterday Donna-loo said “No talk about McLovin?”

Well, not really. McLovin is in the process of becoming dinner tonight. Fred processed him on Friday – if you want to read about it in detail (warning: THERE ARE PICTURES of the processing process), you can go read about it here. Long story short: McLovin was picking on the little roosters, so he had to go.

I’ll admit, I kind of miss him. He was pretty entertaining to watch and certainly very pretty. If our little roosters grow up to be half as pretty as he was, I’ll consider us lucky.

One of the little roosters – these little roosters are from the batch of roosters we hatched ourselves in the incubator, thus they’re McLovin’s sons – has no fear of us at all. He’s always looking curiously at us, he doesn’t mind Fred picking him up, and he’s a pretty little thing.

Hint to the chickens: You can ensure yourselves a long life by being friendly. I’m just sayin’.

Our favorite little rooster.

And his sister, who matches him nicely. I love that little pouf of a tail she has.

Hey now you’re a Rock Star get the show on, get paid. (So pretty but SUCH a featherheaded dunce, this one.)

At the watering hole, our favorite little rooster regales the girls with tales of his exploits. As you can see, they’re fascinated.

Also in my comments yesterday, Amy said:

Robyn, This has nothing to do with your post today but I saw the big buckets at Lowe’s that you used for litter boxes and I got some. The cats really like them and I do too. Our former litter boxes were covered and I like the uncovered better because of the access. But with the buckets, the sides are high enough to keep everything in. Thanks for a great idea!

By the way, what did you do with your old litter boxes? Our are at LEAST 2 years old…maybe more but each one cost us like…$30 and we are loath to get ride of them right away.

The bucket litter box continues to work really well for us, and I highly recommend it. They seem to prefer that one to the top-entry litter box, so we may just make it so that they have two bucket litter boxes at some point soon.

ANYWAY, what we did with the old litter boxes is keep them. I put them upstairs in the garage just in case we need them in the future, ’cause you can never have too many litter boxes. If you have the room, I recommend hanging on to them for a little while just in case. If you don’t – maybe Craigslist? Make a little money off them?

And lastly, Sue who asked if I’m watching Date My Ex, check out Friday’s entry, here.

Sunday I never got around to taking the recycling to the recycling center as I’d intended (I had a fairly lazy weekend), so I did that yesterday and stopped at the crappy-ass local grocery store to pick up some sugar. The jalapeños have started coming in, and I needed lots of sugar to make and can a batch of jalapeño jelly.

Imagine my surprise, when I was ready to make the damn jelly, to find that I didn’t have enough apple cider vinegar. I went down to the dollar store, sure they’d have it, but the only vinegar they had was white vinegar. Since I was already out, I decided to drive to the crappy grocery store in town, because it might be a crappy grocery store that does NOT carry fresh cilantro (for Fred’s salsa, which I do not eat) but I was sure it would carry apple cider vinegar.

It did indeed carry apple cider vinegar, so I bought a big-ass bottle and got home, and then looked over my recipe (I have mentioned, have I not, that I have the horrible habit of not reading over a recipe entirely before beginning to make it?) and realized I didn’t have enough Certo and I was DAMNED if I was going to go into town for a THIRD time in the same day, so I gave up on the jalapeño jelly for the day, and made Fred’s salsa instead. Which he did not deserve because who do you SUPPOSE was the bastard who used up all the Certo so I didn’t have enough?

(Nevermind that I’m the dumbass who didn’t check to make sure I had enough Certo before I went into town. GAH.)

SO I GUESS I’LL BE GOING UP INTO TOWN TO BUY CERTO NOW IF YOU’LL EXCUSE ME.

I’m sure I’ll get home to find that the cats MacGyvered their way into the refrigerator and ate all the jalapeños while I was gone.

At least if they’re busy doing that, they won’t be vomiting in their food bowls and leaving it for me to clean up AGAIN. Except that surely they’ll have vomited the jalapeño from one end of the house to the other.

Goddamn cats.

