The first thing I noticed was that their behavior was more aggressive. We got them at 3 months old and already they were fighting in the beak to beak style. They stick out their neck and make their neck feathers stand up like an open umbrella. Here is a picture of two mature roosters doing it:

It’s very obvious that those are males since they are full grown but i couldn’t find a pic of juvenile roosters doing it. When I saw them doing this I didn’t remember our other hens doing it but thought it was kind of cute and didn’t realize it was a male chicken behavior.

Their feather patterns can tell you a lot as they get older. Roosters have pointier neck feathers. Hens have neck feathers that have more rounded tips.

Saddle feathers – as roosters get older they begin to have more defined saddle feathers. in the picture above those adult roosters have really well defined saddle feathers, the feathers on their backs right before the tail starts, you can see how they sort of drape over the back like a saddle.

Here’s a pic of our three rooster at about 3 months. as you can see the saddle feathers are not particularly defined:

As roosters get older their tail feathers also change. in the above pic you see Flowers (the black one) just has a regular looking tail at 3 months but by 4 and a half months the tail started to change and had some longer feathers at the top that sort of looked separate and drooped over and down.

Another thing to look at is the base of the comb. Hens will have a more delicate and narrow comb base. Here’s a pic of all three roosters (kinda blurry) at 3 months old. Their combs are still pretty small.

I don’t have much to say about this except that combs vary quite a bit from breed to breed. If you’ve got two of the same breed and one has a wider comb base and is exhibiting some other signs then you might have a rooster.

One thing I remember from our hens when they were young is that around about 5 months old they started submitting if you hovered your hand over them. It’s a hen mating behavior. Their chest goes towards the ground and tail and haunches go up. Take the opportunity to rough them up a bit between the shoulder blades.

The most obvious sign of a rooster is the crowing. Only Eggy was crowing in the morning at 5 months old. He did the typical chest up and out, wings flapping and a nice loud oodle oodle oooooo! The day before we took them back to the farm Dizzy busted out with a pretty pathetic crow attempt.

When we got to the farm Dizzy was the only one that wasn’t obvious just by looking at it and he got to have a very undignified and intrusive upside down investigation. “Yep! No eggs in this pipe!” the dude declared.

There you have it! My first chicken sexing experience! Now we have three new hens a Delaware, a Black Star sex link, and a Barred Rock. All of them have brown eggs so I am a tiny bit disappointed about that but there will be other chickens eventually. They are all in-between 3-4 months old so we will have ot wait a bit for eggs from them.

Now we are all fighting about names for them. Jack wants to name them White-Black, Butterfly, and One of Three.

I want the black one to be named Xena and Vim wants the Barred Rock to be Mimi and the black one to be Homestar Chicken. These new chickens are already coming over to eat out of my hand and will allow themselves to be cuddled.

However, Mimi is sneezing and has some nasal discharge. GODDAMMIT.

What have I learned here? I think next time we will order baby chicks from a hatchery. Maybe all these will go in the pot in a year.

UPDATE:
I found a picture Vim took of them fighting. So this is an easter egger and an australorp fighting at about 4-5 months old.

hhshahahah it’s just so totally obvious now that I know even the tiniest thing about it.

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They are going back to the farm tomorrow. dammit. They were so cute too.

In other news I am having a nervous breakdown (i just accidentally typed beakdown…) that includes panic attacks while ordering coffee, excessive watching of Star Trek episodes, over eating of chocolate, and extreme irritability and self loathing. It’s really fucking awesome and fun.

I am attempting a new Pdoc and he is upping my wellbutrin intake. embarrassingly I thought wellbutrin was an SSRI and apparently it isn’t. wtf to i know, anyway? Later we will add in some prozac maybe. I just fell into the rabbit hole of reading about drugs online. I do not recommend this activity as the lists of side effects will instantly make even a healthy person have a panic attack.

Things are annoying me. Like all the douchey things people started saying when the Komen Foundation pulled money to planned parenthood. It was immediately assumed by everyone that it was a politically motivated pro-choice/anti-abortion move. and the douchey anti-abortion people felt all righteously vindicated like “fuck those poor underserved women and their constant abortions and birth control seeking behaviors, let ‘em get breast cancer too. they deserve it”. accept that it was couched much more nicely since surely no one would actually think or say that out loud. Some people started trotting out shit like CDC. HA really? give me a break. I can’t even bring myself to get into how utterly wrong it is to compare the two services. anyway, HUGE EYEROLL.

