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!?!??!??!!

why is there so much poo?!

Owning chickens has pretty much been a delight. I'm not going to lie. A delight with a side of chicken crap. They're cute, pretty low-maintenance, and I love their little peeping noises, but seriously they crap a lot.

I don't know how this happened. I don't have children. I specifically chose smaller dogs so that they made smaller poo, but still somehow my life is run by poo. The dang rabbit poops his body weight everyday (I really don't see how he absorbs any nutrients), and Buster's size is misleading, because the turds populating my backyard are about the size of my head. Maybe (who still resides with us, coincidentally) hates getting her fancy tootsies wet on the morning dew, so she craps all over the deck. Heaven forbid you have to take the compost out to the backyard at night, because you best be wearing galoshes.

And now chicken poo. I had no idea chicks were such disgusting slobs. They're fluffy and adorable, and look as pure as the driven snow, but don't let that fool you. They poo in their water, in their food, on each other's backs, in your hand, everywhere. It wouldn't be so bad, except that you're supposed to touch them as often as possible while they're young so they get used to human contact (how else do you think they'll let me pilfer their babies?) . I suppose it wouldn't be so bad if they weren't confined to three square feet of space. But every day, I don my hazmat suit and cuddle the little crap fiends. Once they're banned to the backyard, I'll have to destroy this corner of my dining room with a controlled burn, but at least I'll get free-range, organic, local eggs! That's what this is all about, right?! RIGHT?!

nature is awesome

I love my chickens. I freaking love them hard and a lot. Maybe it's a sign that we need to have children, but I just love them so damn much. They're so cute, even though they poop on each other and scream every time I pick them up. I find it especially adorable that, even though Mitch won't admit it, he says "good morning, ladies!" every day when he checks on them. But honestly, it's making me wonder how, one inevitable day, I will eat them. Well, maybe only Mitch will eat them, but we'll have to have them butchered nonetheless. Frankly, it's making me nauseous just thinking about it. But chickens live for like, 15 years, and they only lay eggs for like two of those, so it's not exactly logical to keep them for the duration of their lives.

Like, imagine for a moment eating your cat. But your cat lays eggs. And you eat the eggs. Okay imagine that you eat your cat's kittens and then one day you will eat the cat when it stops having kittens. Maybe that's not quite the same, but that's what it feels like when I think about it right now. I know I only bought these chickens for sustenance and kind of because people didn't think we actually would, but I guess I should have known better. They're cute and pretty and have personalities and I can tell them apart and I've named them. It was trouble from the beginning. Let's just hope that they're terribly annoying and disgusting as adults that I can't wait to turn them into a casserole.

I'm not ashamed!

Okay, maybe I should be, considering I placed amongst a bunch of 45-49 year old power walkers, but I used to run at a pace of 14 min/mi, and have improved to a staggering 11:26 min/mi, according to yesterday's race results:

my Mercy Heart Mini Marathon - 15k results

Let me just put it out there that I hate running. Like seriously hate it. But it's the only thing that keeps me from being a fat ass. I love to eat, and I particularly love to eat rich, carefully prepared indulgent food. So I have to run. Yoga wasn't cutting it.

I've set a goal of running a half marathon in May, and yesterday was a little check in for me. I figured if I could do 9.3 miles without totally dying, I could do 13.1 in a couple months and be fine. And while I didn't totally die, I did find myself crossing the finish line in a state of confusion and exhaustion. Finish lines are a cluster f*** of people in silver heat blanket capes, medics, family members, and pallets of bottled water. I never understood why people crap their pants during races until yesterday. I also made the mistake of sitting down immediately after the race, and upon trying to stand again, found my legs to be about as supportive as wet spaghetti noodles. But even though I felt pretty pathetic, it feels good to have accomplished running a 15K. I've never been athletic, and I've worked really hard to get to this point. Now I just have to beat the fattest man ever to run a marathon.