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!

Back Away From the Cupcakes!

We recently started watching The Soup on E! and I had to share this clip. I've been unable to find the words to really capture the true essence of it. I tried, but I couldn't stop laughing long enough to have a clear thought.

Warning: For those of you with delicate ears, there is a little bit of swearing in the clip, but no f-bombs.

Enjoy!

Update: The video with the embedded link has been removed from youtube, but you can still watch it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUbsc_a-e3g

Creepy Crawlies

I have to admit that I’ve become a bit of a spider freak since we moved to “our desert”, as my kids like to call it. When we lived in the city, the very idea of a spider made my skin crawl, but now when I find one, the science geek in me comes out and I actually get a little excited.

It all started about four years ago when I found a small brown spider under some boxes. The spider had a marking on its back in the shape of a fiddle. I knew that the brown recluse had a marking like this so I got online to see if I could find a photo. It was surprisingly difficult to find an actual photo of a brown recluse but I learned from descriptions and drawings that the spider I had found was indeed a brown recluse.

Now, most people would have been horrified by this finding. I, however, found it very fascinating and started catching all of the spiders I could find and checking to see if they were recluses. We’ve found a few black widows but the majority of the spiders at our house (other than the daddy long legs) are brown recluses. Since we moved in I’ve found over thirty. They really seem to like the accommodations in our shed, but there have been a few that have found their way into the house. The only one that really scared me was when I put Talise's jacket on her and there was one on the back of it. I was really glad I was helping her that time.

I found one a few months back and managed to get some pretty decent photos. They’re so small that it’s difficult to capture the detail of the eyes and the fiddle shaped marking. This is best way to identify them. They aren’t the only ones with the fiddle shaped marking but that combined with three pairs of eyes in the shape of a V means that chances are very good it’s a recluse.

In addition to the spiders, we have also found a few wind scorpions (aka camel spiders), a walking stick, three or four scorpions, a couple of red racers and one rattlesnake. Plus, there are hundreds (not an exaggeration) of cottontail rabbits and ground squirrels that love our little patch of grass in the front yard.

If you’re interested in seeing the kind of damage a brown recluse can do, just go to http://www.youtube.com/ and do a search for “brown recluse bites”. For those with weak stomachs, you may want to forgo this option. Most of the videos are pretty disgusting.

Argh! Episode 1

The last week has been frustrating, to say the least. As most of you know, we had some pretty intense electrical storms last week. Well, last Wednesday at about 7:00 am I was surprised by a very loud clap of thunder which, at the time, seemed to happen simultaneously with a very, very loud explosion sound coming from the east end of our house. My first thought was that the house had been hit by lightning. The burning smell didn't help. We checked everything and couldn't find where the smell was coming from and there was no evidence to show us where the lightning hit.

Then Jason said the most ridiculous thing ever, "I think that sound was the computer and I think that's where the smell is coming from."

Of course, there was no possible way my computer had been affected, because I can't deal with that. Eventually, I was forced to come to terms with the fact that my computer is not indestructible. It did smell pretty bad.

Our power was out, so I took it down to work and it wouldn't turn on. While I was there, I pulled the hard drive out and hooked it up to another computer and everything was intact. That's the most important thing - all my photos and videos of the kids and all of my digital scrapbooking stuff are on there. I think I might still be in bed crying if that was fried too. Anyway, I hoped it was just the power supply that was fried. We traded that out and it sounded like it really wanted to start but just couldn't make it. Then I decided it was probably the motherboard too, so back we went to the computer store to see if they had a comparable replacement.

That would have been too easy. Since my computer is now three years old, the parts are all obsolete. I should have known that, but I think I was dreaming a little. At this point there's no point in replacing parts, since I can get a new computer so cheap.

Well, the power was back on when we got home. Apparently, the lightning didn't strike our house, but it did strike the power pole directly in front of our house and then took a quick trip into the house and fried not only my computer, but also my router, my printer (which I bought just two months ago), and the surge protector that supplies power to the antennae for our internet.

It also put my phones out of commission. I felt totally disconnected. They finally got our phones working again Sunday and the internet was fixed today. Hooray! Thank heavens for my crappy little laptop, with the broken CD drive and mouse, that will only take a charge if the cord is placed just so and nobody touches it. It's better than nothing.

If that wasn't enough computer drama, all of this was exacerbated by the modem going out on Saturday at work, so when I went into work yesterday I couldn't even check my email.

We put in a claim with our homeowners insurance, so that should help offset the cost. Fortunately, computers are about half the cost they were three years ago and much better systems. I've been wanting a shiny new computer, and now I don't have a choice. Darn it! Oh well, I guess I'll survive.