Real Easter Eggs

Today after months of waiting and thinking that our two new chickens were egg laying duds, we got two eggs from them. The new chickens are a breed called Araucanas and they lay blue-green eggs, or real Easter eggs. Also our other ladies were very productive as well. This is 1 1/2 days worth of eggs.

The Last Town on Earth

Author: Thomas Mullen

This is one of the best selections we've read for book club. Maybe even better than The Help. Our brave new member, Sarah, made this suggestion after reading an article in Atlanta Magazine about the author, who apparently now resides here.

A small northwestern logging town decides to quarantine itself at the onset of the 1918 flu epidemic. Despite a vigilant effort to contain itself and keep insiders out, the flu gets in, among other things.

The characters were so well developed and the crippling descriptions of the flu were truly terrific. Despite being used to tie a pretty bow around the ending, I felt like the focus on the unions and labor issues were a tired attempt to impart an historical and social significance that the story didn't really need to be successful.

In the end, though, it was a good book with some good moral considerations and well written.

The Forge of God

Author: Greg Bear

At the beach this summer I passed on to my Dad The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I tried and tried and tried to convince him it was worth reading. He ignored me every time. But when someone else told him he had to read it he did. Hmm. Nonetheless, he loved it, like I said he would.

The Forge of God was his payback to me. I'm sure he gave me this book some time last year and I just stacked it away with all the rest of the science fiction I didn't have time for. Last weekend he made me promise to read it before anything else since he had finally fulfilled his end of the bargain (what bargain?). In a drunken stupor I agreed (huh?).

One week later I'm glad I read it. Not as good as his Darwin's Radio but still totally worth reading. I loved that there's no super human to come save the day when the Earth is about to be exploded by alien invaders. I love how the world ends each time for each character (or not). I love to see how they react, where they go, who they think about it. To me, the feelings and reactions were as realistic as you could expect them to be.

The Tender Bar

Author: JR Moehringer

Passed on to me by my Dad, this was a great read. Because I'm too lazy to write my own review you can read his here.

the strain

Author: Guillermo del Toro and someone else

I like reading about vampires. I'll admit it. Anne Rice created the vampire world for me (and probably most of the vampire-reading population) so in my head she represents the truest of the vampire lore. Everything else I read is compared to the world of Louis and Lestat.

Other vampire worlds that have only minor modifications to hers don't bother me as long as the core set of values remains the same and most of the same rules apply.

The Strain is like the vampire alternate universe and I don't buy it. As far as vampires go this book stinks. Being a vampire is the result of a "worm" that multiplies and circulates in the body (i.e the strain), vampires can't cross bodies of water unless assisted by a human, and they don't even bite you with teeth! They have a stinger that shoots 6 feet out of their mouth to suck your blood. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Guillermo, I love your warped brain but this is absurd. You've messed with a genre that has been messed with too much already. If you called them zombies it would have been more appropriate. You can call them what you want, but if I'm going to read the next two books in the trilogy they're not going to be vampires to me.

That being said, this book was way more entertaining than the two bombs we tried to read for book club: Tropic of Cancer (beyond torture) and the Diary of Anais Nin (beyond boring).

2010 and me

Last year I had two goals for myself: losing weight (winning the contest, really) and reading 19 books. I did both - I overachieved on the reading and wasn't quite as successful as I would have liked with the other (but I still won). So when this new year started I was trying to figure out how many books I could reasonably read and how much weight I could reasonably lose. And then I remembered something - I wanted to be a writer, once. I should concentrate on writing this year.

A couple of years ago I decided science was something I just did because I was good at it - but if I could have any career it would be that of an author. But, even after that epiphany, I just continued my status quo because I knew it would take me too long to be good at writing for a living. I am impatient and practical.

Rewind two decades plus - I was about 12. Growing up my family was very close friends with Mary Higgins Clark and her family. I used to swim in her above ground pool and fetch pennies off the bottom where you could feel the bumpy blemishes of the ground it sat on. She lived in a pretty average house on a pretty average street in New Jersey. We lived a few blocks away.

One night at a cocktail party at Mary's house I told her that I liked to write stories. I used to write all the time. And I mean all the time. I wrote stories and poems and filled fractions of different journals galore (never once filled one up all the way, though). She bent down and whispered in my ear, "Never show them to anyone!" The grin on her face made me feel like she had just told me the greatest secret in the whole world and we were the only ones who knew it. And my response was, "I know!"

