Birthdays, Belchs and Brams

I wax nostalgic about my Humanling's 14th birthday today.  And then, the winds of Sailor Belch bring me tidings from the recliner as she watches Spongebob.  Her burps aren't getting more superior with age....she's been able to do that since she was like four.

That's funny...when I sat down I had a whole flow of things to say.  And in the time that I've been sitting here I've gotten up to help pick up her meds which went all over the floor, throw the toys for the cats a few times and implore her to brush her hair before we go to pick up my mother, the Gangsta. 

I also took my meds.  I am currently enjoying a voluptuous pink pill that told  me to call it, Amoxicillin.  This goes with the continuation of a root canal that I started on December 31st.  We all took a break for the new year and then I sandwiched the other side of it on the 2nd with the finale.  I walked in there all thinking, Ha.....the worst is over.  He's just going to remove the temporary filling and put in a permanent one.  I hope my odds this year of being wrong end here.

What really happened was that I was in denial.  I couldn't imagine anyone touching the tooth again, especially to go back inside of it and have a reunion.  The digging, the scraping....no amount of novocaine was enough.  Short of becoming a junkie, many needle holes in my gums, and the dentist's bewildered face every time I jumped after yet another application, I finally decided to deal with it as best as I could.  

Then a diversion.  With his rubber gloved hand, the dentist cradled my chin in his hands to continue his work.  The touch was gentle and sent my mind wondering.....I was in a three year relationship.  When is the last time I recall anyone creating such a gesture?  I don't recall it at all with Flip.  He wasn't like that.  What passed for caressing my hair for a few seconds was really him getting my hair away from his face.  He hated hair near his face.   And no, my dentist is not um.....hot.  He is a super awesome dude, who I trust implicitly with my teeth.  And who is a good looking, married man.  But it isn't like that!  Let me weep a moment for myself for the lack of chin cradles and then open a booth to hand them out.

This is my year of If Not Not, When?  I love it.  It's terribly cliche but it is 100% true.  I've signed up for supplemental yoga classes.  A meditation class.  A writer's circle.  These are all at my town's library.  Why not get to know the community better and like-minded people?  

I have also reached out to a local sanctuary farm to see what they need in the way of volunteers.  Humanling can join me next year at age 15.  

The thing that I really need to do is that O word.........organize!!!!  I need to get together my writings, decide how many volumes of poetry they shall make and then self publish.  A snap, right?

Speaking of farms, I seem to dislike my own animals during the wee hours before waking up.  Five animals in one room at night is proving to me that I need headphones that can block out an explosion.  The cats weren't too bad.  There are three guinea pigs.....two cages.  All male.  Two of them arrived together.  One chases the other and likes to go on a dominance spree.  He did this from 5am to about 7am this morning.  The squealing war cries, the circling around the cage, the banging into the water bottle over and over.....I got out of bed at least six times to knock on the cage to subdue them, to feed them (twice), to give them fresh water....anything that might detract from the bullying situation.  They aren't always like that.  Not constantly for hours.  Eventually I took their shallow swimming pool and took the antagonist out, with a hideaway hut and some hay and put him in there to leave the other dude alone.  Eventually he calmed down after I lay there telling myself that maybe sleep isn't in the cards this morning, as he shredded newspaper in decibels the volume of an aircraft carrier.  

And I begrudgingly admit, I am still reading Dracula.  I have been reading Dracula since about October.  While it hasn't been the only book I've been reading (along with magazines and newspapers), I should have finished it by now.  I think the tiny print and 1800s lingo slows me down a tad but it is really one of the most intriguing stories that I've read in a long time.  Really good vampire stories do that for me.  It's only fitting that Bram Stoker should sit alongside Anne Rice.  Make that early Anne Rice.  Anything after Queen of the Damned is probably meh.  Possibly including Queen of the Damned.  I should create a raspberry filled muffin and name it the Bran Stoker!  Hardy har har.

It is time for me to reiterate for the 12th time for the Humanling to brush the knot out of her hair.  I'd like to be back relatively soon today from our driving adventures.  And as long as the knot lives, we do not leave the house.

Stop it.  It's Knot funny.

Waiting for my Saturday Morning Flood While Enjoying Coffee

It's only 10am and I'm writing!  Look ma, no Farmville!!!  First thing in the morning on the weekends, I generally enjoy a good hour or so of Farmville.  It used to take an hour.  Now it takes a few hours because the Zynga folks decided to add an English Farm to our existing Home Farm.  That was fun and exciting at the time.  Then they added the New England type Farm, which I really love because I'm born and bred in NE.  After managing to function with three farms, we obtained the always cold and snowy Winter Farm.  I try to decorate that one with as many flowers as possible because it's just so Buddhist Minimalist White.  I feel like I'm in George Orwell's 1984.  I even feel bad placing animals on this farm because their little virtual bodies are probably shivering on a level that I can't detect.  I feel like this is the Death Row of all the farms.  Yesterday Farmville gave me a swimming pond and forced me to place it on the Winter Farm because that's where I was when I started the game.  The effing WINTER FARM?  For a swimming hole?  Oh my mind is in compartment Hell because in a world of PC'isms, it just doesn't belong there.  Unless maybe I view it as one of those weird geothermal pools in Iceland.  Yeah...that's what I'll do.  And I'll petition Farmville for my own virtual Bjork while I'm at it.