I’m just trying to think of a situation in which I would feel good about limiting crucial heath care to someone because of how i feel about some other thing. I can’t think of anything. although feel free to suggest things.

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My new book Designing California Native Gardens: The Plant Community Approach to Artful, Ecological Gardens. The plant community approach makes a lot of sense when designing a garden. My class last semester was very much about this idea. I finally ended up deciding to take the Spring version of that class this semester and i also signed up for a ground cover class that may get dropped for low enrollment, although i hope it doesn’t.

Futzing in the garden and chicken herding. The weather has been really, really nice, perfect gardening weather so I have been out in the backyard everyday working on the embankment slide. It involves a lot of digging. And that involves a lot of jack waving the hose around and making rivers and oceans in the trenches I am digging. today, I made him a perfect round little island to sit on.

We are trying to integrate the two chicken flocks. the big ones are NOT happy about it and they cluck threateningly and fluff themselves up very big and then rush the little ones. Last night we snuck the little ones into the big coop. Tonight i put the littles to bed in their old coop but we will switch them in the dead of night again. It’s a great excuse to pet them since the littles are not friendly enough with us yet to cuddle them normally. Yes, they are outrageously soft and adorable.

Sketching and researching natural playscapes. I’m sketching (very roughly) ideas for a natural playscape for a park in east oakland and it is super fun to come up with ideas and figure out where they would work in the space. I’ll probably do some more posts about this and my progress with the playscape in my own backyard.

embankment slide in progress:

Phineas and Ferb. Jack has been watching this show recently since it is on netflicks streaming. He really likes it and I don’t mind watching it either. I like Perry the platypus.

Pintrest. Pintrest continues to be great. I do wish it had some kind of collage tool. here’s a link to my playscapes board.

my By Nieves bath products. They smell sooooo good! the perfect skin serum is my favorite.

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next year i swear I wont let our christmas tree be so sad. even if it means spending a stupid amount of money on ornaments. matching lights that work. tree skirt. some kind of matching ball ornaments. damnit. MOAR bird ornaments. more cute kid made ornaments.

Learn how to mix my own drinks.

after like 3 weeks of everyone being on vacation, AKA at home all the time, i am about to fucking scream every time i see the kitchen in a not clean state. I swear I will try to clean the kitchen every night before bed and run the dishwasher and then empty the damn dishwasher in the morning. that way dishes wont pile up during the day and there will be no excuse for a messy kitchen. jack goes to bed, then kitchen gets cleaned then i can collapse into bed and/or make myself a drink.

play more board games with jack.

shit. i had another one but now i can’t remember it. oh yeah, GET THERAPY.

also, go to ocean beach/sutro baths more!

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Here are a few parts of it:

roguish trader
red shirt
intrepid captain
space hussy
backstabbing traitor
giant space amoeba
dastardly doctor
robot war lord
formless entity
insane scientist

rival species
maroon
genocide
damaged spacecraft
weird genitalia
technobabble
red alert
intruder
doppelganger
space race
right of passage

item:
star saber
space rifle
mind control bug
data jack
antlers
knife of honor
universal translator
tail
recording device
intoxicating substance

place:
space port
captains quarters
bridge
bordello
alien city
nebula
enemy vessel
alternate universe
wormhole
desolate planet

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I don’t like having a million people I don’t know add me. I see how this can be great for people, i really do but it sucks for me. I don’t like strangers and I don’t really WANT to meet new people via that sort of social network, it’s just not useful for me in any way. I feel like I am on the verge of rejecting the internet completely and am feeling oddly violated by strangers looking at my google profile.

Then, there’s this that just happened:

so… WTF? I love Elisa! But do I care that she “shared” (whatever that means) a link to the wikipedia article about echinacae in 2005? DO I CARE? might I care in some other situation? maybe? Like maybe I could reach out to her and have in depth discussion about echinacae that would lead to future world peace! Or fucking NOT. How about I get to look some shit up on the internet without having to know which of my other friends have also looked it up or ever spoken about it on the internet going back to 1994. How about Google let me handle my own personal life?