Sometime in college I remembered that moment and couldn't reconcile why she said that and why I agreed with her. And even a couple of years ago I was trying to decipher that moment again. How could I so completely understand what she meant when I was 12 but not now? Then last week happened.

I was reading an article about JD Salinger after he passed away (I will always and forever link him in my mind to an old school friend, Col, because she was the first person I knew who read Franny & Zooey and Catcher in the Rye and told me how it was a banned book. I even remember looking at Catcher in the Hillsdale library thinking I was going to get in trouble or something). At some point in history he said, "Publishing is a terrible invasion of privacy...I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure."

I had forgotten what I liked about writing - reading and re-reading what I wrote and the feeling I got from it: not having to grow up. Each piece takes me back to the moment in time when it came together and I smile. I didn't need anyone else to read those stories to get out of them what I needed. And Mary knew that a 12 year-old wasn't writing for an audience and apparently 12 year-old me knew that, too.

So I finally understand what Mary meant that night - probably my only clear memory of her: standing in the hallway with the parkay floor on my way to the den with a drink for my Dad, thinking my parents were so cool to let me come to the party because I was the youngest kid there.

Would I ever show those stories from my youth to anyone? Probably not. I would be embarrassed but mostly because no one else would get the inside jokes. Those are just for me and they still make me smile.

So the reality is that I don't want to be a publishing author (blogs don't count - these are just opinions and certainly no one is paying to read them). It's not something I want as a career. I just want those moments back where I can make myself stuck in time.

hoarders

I don't think any description I give is going to fully impress exactly how I feel, deep in my core, when/after I watch this show. This is maybe the second or third time in my life that an emotional response to something has made me physically feel sick, like a fist is lodged in the center of my chest, pushing its nubby little thumb toward my spine. It's dark in there. And I don't know why I do this to myself.

The first time I watched this show I was simply and utterly mesmerized, mostly in shock, I think, that people who lived in this fashion existed in reality. Well, at least in the reality most of us are a part of. They clearly don't have the same perception of said reality.

I've seen 4 episodes and there seems to be two types of hoarders: those who are lazy, want someone to pay attention to them, or simply don't give a shit to clean up their mess, and then those who are unequivocally mentally ill and absolutely cannot detach themselves from even the minutest of possessions. Sometimes we are even treated to the historical event that may have started the landslide. A single robust memory extricated from the mounds of plastic bottles, rotting food, and even feces, like a strand of creased tinsel.

This show makes me feel guilty for every insignificant memento I might keep. I am instantly compelled to clean something in the house, throw something away, get rid of any extraneous magazines. I actually and irrationally worry that I could sink into such an abyss.

I can see how it might start, with an odd bag of clothes you forgot to drop off at the Salvation Army so you toss it into the spare closet. Soon lots of forgotten things are added to the closet that never make it to where they are supposed to go.

But I can't see all the in-between stages where it starts to overflow from the closet to the bedroom to the hallway to the bathroom and on and on ad nauseam until you have to carve a path through the towering stacks of filth to get to the kitchen to use the microwave to heat up dinner because the stove is cluttered with dirty pans, empty glass jars, and feces.

Yes, feces. I have seen two episodes with multiple dead critters (two dead cats buried in the rubble and several crusty rats) and layers of feces (human and animal). This is usually when I start to have an anxiety attack because HONESTLY, who wouldn't notice they were missing one of their cats, let alone two? How are the red flags in these people's minds not screaming through bullhorns at this point?

So I turn off the show, tidy up the tv room, put away every single toy, and tell myself I won't watch another episode because that fist never fails to return. And then I do because I'm an idiot.

the deed is done

Here are some pictures of my first chicken slaughter. It will now become dinner tonight in the form of Coq a Vin. Only if I had a rooster.

Bleeding out

Tools of the trade

Plucked and ready to be eviscerated

Looks just like the one I brought at the supermarket not too long ago, just a few more steps to get there.

Ready for the Le Cresuset pot

Notice how much more fat is on this bird and the color of the thigh meat. I am sure that has to do with the fact it lived a little longer than a meat bird.