Recently, someone on Flickr posted pictures of her cats playing with some interesting-looking knit toys. She mentioned where she’d gotten them, so I went over and checked ’em out, and ended up buying a set of five toys for $4. As you can see, they were a hit with the kittens. And even better – all proceeds from the sale of these toys goes to a no-kill shelter. Five awesome toys for $4, and it’s like donating to a no-kill shelter. How can you beat that?

(Answer: you can’t!)

Get them here.

::urrrrrrp:: “Oh! ‘Scuse me!”

Previously
2007: No entry.
2006: No entry.
2005: “Did you fart?” I said accusingly.
2004: No entry.
2003: No entry.
2002: “KITTIES!” I scolded, and after a moment the thumping and running stopped.
2001: No entry.
2000: No entry.

Reader Lisa says:

I recently wrote an article for Compassion International, (the child sponsor organization), and am looking for people to read it and leave a comment. I know you have a huge following and am wondering if you could post the link and ask people to take a look? The article is called “Iowa, Flooding and the Global Food Crisis.” It’s about how the floods in Iowa are going to effect the global food supply and those who live in poverty in other countries.

Y’all go check it out and comment on the article, would you?

Someone did a site search on “Dancing Guy Video” yesterday. It used to be here, but it’s been removed due to copyright infringement. DAMNIT.

How is it that a cat can get in a litter box, do his (OH MY GOD THE STANK) business and then scratch around for five full minutes and THEN go skipping off without having covered their great big nasty pile of stank? HOW? I spend half my friggin’ life using the litter scoop to cover the nastiness myself, and that just ain’t right.

I have a confession.

I’ve been watching Tori and Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood. On purpose.

I kind of enjoy it – ALTHOUGH I should add that I’m usually playing Scrabble on Facebook (on the laptop) while I watch it.

Dean is SERIOUSLY whipped, but he’s kinda likable in a bumbling sort of way. I’d prefer it if he’d STOP CALLING TORI “MAMA”, but whatever.

Shaddup.

A few weeks ago when I made pineapple upside-down cake, Fred asked if I’d used dark brown sugar when I made it. I told him that I had, and he asked if, next time, I’d use light brown sugar instead.

“Brown sugar is white sugar mixed with molasses,” he said. “And the darker the sugar, the more molasses are in the sugar.”

“I never knew that!” I said. Which is to say that I never thought about it – and if I had, I probably would have come to the conclusion that dark brown sugar came from a different part of the… cane than white sugar. Or something. I don’t know – who the hell thinks about these things?!

“Yeah. And you know I don’t really like molasses.”

“I know, baby.”

So yesterday when several of you pointed out in my comments that Bush’s Baked Beans have molasses in them, Fred was all “They need to look at the ingredients on a can of Bush’s! There’s no molasses in there!” Because during the bean-baking process, we’d both looked at the ingredients to what was in those damn baked beans.

“Well, except for the molasses in the brown sugar, right?” I said.

Silence.

“Because brown sugar is white sugar mixed with molasses, right?” I prodded.

Silence. And then I heard the tappity-tap-tap of a man looking on Google.

“Huh,” he eventually said. “It IS. I didn’t know that!”

So my question to you: when the Alzheimer’s gets really bad, would it be better to feed him to the pigs or just chop his head off with the hatchet?

By the way, thank you, all of you who shared your baked bean recipes with me! I’m going to have to buy several bags of navy beans at the grocery store later so we can try them all and decide which ones we like the most.

Hey, remember a couple of weeks ago when I dropped a bunch of bill payments in the mailbox and then realized later I’d sent them out with 41 cent stamps affixed instead of the correct 42 cent stamps?

Not only were the bills not returned to me, all the checks I sent out that day have cleared.

Kinda cool.

“Nyah.”

Previously
2007: (Yeah, yeah, har. I am HILARIOUS.)
2006: No entry.
2005: No entry.
2004: No entry.
2003: No entry.
2002: “You mean Todd Beamer wasn’t the only one on that flight?”
2001: That’s it, that’s all the Miz Poo stories I have at the moment. I hope that’ll hold you.
2000: At the end, after having achieved a size 8, Jemima porked ALL the way back up to a 10, the cow.