Oh but that's not all.  After the Winter Farm came the Hawaiian Farm and even though I barely have that one under control we've received Jade Falls, our Japanese getaway.  The music for this one is the loveliest of all the farms. You go into a meditative state on this farm and keep playing on for another 20 minutes past the time you would have naturally.  You also pull out your credit card and buy FV dollars in which the Impatient will purchase the newest and hard to get trees and animals.  If you wait long enough, Danielson, you will obtain these animals and trees through other people's throwaways.  And if you don't, here is where you've fully learned Zen....you don't want what you haven't got.  Or was that Sinead O'Connor?

 However, all of these farms cause us hardcore Farm Folk to spend way more time than should be spent on a game.  So yes, I am waiting with extreme expectancy for someone, anyone, to come up to me right now with a ribbon of Excellence for writing instead.  

I've moved the writing party to the front porch so that I can put the piggies out to graze in the grass.  I have a strong Guilt gene and it flares up when I walk by them and have to use the High Piggie voice to make sure they respond since they look like death took them with a yawn.  They just look so bored in there.  Kyyo is still not well but surprisingly has been hanging on for weeks.  He looks like one of those gastro bypass experiments....the suddenly skinny pig who's face would look a bit better with a tad more weight on him.  I thought the fresh air might perk his spirits and by that idea alone, the other pig, the healthy rambunctious one, also needs to come outside or it just wouldn't be fair (Yes, Guilt gene, I hear you.)

I live in a village so anything that goes on to create that weekend, homey, quaintness that villages enough, is audible from my apartment.  Right now the farmer's market is happening and they usually have a singer/songwriter (can we stop using that phrase?  Why not just singer?) singing along to your applying discretion to the red leaf lettuce from this stand or that.

I hear we are in a flash flood warning, another great reason to "Like" your town on Facebook.  As soon as I sign on to get my FB Fix, there's the Heavy, waiting to let me know to be careful.  So before I build an ark out of Erdinger bottles, I'll sit out here and enjoy the Pre-Storm breeze and gray skies.  

Speak of the Devil.  Melodic guilt just walked in. The Singer/Songwriter just expelled the Father of all guilt songs, "Cats in the Cradle".  As a paying customer to this apartment and air space, I do not want to hear this song.  While it's a great song, one note of it bothers me to the point of wanting to call my therapist.  Good thing it is now over or I would have had to walk down, braless and barefoot to grab the nearest batch of kale and stuff it in his mouth.

The breeze is picking up a bit, and I see my child zooming back from the library in her black velvet dress.  She insisted on a Saturday morning at 10am to go to the library in a black velvet dress.  Yet if we were going somewhere where we'd be more represented, she'd have on some dirty shirt she's worn and dropped food on along with mismatching socks and a ball of knotted hair in the back of her head.  

My sober shhhh time is over for now.  So I'll continue to drink my cold coffee, enjoy the breeze and plant some crops.

I Bet Cole Hamels Would Love my Kale Chips and Then Marry Me

Beer O'Clock Here!  I've got on the highlights of baseball tonight (thanks MLB....now could you please focus on Cole Hamels for the next 30 minutes?)  I have not even pulled out my trusty air mattress yet, which is where my butt is usually parked when I blog.  Tonight though, it is On Fire degrees out so I'm sitting on a pile of blankets right in front of a window.  It was actually so hot out that I almost couldn't drink my beer earlier.  We're talking a COLD beer.  

By the way...mmmm.....baseball bodies.  As if on cue, they portrayed my handsome pitcher on the screen.  Someday he will realize how much he wants me and when he does, his wife will be sent a nice care package to go with those walking papers.

So I'm a bit surprised!  Probably within the last month I emailed my mother a link to watch baby red-tailed hawks hatching, along with the behavior of the parents throughout the raising cycle.  This is all done at Cornell University and the camera is "hidden" so that the hawks are not intruded on.  I didn't expect that she would watch any of it.  And one day she mentioned them to me, along with what carcass they were eating just the day before (I'd seen it also so I knew she really did see it).  It's become an online place that she enjoys visiting often.  I was on the phone with her this weekend and she was watching the hawks, and then exclaimed to my step-dad, "Babe, look how big they got since I showed them to you last week!".  

