AMAZEBALLS, Y’ALL. SRSLY.

So, my child has come up with the ultimate weapon – a gun that shoots knives. Totally brilliant, right? He likes to bust that one out as we walk to school holding hands in the sunshine with all our neighbors standing in front of their houses smiling at us. Smiles that are wiped clean once they realize they are being impaled by knives shot from a gun. anyway.

I wish i had a picture of my cell phone as it was two weeks ago. it was a sad sad thing. Not only was the screen cracked and actually shedding glass dust all over the place as it slowly crumbled into oblivion but the only app that worked on it was kindle, everything else including the camera caused the phone to crash. Why have an iPhone if it is going to suck so badly? My whimpering finally got so loud that Vim was forced to do something about it. He ordered a new screen from Apple for 4$ and then he told me something that would change my life forever.

You have to CLOSE YOUR APPS. Basically every app I ever opened on my phones WAS STILL OPEN. That’s at least two years worth of apps open. What the?!?!??!

After closing 62 apps my phone now runs perfectly including the camera. End of Story.

Did you know that there were 13 Pollyanna books? 13. how? what? I can’t even… whaaaaa?!?!?! I swear I thought there were only 3, the last one being Pollyanna and the Family Jewels. Can’t top that.

I might post some garden updates in a bit.
I’m outie.

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I have trouble weeding out anything and books and fabric are the two things that I find it almost impossible to part with.

I think I am going to move all the large books to the downstairs behemoth (which is a whole other problem) to make room for some of these books in boxes. Then what?

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I can’t seem to find a Salvia spathacea in any nursery around here for some reason. I still haven’t tried Bay Natives.

Jack and I had some adventures this week and some fights too.

I went to see my friend and her newborn today. omg. Baby was so adorable and tiny and smelled like a baby and had tiny eyelashes and shit. She slept on me. and she has a super cute name.

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In other news I cried and had a panic attack at my therapist appointment today.

In more other news today was my last day blogging for Craft Gossip. I was too flaky and NOT INDIE ENOUGH. I didn’t ask what the fuck that meant but I’m assuming it meant that I wasn’t COOL ENOUGH (see cat conversations mentioned above). At first I was sad to see the 200$ a month go but now I feel a sense of relief. SO FUCK CRAFTS AND THE CATS THEY RODE IN ON.

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I have been letting jack watch too much TV lately. My ability to cope with him has been stretched thin. It’s mostly just a problem of introvert vs. extrovert. He wants to be talking and interacting with me and touching me ALL DAY. I just can’t. Just especially the last few months I’ve been having a terrible time, my brain is malfunctioning.

Aside from your standard variety of depression suddenly descending on me I’ve also been like, confused, or something. my brain is just very very foggy and jumbled and it gets worse if there is a lot of noise happening or too much going on.

He’s very loud and his particular sort of play is not my idea of fun at all. He does not quietly build worlds and then populate them with animals and think stories about them in his head. No. He must have two armies with many kings and queens and princesses all engaging in furious battle. He is one army and I have to be the other. I can sustain that for about 5 minutes before I start to internally freak out. Plus his story lines are totally not sophisticated.

I do get to nicely read to him. We did Norse myths and now we are doing Greek myths and also Little House in the Big Woods. We started Wind in the Willows but I was reading it from my phone and that kind of sucks so I decided to wait until I can find my actual book version. He will also play legos by himself fairly quietly for a decent amount of time. so yeah, he’s been watching stuff on Netflix while I cower in my room.

It helps if we are out of the house. With my slightly upped Wellbutrin my energy levels have improved, so that’s something. At least I can manage to get us out of the house. Today I am going to take him to see the tall ships that are in the Port of Oakland right now.

I’m still hoping to find my little green point and shoot camera. It HAS to be this house somewhere. FUCK! Until then I am going to start using Vim’s camera more.

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Well, here is Jack’s room in a before picture:

He had been sleeping in the nest of blankets on the floor every night for a week. There is a pointless huge table on the left that i just stuck in there because it had no where else to go. In this picture I had already gone to Ikea and bought and assembled one other Trofast set of shelves you can see on the left.

When I moved his original trofast there were all these little things that looked like grains of rice under it.I didn’t think too much of it, i thought maybe he had a toy with rice or… something… who knows. Only, later I was bending down and one of the grains of rice MOVED. omfg. MAGGOTS, I thought immediately. but HOW?!?!? WHAT? GROSS!@FUCK!

