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| I made this in '08 or '09 by rendering a screenshot of the carpet pattern in the hotel lobby of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas I've been Yablo since the Sprite commercial first aired. Yablo is alive and well deep in a tunnel somewhere in the MoCreatures server. omg they have a mug all the yellow words are linked |
So now I can do chicken tricks! I can bend my head around and see the world in whole new ways! Yesterday, for the first time since I moved into this house, I backed into the driveway actually looking back at the driveway over my left shoulder. O_O srsly, right?
Wow, just discovered wry neck is a real thing with chickens. I've lived with chickens all my life and never once seen a single wry neck problem. Well, that made me feel sad...
Now I'm going to dig through my photobucket and look for stuff to cheer me up.
And that quickly escalated into ducks...
@bonenado has brought up the subject of painting. It's not a solid plan quite yet, but we might spend the weekend with me finally stripping out the kitchen and him finally repainting the ceiling after all the whole replacing the roof thing. Things will get interesting if he winds up going down the walls. Good thing I planned on chili dogs this weekend. Guess we'll see what happens. Nothing's ever set in stone around here.
Memorial Days get weird for me. I'm usually 'left behind' while other people do cool fun stuff, so I try to stay busy. One of my toughest Memorial Day weekends looked like this, pure oily sauteed more than boiling hot mess. That's right, I dropped a pan. I have no idea how it didn't melt the linoleum or even splash on me and burn me quite badly (I've seen second degree burns from hot oil fires in the kitchen, very healthy fear of getting burned!), but I have dropped so many things in my life that I've learned to jump and dodge as soon as I feel something start slipping (that becomes automatic when a knife literally stabs you in the foot). I remember I cried a little because I was home all alone and already in so much pain and barely able to bend well enough to even clean it up, so I tried to cheer myself up taking pix and laughing about it.
It's ok, that wasn't as bad as 2012 when I went off the rails during the supervised double hormone crash and then came back out public the next month.
Memorial Day weekend is really stressful for a lot of people, and just yesterday, Twink tried calling 9-1-1 for a fight that broke out in traffic right behind her, guys jumping out of their vehicles right there in traffic and duking it out, and no one was answering. I'm sure their phone bank was swamped with calls. This time of year really sucks for tension and traffic and all kinds of social pressures and people trying to get off work and whatevers.
I've done a few flashbacks of different times of year, but I don't think I've ever done a flashback of Memorial Day weekends. So here is Memorial Day through the years. Bluejacky was born on a Memorial Day weekend.
May 24, 2007
bluejacky
No, I didn't draw that, I just think it's cool. I did, however, colorize it.
May 30, 2007
Blue Moon
Yeah, wasn't writing much in public yet back then. What I wrote privately on May 28, 2007 is sad (not because of death or anything) and I'm probably never going to share it with anyone, but I will share this bit about the chickens.
I'm perplexed with my chickens. Last fall I tossed two strange chickens into the coop which resulted in one of my original girls getting beaten nearly to death over a week's time. Things settled down over the next month as the new hens got better food and more freedom. When one of the strangers died this winter, leaving only 3 hens, there was no movement for leadership, no matriarch was established. Now Luella, the stranger who had done all the vicious beating, has chicks, and the tables have suddenly turned. You would think that her being a mom, on top of her past history of abusing others, would establish her as the lead, but surprisingly, Marzipan, my most peaceful chicken, has turned into a monster, and not only pounds her, but goes after her chicks as well. There is definitely discord when they are penned up together, to the point of Marzipan not even letting them eat. You'd think that letting them out to graze would solve the problem. Nooo... Marzipan just waits for Luella to come sort of near her with her chicks, then drives them apart. It's like she delights in making it difficult for Luella to take care of them. Fortunately there is plenty of space out there and they rarely cross paths, but it happens, and I'm watching Marzipan go from sweet to arrogant and having a hard time with how I feel about that. I'm all for having chickens who feel tough enough to defend themselves and their territory, because they are literally surrounded with danger where we live, but to delight in the abuse of another isn't cool. As much as I hate to admit this, I'm really looking forward to getting rid of Luella and the chicks when I take them to Dad's next month. And I will never, ever, EVER mix a flock again.
They are having a good Memorial Day, though. I bought fresh corn on the cob yesterday, went out awhile ago and husked some. Very exciting! They love fresh corn. And later they'll get watermelon rinds. That's about as close to chicken cake and ice cream as it comes.
A fox solved the Luella problem a few days later. Salut to the political karma of nature. The chicks were fine, sent them to live with Dad, they flew up into the trees to roost, and then owls got them. *sigh* I saved pix of Luella and her chicks here.
May 27, 2008
our selves
I won't repost that since it's public and you can click to it, but I was starting to slug them out and I wasn't holding back. Little did I realize at the time that Bluejacky had spawned an Aspienado.