Even better, I'm fairly certain that my mother never knew what a hawk really looked like.  We went to the Museum of Natural History and strolled past the stuffed birds.  My mom pointed out the red tailed hawk to me.  I know- I'm acting like a one year old identified a primary color.  But this was exciting for me.  My mother is particular about her interests, which usually involve crime, serial killers (to the discomfort of my step-father) and anything cry-worthy on the Lifetime channel.

Flip invited me to go for a hike today. I found out after further inquiry that it would be for about two hours.  I had to decline.  One, because it was too damn hot.  Two, because I didn't want to leave the child here by herself.  And three, because I was in fear that even if we put the relationship 'off limits' for conversation, it would happen anyway, because it does on a daily basis.  (Follow the arrows on this chart...) Then the explanations, then blame, then the fighting, and the capitalized and bold font.  I'm lucky he doesn't really employ the italics.  I'd really be losing if that happened.  

So I declined the offer to lock myself into a lover's spat up and down a mountain, huffing and puffing in the heat for two hours while I worry about my kid at home. Instead, I cleaned guinea pig cages.  That's probably the best thing that anyone in this town has done today.  I wanted to have the chance to put them in their new waterless pool so they could run around without poopin' up my floors.  

Yep, that's the Yuki boy.  He had his turn and was a severe pain in the ass trying to climb out while I had dirty cage hands.   I hate touching stuff while I'm dealing with these guys and scrubbing poop out of their food bowls.  I mean, why?  Why in the food bowl?  Come on guys...you've been around for three plus years now....

Kyyo is the complete opposite of Yuki.  He was frozen to that spot the entire time.  Probably with that expression.  He's a love to the point that you could hand him to a two year old (and I have) but if you put him in the same space with Yuki, he will go after him and drain the blood from him.  Bad Vampire Piggie!

Other than that, I needed a way to get those greens into my girl.  So Kale chips it was again.  Damn, they're good.  I almost finished them tonight with this here beer.  However, stopped myself so that she'd had have snack tomorrow.  We heart the kale chips.  Here below is the Before shot:

After the makeover, and two thousand degrees added to the small apartment from the oven being on, they emerged:

My 

Seriously.  So crispy. So simple.  There is not one reason to avoid making these unless you are allergic to tasty nutrition.  My butt is falling asleep just sitting here writing how great these were.  

I found a list today that seems sort of important and timely. But more on that tomorrow possibly.  I woke up this morning having that memory...that weekend memory.  The one where you stay in bed later.  You caress, you give all, you wish it could last all day.  Then there is coffee.  But that's not how it is anymore.  And honestly, that's probably the only good that was left, and it no longer exists.  Someday it will be superseded, of that I have no doubt.  But this is now, this is my latest memory and if that's the only loving act left, it's not reality.  Because respect should exist outside of the boundaries of the bed.  

My goodness can it be that late already?  I must get out my airbed and get ready for sleep.  A work day tomorrow awaits.  Nighty night rabbits!

Shhh....In the Shadow of a Shady Tree

We wore pretty dresses with sneakers and I curled Humanling's hair.

I put one blueberry and one organic carrot in the box that had our guinea pig.

However, when we got to the cemetary (people cemetary), we found that trying to dig a hole with a snow shovel is like driving with rolls of toliet paper for wheels. We had chosen a nice tree area and there were so many little roots in the ground.

Instead we resorted to the recycling that happened to be in a bag in the trunk. Ricci's burial plot was dug out by a coconut oil container and a cat food can. I will admit that Humanling really stepped up to the job and there in our dresses we dug. We found that if we were going to dig a hole big enough we'd be sitting in those dresses until it was dark. So unfortunately, we had to take him out of the box, carrot & blueberry in tow. Somehow that seemed like the better thing to do.



We brought his leftover food with us, including all his goodies in the fridge. He was a spoiled boy and only ate organic baby lettuces for snack, along with other various stealings in the day, like the stray apple slice or a grape. We scattered the food a small ways away from him for the animals who are alive and can enjoy them.



Then we went to the store and bought a bag of cat food to donate to the locale animal shelter.



He was, as far as we know, the only boy in the house. I do have five hermit crabs but I'm not going to even attempt figure that one out. So maybe that made him more special in a way.

The night before he died, for whatever reason, I wrapped him in a pillowcase and decided to hold him for a long time. Or maybe that's what happens when I stay that close to boys! All joking aside, I didn't want to put him down and the sixth sense was blaring through me. I meditated with him close to my heart and put him in white light. I'm really glad that I did. I feel inside that it brought him on an easier transition. I hadn't seen anything really wrong with him that stood out. He wasn't drinking his usual amount, which is not good for a guinea. But he was interested in drinking and I saw him at his water post. He snatched a carrot from my fingers earlier that morning. And devoured the apple slice that I brought in mid-day.