They were not maggots but were carpet moths. gross enough. It took two days to get rid of them with much vacuuming and dusting of diatomaceous earth and borax and much woe is me-ing about how gross it was.

His room has 4 low trofast shelves ad one stepped trofast. I meant the stepped trofast to be for his Legos but Vim scoffed at it as too small. So I will move that and fill it with more toys from downstairs and buy two large tall trofasts to be for legos. I also put in a small Ikea desk for him.

So we got that all cleaned up and the furniture built and then I weeded. I donated a box or so of his books and put some in a box to be gone through later, basically reducing his books by about 2 thirds. I changed the orientation of his bed to make it easier to make and clean around and even though that does reduce his play area a bit think it’s worth it. I weeded his stuffed animals and reduced them to two laundry baskets full and one box of them put away in the top of his closet. I weeded his toys donating some and putting some in boxes up in his closet to be gone through later.

One thing I did that has made a huge difference is to reduce his bedding by like 90%. Before he had a top sheet, a large blanket or two, a comforter or 2, a small quilt, and a million small blankets. WHY?!? I reduced it to a top sheet, his Little Blanket Soft Blanket, one large blanket and a comforter. The rest of the stuff I put in the linen closet and I hope he never sees them up there because he will insist on having it all back on his bed.

I’m not done, obviously. I need to go get the large lego shelves and i need to frame some pictures and hang them up. I wants a full length mirror and some hooks to hang up his hoodies and superhero cape.

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You can see the bok choy there has bolted. The cauliflower plants got eaten by something, possibly a chicken. The celery is to the left of the bok choy and it turned out quite good, a little salty and spicy and much nicer than grocery store celery. I’m surprised because i didn’t water it much and it barely rained this winter. The giant red mustard greens grew nicely but I didn’t eat much of it.

We did hit on a good place for the winter veggies by putting that container where it is. It gets good winter sun in the early morning and then in the afternoon and evening.

Today Vim put in some carrots where the book choy was. We have a ton of seeds sprouting in our sunny front mud room. I’ll probably fill this container with lettuce and spinach. Actually I think we have too many plants. I have no idea where they will all go. Like, where will the zucchinis fit this year? Where they were last year there is now shallots and onions and a container with kale. shit.

I bought a ton of annual and perennial flowers today. omg. i am so excited about all of them!
Here’s a list of most of them.

Nemophila menziesii
“Baby Blue Eyes”
Layia platyglossa
“Tidy Tips”
Erigeron glaucus ‘Wayne Roderick’
Platystemon californicus
“Cream Cups”
Ribes sanguineum glutinosum
“Pink Flowering Currant”
Primula polyantha
‘Victoriana Silver Laced Black’
Nicotiana alata ‘Lime Green’
Eriogonum crocatum
“Saffron Buckwheat”
Oenothera caespitosa
“Tufted Evening Primrose”
Helenium puberulum
Linum lewisii
“Blue Flax”

Mostly they are natives. the primula polyanthus is not native but was so neat looking I bought it anyway. The non native Nicotiana alata has chartreuse flowers. neat!
unfortunatly I havent ben able to find a Salvia spathacea. I did get another Salvia clevelandii and another coyote mint. i think our garden is going to be uber fluffy and colorful this spring and summer!

And I bought Vim a bunch of fancy poppies.

There’s no room I tell you.

My meadow is put off again until this Fall. Basically we have spent the last year doing cover crops but now we are leveling that area and taking away all the nice new soil we created and putting it elsewhere. Once we have the area level we will do a couple more cover crops. This gives me time to grow all the native grass starts since I don’t have like 1 million dollars it would cost to buy them as plugs. I still cant decide what grasses to use for the meadow though. Carex pansa? Festuca rubra? a Deschampsia? ugh! i am gong to prowls the local native nurseries to see if i can find a seed mix or even sod or plugs i can afford.

I need to go check out Larner Seeds.
and Bay Natives. oh huh, i see they have a native fescu mix sod available… 3.00 a sq foot.

oh also, Vim found like a million weird ass CA salamanders all over our yard lurking under stuff. They looks so wormy and moist! Those arms look like pointless T-Rex arms. If that salamander eats a just a little bit more it wont be able to move.

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I need 3 cat bung hole plugs STAT. And the world’s top scientists to figure out how to genetically engineer assholeless cats.

WHAT.THE.FUCK

VILE OFFENDER

EVERYTHING WRONG WITH WORLD

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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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