Privately I wrote "picnic and pie". It was a typical stupid big family weekend because people were crabby again, and I met my ex son-in-law, and we were staining the siding for the Quackerdome, our chicken house. I'd love to share, but our dirty laundry gossip is insane. (I sometimes joke about being recompensed for all my emotional sufferings with a best seller after a few people croak off, but I seriously say that in jest.)
May 2009
Publicly I was still ranting about new Trek. Privately I was withdrawing off years of very addicting medications in a desperate effort to get some control back over my life. I'd been granted full disability and was declining so quickly that I feared complete nerve fail (I was mimicking every symptom of CNS lupus except strokes and seizures). I wound up needing a 'rescue' because I was incorrectly withdrawing from a very long term benzo med and went into DTs, which can actually be quite dangerous. This is an example of my ignorance.
Anyway, yeah, this withdrawal has gotten really interesting. Last evening I started feeling like I was being nipped really hard in random places off and on, as if a deer fly were biting me. If you haven't felt a deer fly bite, think fire ant, sorta in the same intense get-your-attention category. Then it felt like something was crawling through my hair and nipping my scalp a little here and there, thank goodness I'd already looked up withdrawal symptoms, so I wasn't too bothered and just kept doing what I was doing, ignored it. It wore off after about an hour.
But this also happened, in case you like weird gorey nature stuff.
I've deemed this next story a little too gory to go on the chicken blog, but we've never seen or heard anything like it, and I've gotta tell it.
Earlier this afternoon Scott and I were sitting out on the deck in between rains, nearly got involved in an epic woodpecker battle. They're called red bellied woodpeckers, but this is what they look like.
Anyway, there's this super aggressive one chasing another one from tree to tree and around our deck, when out of one of the trees comes a fledgling of some kind, made it across the yard to the gutter at the edge of the henhouse. The second it landed, that aggressive woodpecker was all over attacking it, and even picked it up by its head feathers in its bill and flew down to the grass with it. A male cardinal zipped down and met it on the lawn, and as the woodpecker was violently spiking the baby's brain with its long bill, the cardinal was trying to drag it off and actually got it off the ground before the woodpecker snatched it and carried it into the cherry tree. (I had NEVER seen or heard of birds carrying babies in flight, and I saw it twice with two birds in only a few seconds.) The cardinal flew after it but was too late, and there was horrible crying in the tree. Scott went out to see what happened, came back with the bloody dead baby, still didn't have much in tail feathers, but enough wing feathers to fly. At this point I have to go back and mention that 3 cowbirds, 2 males and a female, also zipped down to the lawn and witnessed the whole thing within a foot of this fight as though they were intensely interested, but didn't get involved. So we're wondering if a cardinal family raised a cowbird baby, and the cardinal tried to save it, and the cowbirds were watching because they know where they put all their eggs and keep on eye on things. Anyway, we looked the baby over, and it was undeveloped enough (and we're not educated enough) to identify whether it was a cardinal or cowbird, even couldn't tell by the beak, still too wide and babyish.
We've been wondering if this super pecker is the reason why we haven't had any orioles or hummingbirds the last few days (we've seen him hanging on a hummingbird feeder slurping up the juice), and have mutually decided Scott needs to pop it with the pellet gun. If it was targeting a baby cowbird, fine, but if it's targeting ALL baby birds making first flights and driving other birds away from the feeders, he's got way too much testosterone and too much time on his hands. He's as bad as having a stray cat in the yard.
May 2010
Privately- I was able to start watching TV again after several years of nerve problems (ears, eyes, severe headaches), so I rambled about a couple movies I'd seen and whatever. I was on the right track getting off meds, and even though my demeanor was perking up a little and things had started looking funny again, I don't have anything public for most of that year.
Kept kitchen and laundry done up all weekend, then made a punkin pie for Grampa next door (war vet, and thanx for all the fish, as it were) and a lemon pie for Scott. Funny how a person can keep forgetting they don't have a mixer, eh? I never whipped a meringue by hand before. Never really got to a fluffy peak stage of any kind, but made it to the white and glossy thick stage and decided that was close enough. Cooked up real purty, tastes just as good, just looks like a flat sheet of toasted marshmallow crream. Sorta makes you wonder how in the world the French invented all this whipping up stuff, because way before we had electronics they were whipping up fancy things, and I'm getting this scenario in my head- one geeky pimply French kid apprentice is battling it out with another geeky chef wannabe, Oh, yeah? Well, watch THIS! and he whips his little bowl of cream an extra 10 minutes till his arm nearly falls off, a sous chef walks in to yell at them and gets distracted by the fluff in the bowl....
