Chirp Chirp

I feel a little like a zombie today. My eyes keep trying to close as I write this. For some reason, my brain kicks on about 10pm and that’s when I seem to get some of my best work done. I don’t know, maybe it’s the delirium of exhaustion getting my creative juices flowing, but strangely enough, it works. This puts me in bed about midnight or 1am, which wouldn’t be such a big deal, except I then have to get up at 6am to get the kids ready for school and on the bus. I tried to go back to bed for a couple of hours this morning, to see if I could get my brain to start working again before work this afternoon, but Jason woke me just as I was drifting off. He had some very exciting news.

Today is baby chicken day.


We have three silkie chickens that we got for the kids for Easter last year. One of the hens started laying eggs in December, but she wasn’t very consistent about incubating them. None of them hatched and they smelled very, very bad. Very bad. Did I say it was bad? Anyway, after we got rid of those, she started laying again. She and our other hen have been brooding for about three weeks, and we got our first little chicks this morning. Only the eggs from the second hens clutch are hatching, so I’m wondering if the other one is infertile. I guess we’ll see (or smell) in a few days. There are six hatched so far and another egg that’s cracked. If they all hatch, we’ll have over thirty.

Anybody want a chicken?

Here’s a video of one of them hatching. I was a little surprised by how long it takes those little guys to hatch. The clip is only about two and a half minutes long, but the poor thing was going at it for over twenty minutes before he finally broke free. He was quite exhausted by the whole ordeal.

Tagged

I was tagged by my good friend, Stephanie.

Here are the rules:

*Link to the person that tagged you.
*Post the rules on your blog.
*Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.
*Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
*Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.

So, here goes. Sorry, it’s kind of long. It seems I have a hard time shutting up when I’m talking about myself.

1. Reading
I love to read. Not just books, although that is what I prefer. If I’m bored, anything will do. I will read whatever is in front of me, including shampoo bottles. It’s kind of fun trying to figure out the correct pronunciation of all the chemicals in the ingredients list. Yes, I’ve been told many times that I’m weird.

2. Irregardless
I was quite chagrined to find out that, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, this is indeed a word. I absolutely loathe it, and every time I hear it, I cringe. Please, bear with me on this. I’m not just another crazed member of the grammar police, and it’s not my intention to offend anyone. There’s actually some pretty solid logic behind my reasoning. Well, it’s solid logic in my head, anyway. I’ll elucidate. If you look up the meaning of the prefix (ir-) and the suffix (-less), they mean essentially the same thing, so wouldn’t that be a double negative? It totally contradicts itself, making it, in my opinion, a wasted jumble of letters. The dictionary even says to use regardless instead.

I’m not really sure when I developed such strong feelings for this ‘word’, but it may have something to do with my grandmother being an English teacher. She passed away several years before I was born, but growing up, my mother told me on a regular basis, “Your grandmother would roll over in her grave if she heard you talking like that.”

Hence, I strive to use proper grammar. Heaven forbid I should be the cause of my dead grandmother rolling over in her grave.

3. Time Travel
The whole concept of using time travel to fix past mistakes makes no sense to me, at all. Let’s take, for instance, the movie Terminator, followed by Terminator II and Terminator III, and now The Sarah Conner Chronicles TV series.

The basic plot is that in the future the world has been taken over by cyborgs, which stemmed from an artificial intelligence program that man created. One of the cyborgs is changed into a ‘good guy’ and sent back to the past to protect John Conner, the man who is the leader of the resistance in the future. Thanks to the cyborg’s presence, John Conner and his mother, Sarah, discover the cause of the future war, so they try to stop the creation of the source of the cyborgs, which in turn would cause the cyborgs to cease to exist, thus making it impossible for the time-traveling cyborg to go into the past in the first place. Ultimately, this would eliminate all of the events that led up to the destruction of the artificial intelligence. So, essentially, nothing would have been changed.

Are you following this? Don’t worry. The headache you’re experiencing is a normal side effect.

--Jason read this and told me that movies are meant to be entertaining and not to be picked apart by crazy people like me.

Whatever.

4. Movie Quotes
One of my favorite lines from a movie is, “Your mother went to college,” delivered by Kipp in Napoleon Dynamite. I would try to describe the scene, but without experiencing it for yourself, you can’t truly appreciate just how hilarious it is. If you haven’t seen the movie, you wouldn’t understand. If you’ve seen it and still don’t understand, well, there really is no point in trying to explain.

5. Coordination
When it comes to sports, dance or pretty much anything that requires even a small amount of coordination, I can confidently say that I’m very, very bad at it. In addition to that, I am continually running into things. I hit my arms on doorknobs, stub my toes on a regular basis, and hit my head on open cupboard doors (this is more of a height issue, but still relevant), just to name a few. Sadly, I think I may have passed this on to my youngest, Talise. I’ve noticed her doing it with more and more frequency as she gets older. She is way too much like me for her own good.

6. Mechanics
I really enjoy taking things apart to see how they work. So much so, that I get a little thrill of excitement when something breaks, because that means I don’t have to feel bad about dissecting it. When the keyboard went out on my laptop, I called Gateway to see if it was still covered under warranty, and I was very excited when they told me that they were going to send me the keyboard to install myself. As you can imagine, I was quite disappointed when it arrived and all I had to do was pop out the old one and put the new one in its place. I really wanted to open it up and see its innards. Don’t feel bad for me. When it finally did stop working, I happily opened it up with hopes of repairing it. Unfortunately, that wasn’t a possibility, but at least I got something out of it.

So that’s it. Virtual high fives to all who hung in there till the end. It was a long and arduous journey. I tag Tori, Jill, Bailey, Ashley, Vanessa and my new friend from the blogosphere, Jeanine. Happy tagging!