I just might start a link farm blog that links to every heinous thing someone i know might look up on the internet and then my name will ALWAYS pop up when you google ANAL POLYPS.

Bing search engine here i come….

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speaking of horrible. do you pronounce that WHOREIBLE or HARABLE? I say HARABLE and Vim says it the other way and I sometimes now find myself saying it his way and I hate myself for it.

I got some excellent christmas gifts. 2 sewing books – the new Colette patterns one and the new burdastyle one. MOST EXCELLENT cat years from liz. And one of those across the bathtub holder things. I’ve always wanted one and it is as awesome as i imagined it to be! plus, a kickass pasta/stock pot form my parents that is really pretty and awesome.

Christmas day was so mellow and nice. The weather was gorgeous and we spent an hour or two playing outside. We put the big chickens in their yard tractor and I weeded tons of grass, dandelions and oxalis to feed to them. In the evening Liz and D and A came over and we ate steak tacos at a kitchen table covered in Legos and books.

Back to New Year’s resolutions though… I have TONS of things I would like to get done, or improve or start just a little bit this year. I’ve been thinking about it for weeks now and I need to get some of them down on paper so that I don’t forget.

one weekend day hike/outing a month in some awesome gorgeous CA spot. some examples: mt. Diablo, muir woods, mt. Tam, somewhere on skyline, Pt. reyes, stinson beach, suisun bay, etc.

basically I can just make a blanket – Craft MOAR in 2012 – type statement but I need some more specific goals.

use up my stash – i have a real problem with this as I am sure many of you can relate to… I’m not just talking about fabric but all that shit i have lurking up there in my craft cave.

sew more. finish converting vintage dress into a skirt w/patch pockets. sew a few more bathing suits and finish the hilarious polka dot one w/ ruffle. do some projects with the knits I bought this year – camisoles and underwear? a few summer dresses that don’t suck would be nice. a mini skirt of the cheerleader variety made from excess garden glove dot fabric.

screen printing – i have a few screen printing projects I would like to do this year.

House and yard – get backyard meadow planted and keep experimenting with natives. continue w/ veggie garden and work on planting stuff we will actually eat. take down side yard gate. integrate new chickens. front yard is a horrible wasteland of dirt – work on that. start taking down the shitty invasive ivy.

remodel the downstairs bathroom/laundry room. We are maybe gearing up for this. It could happen. Altso, we really should do our foundation but stocks everywhere tanked heinously and so there went all our money. here is my pintrest for the project. is there a polyvore type thing for house decorating related stuff? to make more of a collage? that would be a cool feature for pintrest – to let you take images from a board and collage them.

Get organized! – something might get organized and stay that way this year. i like to think it will happen.

School – Spring – survive spring natives class and attempt landscape eval class. Fall – no idea but hopefully some actual design classes.

We have a bunch of summer plans already. We’ll be on the East Coast for a couple of weeks in July and we are also thinking of going to Burningman one more time… with or without Jack remains to be seen. Maybe we’ll throw in fish or family camp too. I know I am going to start longing for Maui but I think we are skipping it this year.

One milestone happening this year is that Jack turns five in May and fall of 2012 he will start kindergarten. So fall of this coming year will be a big adjustment. It means we will all have to wake up early and be out of the house at 8am instead of 9am. I think jack will be fine with the transition to school ’til 3pm everyday. He has his first private school evaluation Jan 17th. i’m excited about it! For me it means I could go get a job or ramp up school to full or almost full time. I’m going to make a real effort to not freak out about that until I have to and jack is still so little i don’t want him to be in aftercare all day after school yet. So this fall doesn’t mean a one way ticket back to coding cubeland for me. If I thought it did I would def. be freaking out.

In other news, I love my lego knight bus.

I’m sure I am forgetting some stuff but this is a good start.

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Jack named them Eggy, Flowers and Dizzy.

Right now we have them in the side yard in our old hen house. It’s an awesome place to have a hen house because we can look out the huge picture window in the dining room to watch them. The cats are in cat TV heaven. We might try to move our big hen house there even though it is against the law here where chicken houses have to be 20 ft from a residence. Once our neighbors reappear (they have been gone for like 2 months!) we will ask if they mind.

