chicken eye boogers

I feel like I'm getting a little more street cred with every animal crisis I avert. This morning, during my daily routine of feeding, watering and cuddling each individual chicken, Millie turned her head and glared at me with this:

For those of you not familiar with chicken eyeballs, this is not normal. Generally, chicken eyeballs should not be foggy and oozing pus. After a minor panic attack and running around the house in no particular direction with a squirmy sad pullet in my hands, I gathered the sense to isolate her from the other chickens (to which she responded by screaming relentlessly), and turned to the Internet. Googling "chicken eye infection" before breakfast is not something I recommend.

Anyway, my searches were not fruitful, and I launched into a string of frantic phone calls to every person I knew at Gorman Heritage Farm (sorry Madeline). Finally I was able to get someone on the phone at Mt. Healthy Hatchery who told me to run to the nearest Tractor Supply (a mere 30 minutes away) and buy a special antibiotic ointment. One would think that these types of medications would come with instructions, but one would be wrong. One would also think that the proprietors of such establishments would know how to administer these types of medications, but one would be wrong about that as well.

After finally getting some guidance, I called Mitch to have him meet me at home so as to help me wrangle the sick chick and stick drugs in her eye. Poor poor Millie. So docile and sweet. The sweetest little pullet ever to be. She just laid on her side while I schmooied gunk on her eyeball and didn't even make a peep. It was so sad and sweet all at the same time. But now all I can think about is catching pink eye from my chicken. Mitch will be so pissed if that happens. Barf.

That's That.

I suppose I should feel some amount of sentimentality. Last night I finished my demo, which, according to studio records, we had started exactly one year from last night. I remember Liz laying down the drum tracks, I recorded click tracks, and then the thing collected dust while I had lasers shot into my neck.

We had attempted to finish it in December, but the piano at the studio needed some serious therapy. Then I fell ill in January, and their sound board broke in March. It seemed for while like it was just never meant to happen. So I guess last night should have been cathartic, but it was fairly anticlimactic. It's not like you walk out of the studio with a shiny new box of records to distribute. There's all kinds of insecurity and wondering if you could have done such and such part better and maybe you should have recorded that one song one more time but studio time is just so damn expensive and maybe we should just go ahead and re-record the drum track now that we actually play it faster live and...

But I'm sitting here drinking my coffee listening to two of the songs we finished, and they're nice. That's about as good as it gets. The culmination of almost five years of writing and playing open mics and parking lots and singing backup and burning bridges and building new ones is just that. Nice. If I never do anything else with it, at least I have something to show for dropping out of grad school, selling all my shit, and making my husband drive me 2000 miles across the country. I hope he thinks it was worth it.

Why I love my husband.

He put what he thought was homemade mashed potatoes on an egg frittata, but it turned out it was actually pear cider spiked cream cheese icing leftover from this recipe: http://www.food52.com/recipes/2907_the_snake_bite. It ruined the frittata. And then he didn't tell me for like, three days because he was so embarrassed. I love him.

pushin buttons

Mitch hates bumper stickers, so it's only natural that I would stick as many on our car as possible to annoy him and significantly decrease the trade-in value. Also, we own a Subaru, and I'm pretty sure it was on our loan papers that we had to fulfill some kind of bumper sticker quota if we were going to buy a hippie car.

Anyway, I've been kind of jealous of those people who have those family stickers on their back windows. You know, the ones with the stick figures of the happy skinny parents and kids in cheer leading uniforms and wheelchairs and whatnot? Why should we have to wait until we procreate to get one of those?!!! So I decided that I'm going to get Mitch one of those for his birthday. Tada!
Look how freaking skinny and drunk I am! Amazing. Plus, for some reason, they only had monster chickens, and I had to make Greta bigger than the rest of the other chickens because she's the HBIC, so she's colossal. Proportion is clearly not of concern to the car family stick figure sticker industry.

On another note, I've yet to see a family car sticker with two moms or two dads, though. One day...

P.S.--notice there's only ONE dog on the sticker!?!??!??!!