I put him back in his cage reluctantly and he stood there staring at me. Not going back into his little hut like he normally does. He wanted back out. His stare was haunting and I said to him "Stop looking at me like that. You're breaking my heart!" Then I climbed into bed to read.

When I got up the next morning, it was clear that we was gone. I'm so very glad to have spent the time with him the night before.

Humanling and I notice that the house is a tad different without him - without him filing his teeth on the cage, or constantly at the water bottle at all hours making that cage rattling noise.



I started to think to myself, why bother having pets when you're just buying a plot of time lapsed heartbreak? But then realized that we as humans are quite possibly deemed 'stewards' of sorts over the world's animals, making it our job to care for and love them, no matter what the duration of their lifetime is.



We'd all rather have that taste of love, even for a moment, than to not know the possibilities.

So it is almost a week later and I am slightly still annoying to Humanling about this. It's just that every food preparation task usually involved treats for Ricci. Apple slices, vegetables, pears, blueberries. Even at the store today I almost picked up a bag of organic green leaves for him.

I have to mention something a tad on the woo-woo side for those of you who may not wander into the spiritual or just plain nutty side of things. The day after Mr. Man's funeral, I was driving to work. I popped in a CD that had been in for a few days but not played. It's also a CD that I rarely play - a mix CD that I'd made a while back.

The song was "I miss you" by Finch, which is really really upbeat actually. And yes, most songs fall into the category of "I Miss You", "I love you", "I want you" or "I hate you, fall off a wheelbarrow in the Grand Canyon". So I thought, mkay.....maybe too broad scoped.

Until I ended up on the highway in a situation that I've personally not remembered ever being in before. I was in back of a hay truck, filled with bales, and little sparks of hay flying around and past both sides of my car. This is a guinea pig's main food staple and something that I gave to Ricci twice a day. I felt positive that this was him waving to me from the last rung up before disappearing into his happy land. It was one of the warmest feelings I've felt in a long time.

I am already on Craig's List looking for a new little rodent for us to care for. Someone asked me to examine if it might be hard on me if I get a similar (looking) animal since I had emailed him a photo of one that I was looking at. I know without a beat that the energy tells me it is joyous and happy. That as long as I am here, it is part of my duty to lovingly care for these animals as much as I can. Not hoarding though! One or two - a little Shades' Ark where it makes sense.

And most certainly when we add a new little boy or girl to our family, photos will follow!

Meanwhile, the new kitty, named Princess by her previous owners (I really like Saphara and might change it slowly) is used to us now. She sleeps on top of us and is a face licker while we sleep. She also endures Azrael putting the pause (or should I say PAWS!) on harassing her while she uses the litterbox. Azrael simply stands next to the box waiting for her to come back out.

Talk about inducing stagefright!

Ricci Will Be Missed

Otherwise known as "M", Ricci passed to the other side last night.

I am hoping he is in a field without tomatoes and green peppers, for he hated them.

I am glad that I held him for part of his last hours here and hope he felt all the love that surrounded him from my heart.

My Soulmate, Derek Wheeter

Laugh all you want. This is Mr. Man. He is my Soulmate.

Alan, I know you love squishy faced Death Eater Azrael, but she's got nothin on this little guy.

At one point, I thought about putting a black bar over his eyes for privacy purposes. I've invested a lot of cash in him and can't be having people busting into my house (except for Organic friend because she leaves nice presents and well, she's just the recipient of my life, unfiltered - and NO ONE needs that job) and stealing him.

Oh CRAZY you say? PLEASE! Look at his handsome mug. :doot: is damn lucky that I respect the boundaries between me and Mr. Man and that we are not to be in That Way. Azrael is just lucky I don't kick her ass out the door.

We've only known each other since about January of this year and I am his second human slave. I was told he is about four years old. And because you are dying to know, he hates tomatoes. Today, I've added White Nectarines to the Do Not Want list.

Once, I went on a Match.com date. The guy was nice, not for me, a little too looking behind him constantly and forthright but serious, about his OCD. My OCD is funny. Not so much to me, but like I've mentioned, if no one is laughing, then my fears have been verified and life is Not Okay.

And okay, when I asked him about his mom, he said she died in the last year or so, then I asked about his sister and she died too of drugs and so I figured I'd better not ask anymore questions. However, he did something that I won't forget. When I showed up and gave him a hug that might have been categorized as an Air Hug, he handed me a flower, and then a baggie stuffed with goodies for Mr. Man. He'd cut fresh apples, threw in some lettuce and cucumbers. It was the thought behind that. Either that or he knew about Mr. Man's extreme power over me and was trying to do away with him and have me all to himself....(breath, breath, pant.....gasp....ok...calm....perish the thought.)

Turns out the goods were legit. Mr. Man ate them. Or else he is Rasputin.

Now that you've all seen him, I must go buy him an ankle tracker. Just in case.