I just watched eggy and dizzy fighting it out to be top chicken. They stand beak to beak, stick their necks out and fluff out their neck feathers like umbrellas and then they dance around each other. I feel kind of bad for them since once they work out their peeking order we will stick them in the big coop with 3 huge chickens and they will all have to work it out again.

HOLY SHIT A BABY OPOSSUM IS CUTE.
In other news Vim saw a baby possum and it was cute as fuck.
It’s huge and horrible mother wants to eat some baby chickens I am sure but there is no way they are getting into the coops. So there.

Our new fence in the front yard is up and I love it. Here’s a crappy iPhone pic of it:

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yeah, 7 of 9 was a bid to add some sexy so that idiotic 20 year old misogynist male fans would stop bitching about every.single.thing about Janeway. Sad. I know. but 7 of 9 WAS sexy AND awesome so I thought it was a win win. The main annoying horrible characters on Voyager were Chakotay and horndog white guy Paris. Janeway was a pretty kickass Captain. I’m only like 6 episodes in so I cant remember exactly what happens later but i remember feeling a little annoyed later on with her because she started like, gazing up at Chakotay too much.

Anyway, can you imagine Kirk in Janeway’s situation? Hell no, there is no way he would have been smart enough in that first episode to realize that the only way to work it was to integrate the two crews. I mean, i guess it was pretty fortunate that the original first officer was killed but whatever! Harry Kim was fucking hot, the Doctor was awesome, Torres was pretty good, I hated Kes and Neelix was annoying but worked as a comedic foil to Tuvok.

After the complexity of Deep Space Nine Voyager was a tad disappointing but since it was sort of just a return to the TNG model it wasn’t a particular shock.

Any other trekkies out there? Which was your favorite incarnation of the Trekkie ‘Verse?

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This book also has a bunch of other awesome stories. The Very Mischief by Lesley Frost. Susan’s Bears by Mildred Lawrence and the Pear Tree by E. Elizabeth Longwell. ther is a list on this page.

________________________________________

Once upon a time there was a little girl named Donnica who lived with her mother and a little black mouse. Mousie was very bad because no one had taught him to be good.

He cut big holes in the bedspread with Donnica’s little scissors.
He threw all of Donnica’s clean socks into the bathtub when it had water in it.
He made little mud tracks all over the rug when he came in.
Donnica’s mother said, “Mousie, don’t you know that nobody loves a bad mouse? That’s why we don’t want you to stay here with us anymore.” And she took her broom and swept him out of the house. “Now, don’t you come back until you learn to be a good ouse,” she called after him. Then she closed the door and locked it.
But bad Mousie waited until dark. Then he crawled under the gate and crept through a crack in the wall. And next morning, there he was again!
Donnica was glad to see him, but Mousie was still bad.
He pulled the top off the powder can and spilled powder all over the rug.
He tangled Donnica’s hair and scattered her ribbons on the floor.
He tipped over things not he breakfast table and spilled cocoa, and orange juice, and lots and lots of milk.
This made Donnica’s mother very angry. “Bad Mousie,” she said, “I’m going to put you in a box and close it tight and throw it in my washtub full fo water.” And she did.

But the box was only glued together, and the water softened the glue and the box fell apart. So, Mousie swam up to the top and scrambled out. Then he shook the water out of his ears and he climbed the cellar stairs and squeezed under the door. And there he was again! And Donnica was glad to see him.
The next day Mousie was as bad as ever.
He pulled all the books out of the shelves and tore out some of the pages.
He unrolled yards and yards of paper in the bathroom.
He spilled green ink all over the inside of a desk drawer.
Now Donnica’s mother was very, very angry. She said, “Mousie, you are so very bad that I shall feed you to the night owl!” o she took him and tied him with three white strings to the fence in the back yard. Then she put a yellow ribbon around his neck, so that the owl could see him better in the dark and fly down and gobble him up.
But before the stars came out, the mouse wriggled and tugged and finally got his feet loose. Then he untangled his tail, and nibbled through the strings around his tummy. So he was free again, and he ran and hid all night. The owl couldn’t find him.
Next morning he came back to the house and climbed in at an open window. And there he was again! And Donnica was glad to see him.
But Mousie was still bad!
The next time Donnica’s mother was away at the store, he took purple crayon and scribbled all over the yellow wallpaper.
Then he dumped all the buttons out of the button box.
He found a bottle of shoe polish, and he painted the floor white.
When Donnica’s mother came home and found the awful mess he had made, she grabbed him by his little string tail. Then she pressed her lips together hard, and she thought and thought of a way to get rid of him. At last she decided to let the wind blow him away.