May 2011
The year EVERYTHING changed, thanks to a new doctor who took my whole being very seriously instead of just trying to throw pills at me. I started a 'spaz' blog and wrote my problem with healthy food. If you are strugging with diabetes, start there. I'm doing pretty awesome with it nowadays. I still wasn't owning my public self yet back then, but I was done being just private. On Bluejacky I was throwing silly surveys out right and left- 3 things survey. And on my private blog I was writing about sitting outside in 100+ degree weather to get away from the whole house reeking of fresh stain while Scott stained the siding. Kinda noticing a pattern... staining a chicken house, staining our house, maybe painting in my kitchen on ~gasp~ Memorial Day weekend!
May 2012
This is about the only thing I can share from my private blog from Memorial Day weekend that year, and I had gone underground again, so there was nothing public until I erupted back out in June on twitter and July on my original blog.
What a thrilling snake year we are having! First it was the monstrously fat king snake in the quacker dome, and yesterday it was a 6 foot black snake being disturbed enough by Scott's drilling to come out from under the quacker dome and zip down to the woods. The underlying problem seems to be a very extended family of mice that is apparently thriving enough to keep said snakes not only interested, but very well fed. So we're doing the mouse traps, have already caught two mice inside the quacker dome, prolly have a hundred left to go. And then Scott is going to have to put chicken wire up around what's left of the big pen that doesn't already have reinforcement before we can move new chickens in there.
A little over a year later, I finally wrote on syfydesigns about what was going on underground in 2012 just before I came back out public. That thread has 12 posts and over 3000 views, which is partly because I think people can relate. It's the first time I say anything really REAL about myself to public after years of being a behind the scenes fandom website owner. I'll paste the important part over. It's still just a hint at this point, but I've since confessed that I 'broke' into bubble worlds and couldn't tell which bubble was real during a medical crisis where 3 different specialists supervised me over 2 months crashing down 2 different hormones, which does really weird things to brains. During this time, I spent a week seeing and talking to a child I'd lost as if I'd never lost him and he'd been in my life all along. 'Waking up' from that was about the most depressing thing I've ever been through.
I'm not going into the details here, but I should have another kiddo in my life about Colin's height, looks, and just a wee bit older. I used to wonder how fans get so 'insanely' attached to actors and the characters they play, well, I had a chance to learn that last year for myself. It's very personal stuff, but sometimes something happens and you break a little, and you patch over with a borrowed bandaid and keep it together. As I went through this myself, it finally made sense to me what I was seeing in other fans who get a little more intense than is probably psychologically healthy. Fortunately I knew exactly what was going on with me and had help and I'm doing very well, but not everyone gets that. I've already written articles on the benefits of mythology in our lives, the way we use stories to help us figure out who we are and how to handle problems and decision making, but soon I'll be writing more from my new experiences.
May 2013
Both daughters were pregnant, I was getting ready to fly to Houston (my fear of flying is about claustrophobia), was on at least 2 different cancer watches, and had started public blurbing at SyfyDesigns a few months before the big Xanga server move, and that year I published pix from a family reunion. I also got silly and posted Stargate Pie on my original Lexx blog. Through it all I felt like I was hanging on by my fingernails to a crazy rollercoaster ride. It was marvelous. It was the most exciting my life had been in years. It was also wildly depressing in so many ways, and I'm really not sure how I got through it, except that I was determined to stick to producing public content.
May 2014
I had completely stopped private blogging. On Memorial Day I published the Drew Carey show tunes post on my first public Pinky blog, and the day before on SyfyDesigns I confessed my severe arachnophobia, and shortly after I was stalking Mike Bilinski.
May 2015
Wow. there is no U in aspienado Fully integrated public Pinky now. Dealing with all the things. Confessions left and right and going places I never dreamed I'd go as a public person. Breaking open and really starting to heal in mind, body, and soul for the whole world to see. Owning my stuff.
And only a handful of people know the full circle I've come and what I'm not saying behind all this. I've said elsewhere that everything I've done on the webs was inspired by one person, and everything I've become on the webs was motivated by another. Neither one knew any of that.
But back to Memorial Day weekend! I have absolutely nothing planned beyond chili dogs, assisting @bonenado with whatever, and tunneling my way through MoCreatures. I hope I get a few naps and some good TV- OH!!! Zoolander 2 is finally on Dish, definitely want to watch that this weekend.
Real life- I mopped my floor yesterday. I'm not sure what came over me but I kicked into high gear and tore into this house. I think part of it is we're breaking through another wall in physical therapy, and my energy level is coming up. Paying for it today, though. It's taking forever to patchwork this one together in between lots of breaks.
This playlist has been my go-to all week for motivation. Most of it is pretty upbeatish.
And if you're having a really stupid Memorial Day weekend for whatever reason, here you go, some really good bad mood music.