So she got her oldest umbrella and fastened Mousie to the handle with an old belt. Then she carried him up to the roof and opened the umbrella, so that the wind could blow him off, right into the sky. The little mouse kicked and squeaked, but it did him no good, for soon the umbrella was sailing up, up over the tree tops. And Mousie was fastened to it.
After a while the umbrella drifted gently down onto a little ink cloud. Mousie managed to get himself unbuckled, and he let the big umbrella blow away. Then he lay down on the soft, warm cloud to rest. He was really very lonely and wished that he could go home to Donnica and her mother and live there with them. “Maybe I could leaner to be good,” he thought.
All of a sudden it began to get cold and th cloud began to drip. Drip, drip; drop, drop; dripple, droplet; the cloud was changing into rain. Mousie was getting wetter and wetter. Soon there was no cloud to lie on, and down he tumbled with the raindrops. Down, down, until he splashed into a muddy puddle.
Mousie was cold and wet and very unhappy. He had to swim and wade to get out of the big puddle. Then he ran as fast as he could to Donnica’s house. But before he crept under the door, guess what he did! He wiped his muddy little feet on the doormat.
And when Donnica looked around, there he was again! “Donnica,” said the mouse, “could you teach me to be a good mouse? I want to stay here with you where it is warm and cozy and I can be your friend.”
“I’ll try to teach you,” said Donnica.
“And I’ll try to be good, ” said the mouse.
So Donnica taught him how to begin to be good.
She showed him what not to touch.
She told him to cutpaper dolls, instead of bedspreads, with her little scissors.

She taught him how to wipe up the milk he spilled.
She helped him pick up books and put buttons away in there boxes.
Then she kissed him to help him get good faster.
When Donnica’s mother came home from the store, she certainly was surprised, for there was Mousie helping Donnica set the table for lunch.
“Mommie, I’m teaching him to be a good mouse,” said Donnica, “and Mousie is trying very, very hard. Please let him stay.”
So Donnica’s mother was proud of them both, and she told Mousie that she, too, would help him learn to be good. Then she hugged Donnica and the mouse, and they all join hands and danced round and round.
Next day Mousie brought in the morning newspaper and the mail.
He wiped all the forks and spoons, and put away the pans after breakfast.
And he spread the wet tea-towels out on the grass too bleach in the sun.
So Mousie became a good mouse, and they all lived cozily together again.

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welp! I’m back! *waves energetically but not in a perky fashion*
thanks to my sister, who kicks ass all over the place.

Here she is:

I am sitting here at noisebridge in SF. It’s very cool but only for visiting occasionally. for me. I am way too much of a hermit to be able to deal with this. there are people popping in and out, doing shit. I hate that. they might
a. see me
b. talk to me
c. wonder what i am doing
d. make noise
e. talk to each other
f. listen to music loudly on headphones that i will still be able to hear.
g. do stuff.

All things that are unacceptable to my cold black miserly heart.

I do like that it exists and that it is the kind of thing my sister likes. this means that i can come enjoy the benefits of it occasionally without having to explain myself. it’s called ‘riding on my sister’s coat tails” and i do it a lot. it’s a benefit of having an older sister of the extrovert variety.

speaking of coat tails. she needs to give me my tux tails back.

I’ve been doing some stuff.
I made a dress:

and i should be doing homework right now. I also have an asston of christmas presents to make.

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After:

I’m sure there is some philosophy about how workplace reorgs are a great thing. I’m not sure what those great things are but you can bet they were made up by a bunch of extroverts. I never liked that kind of reorg at work but i do like to endlessly reorganize cabinets for some reason.

This kitchen pantry organizing project was quite easy and didn’t take too long as it is a pretty small cabinet. Problems encountered were things like: i have 1/4 cup of elbow noodles left over that won’t fit in to the jar. that stressed me more than it should have for sure.

I still need to do the cabinet of baking stuff. we have a million tiny amounts of odd types of flours. this will have to wait until next year though.

I just spent a good HOUR being a princess who was out of ammunition who kept being attacked by a large octopus… my head has now exploded.

I am attempting to sew a dress! it has princess seams and I have never sewn princess seams before but it is clear from my muslin that the apex is in completely the wrong place.

I wish my dress form was in better working order. did I ever post about the dress form? hmmmm.

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Things have been slowly changing over the past however many years and i have been enjoying reading about nutrition and realizing more fully that food is meant to be delicious and nutritious. It doest seem too too long ago that my favorite breakfast was a diet coke, doritos and a cigarette… just typing that made me salivate a little. Yum! and GROSS!

Now I try to buy meat and produce from CA, I don’t buy a lot a of processed foods but certainly crackers and cookies sometimes. I like fancy cheese. I occasionally buy juice for Jack although I tend to only drink juice when I am sick. I buy a LOT of milk and cream, usually Strauss Farms but sometimes just whatever.

Sometimes I have my shit together and I make a weekly meal plan but really, that is not too often

I dashed across the street to the grocery store this morning and bought: cream, eggs (our chickens aren’t really laying right now), genoa salami, kalamata olives, an apple, my favorite Alvarado Street California protein bread, italian provolone, parmesan, sharp cheddar and.. that’s it, I think.

Sometimes I buy stuff in cans but mostly I try to make soups from scratch and buy dry beans instead of canned. Last week I made a crockpot chicken soup recipe that called for canned beans and I didn’t have any. So I soaked some dry beans over night and then added them to the crockpot… but I hadn’t COOKED them. So they came out crunchy. It was horrible. Resetting the crockpot to cook another 6 hours worked totally fine somehow and didn’t dry out the chicken or make it seem over cooked. major save! and that fed Vim and me for a whole week.

I make broth and soups and freeze them now that i have a crockpot. One of those tiny deep freezes would be super handy. I saw them at the store when we bought our fridge. They are cheap and when we have a basement someday I will get one. Then we can do that thing where you buy half a cow or whatever.

I also order food from Three Stone Hearth every week. This week I ordered Pastured Pork and White Beans with Greens, Beef Stew Osso Bucco Style and the Gremolata that goes with it plus more walnuts and their coconut date bars that are so damn good.

I grow some stuff. Just greens are growing now, I have kale, lettuces, bok choy and mustard greens ready to go. When I need some I just go out and pick it. All good for stir fry and soups.

What I ate today:
two egg omelet with olives, cheddar and walnuts.
two fish tacos from Rubio’s
curry lentil soup with yogurt cream
and like 3 cups of coffee
water
large spoonful of almond butter

That menu has a distinct lack of veggies in it, i guess the fish tacos had some…

What Jack ate today:
3 scrambled eggs with olives
cereal (some wheat flake kind) w/ milk
water
spanish rice and 1/2 a cheese quesedilla and a gross churro
some milk
2 strawberry mochi ice creams
2 bowls of beef stew with green beans and potatoes
1 small box of NERDS from his halloween stash

That’s more sweet stuff than he usually eats… oops. It was a holiday!

Here’s my fridge plus notes added with the app Skitch which is pretty awesome. Oh and if you like looking at people’s fridges, like I do, there is a whole flicker group for you to peruse here.

Today I embark on a pantry cabinet reorg inspired by Stitch and Boots, you can read her post on cleaning and organizing your shelves here. okay, wish me luck. I will blog about it hopefully today too.

oh and i wrote this on Friday but published it on saturday.

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Which was great and all but the scene utterly lacked all my classmates and teacher and since I was supposed to be meeting them I was on the verge of a panic attack. I finally got cell reception nd left my teacher a tearful message and then ran into a few other class mates who were equally flummoxed.

Unbelievably gorgeous november day, sans the rest of my class:

I drove all over effing Pt. Reyes and then, after a mini nervous breakdown, decided to take a nap on the beach and have lunch. After that I was on my way home when I saw a crap load of cars on the side of the road and it was… my class!

Turns out they never went to the place we were supposed to meet… (WHAT>!>WHY? OMFG) . instead, the teacher and assistant decided to stand on the side of the road and try to flag everyone down to go to north beach. But they missed about half the class. So, that blows.

I joined up with them and we drove around sort of frantically and pointlessly until i was almost out of gas and had to hitch a ride with classmates. It was a beautiful, highly annoying and pointless day. I almost wish I hadn’t seen them and joined up.

I was really looking forward to getting to walk around with someone very knowledgable about plants but there was no plant list, we didn’t spend much time or talk about anything in depth, it was basically impossible to listen, take pictures and take notes all at the same time so I just gave up.

We ended up here:

Sometimes I can’t believe I am lucky enough to live here.

I saw a bunch of tule elk and that was awesome. Also, happy California cows, they are adorable.

At least there is no homework this week!

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The new fridge is a Kitchen Aid counter depth, freezer on the bottom, french door, w/ in freezer ice-maker and in-fridge water dispenser.

I hate fridge with a door ice and water dispenser in the same way I hate a house that has it’s garage positioned closer to the street than the house. it’s like a prolapsed turtle uterus. Gross. It’s just very indecent.

I imagine that with a counter depth fridge I will no longer lose shit in the back only to find it later in a soggy moldy gross heap. That will no longer happen. Instead everything will be above my eye level and therefore will not really exist. Hopefully that means the moldy soggy thing will not exist either.

Counter depth will also mean that the kitchen will look bigger. It’s already perfectly large to medium sized kitchen so… I’m not really concerned with it seeming bigger anyway. BUT. Having the double doors will be awesome when we someday build a kitchen island. we really need some more horizontal surfaces to store our shit on.

We have sold our current fridge to some friends and I just finished cleaning it out. EW. Thank god I cleaned it our recently. that first clean out took me like ALL DAY. it was super gross. so anyway, this time around ti wasn’t so bad but still really boring. I am looking forward to arranging stuff in the new fridge. That will be the last blush of the illusionary thinking that this new fridge will make our life better.

UPDATE:
New fridge has arrived. It is quite magnificent!
behold!

It’s all clean and organized!!!
Mom, you can see there is some orange pineapple juice in there. Jack insisted that we get some for you at the store the other day…. I’m sure it will be gone by the time you get here though.

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1. I continue to be upset about the gender balance of children’s toys and books. Lego mini figures for example. I’m upset about them. Why are there only 4 lady lego figures in the series 5 mini-figure packs? why do they all have red lips and boobs? The male mini figures don’t all have huge crotch bulges. the male figures are mostly just blank slates that could be either male or female if there weren’t these stupid boobed red lipped figures. so what fucking gives Lego and Play Mobile? I want to love you but I can’t.

Pink leotard boombox headband lady figure? RLY? PULEEESE fuck offfffff.

2. Flatware. We have, for some reason, only like 3 butter knives. I don’t know where all our knives went but I didn’t like them or the rest of our crappy flatware anyway. why is all modern flatware so HUGE? Every time I have to pick up a fork that is bigger than my arm I am pissed about it. I need to buy some vintage flatware but I am afraid Vim is going to kick and scream about it. I kind of want this mid century modern Interpur set or this Florenz flower Interpur set, or this Mexicaly Rose Interpur set. .

3. There’s another thing I am so unreasonably upset about that I don’t want to blog about for fear of exposing myself as even more of an asshole. It’s something that SHOULD be really awesome but that I fear is actual fucking stupid due to annoying fuckery. I want to complain about it SO BAD(ly) but I will show uncharacteristic restraint, for now anyway.

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We grew those cute little white pumpkins ourselves! I like the white with the contrast of the orange insides.

Then I made Jack’s costume:

I was a little nervous about it since he was being sort of bossy and demanding about what it should look like. I had to explain that I would do the best I could and that if he complained my head would explode and he would have to clean it up.

I might draw up a little tutorial as making this alligator tail was pretty easy and came out so cute on him:

We did the Piedmont Ave Halloween parade and trick or treating event on Saturday:

Then on to the haunted hallway at the elementary school, then to the free hot dogs and bouncy houses at the cemetery. I love this neighborhood.

Sunday was a Halloween birthday party at which they beat the crap out of a unicorn, chased a ghost, made magic wands and ate cake.

Monday at preschool they went to the pumpkin patch wearing their new screen printed shirts and they bobbed for apples. heh. When I picked jack up after school one of the other kids said she was going trick or treating. Last year we did not do that on halloween night so i sent out a hurried e-mail to my neighborhood toddlers mailing list about when and where to do it. We went out at about 6:30. jack refused to wear his crocigator outfit and instead wore a ninja sword and a mask he made at school.

It was pretty cute watching him trick or treat. He rang doorbells, said trick or treat loudly and said thank you after getting candy. It was fun to watch and fun to see the people who live around here and all the other kids in costumes.

What in the heck do we do with all this candy? I ate a few baby snickers and a butterfingers. It’s all too sweet for me now. Jack likes the sour candies and the lollipops.

Jack sorted his candy and crouched over it like a dragon on a pile of gold

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I’m just bitter because I feel like a failure no matter what I do.

I sort of attempted to have a crafty business. My etsy shop was going strong for a while and i did well at craft shows but I wasn’t organized enough to keep it going and i couldn’t deal with shit like taxes.

The craft conference thing was too much work and we all burned out. We didn’t get paid enough and while people enjoyed it and it was a worthy cause no one wanted to pay for it and now Etsy has swooped in with it’s free events and lectures and conferences and shit. So much for small business…

School is kicking my ass because I don’t know why. Is it all in my head? Am I stressing about homework too much? no and yes. it’s total snowflake community college in which we aren’t even forced to actually KNOW anything. Besides which I have no idea where this is going. If it ends up meaning i have to have my own business than the whole idea is clearly pointless. I could go to Berkeley Extension for Landscape Architecture but that is expensive and what if it was ultimately pointless and the second i got my degree I discovered that actually i really need to go back to school for underwater basketweaving because that is my true true true calling? plus, when I told vim my secret hearts yearning five year plan he looked at me like I was an idiot and suggested that I learn a new programming language.

I DO want to learn a new language but when exactly will I have time to do that? I need to write a new form and back end voting system, I have about 6 months to do it. It’s on my list.

I am feeling extra sensitive. One of my friends told me that my “personality isn’t for everyone”. which…I don’t know. isn’t that true of EVERYONE’S personality? why point it out to me? wtf? also, why is this careless comment still rankling me?

I have a bunch of emails and phone calls that need to be made. This stresses me out unbelievably and I would rather burn myself with a cigarette than even think about it.

Also, I am having to fill out forms for kindergarten applications and it is making me nervous and avoidant. is that a word? it should be.

My period is making me insane lately. Like really, actually insane and freaking out crazy. so sorry if that personality trait isn’t for you. If you need to talk about how much my personality sucks please discuss it in a time wasting detail with someone else.

anyway, my kid is alive and fed and wearing clothing so I count that as at least one success AND I made him a really cute CRAFTY halloween costume and I will bog about it in excruciating self hating detail soon.

P.S. Happy Monday!!!!

P.P.S. Here is a picture of a crocigator beating the shit out of a unicorn.

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In this pic Jack is pretending to be a pogo zombie.

This game is killing me. fortunately, now a few weeks later, the obsession is waning. But for a week there all I did was play this game. I played it while I should have been studying for my mid-term and I played it while I should have been steering Jack to some sort of more productive activity.

we play analog plants vs zombies now. all the time. And Jack makes up new plants and zombies. Ninja zombie, double headed chomper, etc. He reminds me to tend my zen garden.

So I procrastinated on studying for my mid-term and then I did all this studying and then at about 5pm the day before the test I realized I had been studying the wrong shit. Anyway. During the test I got all flustered and I missed a bunch and then spent the next week worrying and feeling crappy about probably getting a shitty grade. I got a B+ so… that’s fine. I’m not sure why I bother stressing. The first quiz I thought I totally fucked up I actually got all of them right.

Here is my zen garden:

I’m never going to win the whack-a-zombie level mini-game and I’m pretty upset about it. Meanwhile, despite doing okay on my test the rest of the house has gone to shit. We have a horrid fruit fly problem in the kitchen right now. nothing is working to get rid of them! Where do they come from??! They are very gross.

Video games are evil, folks.

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