The Best Breakfast Ever!

Today, my chickens laid two brown eggs. So, using one of those and a few other humble little ingredients, I set about concocting the Best Breakfast Ever!


Here's how it goes:

Take one fresh-laid big brown egg, a bottle of not-from-concentrate orange juice, a gallon of 1percent milk, and one all-natural turkey sausage.

Look at that yolk!

That's Buffy's egg compared to a store one. Go,Buffs!

Now throw one turkey sausage patty in the pan with a little olive oil.

While that's cooking, mix up your egg. For one egg, you want about half a cup of milk(I usually just eyeball it.). Stab the yolk with the tines of a fork until it breaks(The egg, not the fork!), and then add the milk. When the sausage is brown, take it off the pan, put  it on a plate, and pour in your eggs with the heat on medium-medium high.

When the eggs are solid enough to push to one side of the pan, you can put the sausage back in to get it hot. They cool very quickly!

Now I'm sorry to say I cheated a little, because while all this was going on, I had homemade hashbrowns in the toaster, heating up, which I didn't put in the ingredients list, sorry. :(  But if you don't have delectable homemade hashbrowns, I guess you can substitute them for toast, but it won't be as good. But if you DO have hashbrowns, you want the toaster on broil, 350 degrees for about five minutes.

Now your eggs should be done, your sausage should be hot through and brown, and the hashbrowns/toast should be crisp or sizzling. Now pour your orange juice, load everything else onto a big plate, and ENJOY!!!


                   (Ketchup is delicious with everything pictured on this plate, if you like that sort of thing.)

And now.......THE EATING!!!!

And, boy, was it yummy!

NO MORE ACTING CLASSES!!, A Sad, Sad Story..also, a Birthday, Old Souls, and a Certain Creepy Monkey.

So now I'm very sad. And I assume you're wondering why. It's because.....................
(DRAMATIC PAUSE)...........NO MORE ACTING CLASSES!!!!!!!!!!  :(   :(    :(   :(   :( 
This is the part where you say, "Oh no, quintuple sad faces!! This must be REALLY bad!!!"  And it is. Because NO MORE ACTING CLASSES!!!!!!!!! means no more going into Port Jeff. No more seeing Gwen every week. No more Starbucks. No more laughing to death. No more Old Souls (I'll explain this freaky part later) in the mall. And.....the worst of all. NO.MORE.STALKER.MONKEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(Those who have read the post before this will understand the capacity of this problem, and how devastated I am.)  So that's why I'm practically dying of sadness.

BUT now I'll tell you..my sister turned sixteen today!! So that's a cause of major happiness that ALMOST cancels out my desolation of NO MORE ACTING CLASSES!!!!!!!!, but probably only for now. Now, the Old Souls. The first time we walked through the mall to Starbucks, in the FIRST SHOP WINDOW we saw, hanging on a Christmas tree, an extremely creepy doll-fairy-thing. Dressed in a pink, sparkly body-suit, it was winking in the freakiest, most menacing way that anyone in the universe could achieve and holding a dementoid little wand. But the creepy part WASN'T that it looked like somebody's grandmother gone wrong, believe it or not. It was that it looked SEXY- or at least the weirdo who made it tried to make look like that, with exaggerated curves, a mischevious(or incredibly STALKERISH) expression, and boobs like someone had slipped a double set of balloons under that body suit......and it all sums up to the creepiest thing you ever laid your eyes on. And later, we found out an EVEN CREEPIER (if possible) nugget of information...they were called 'Old Souls'- and the person who makes them modeled them off of DEAD PEOPLE. So now I go to sleep and have nightmares about a freaky grandma fairy who turns me into a haunted pink body-suit. And now you fully understand exactly how freaky my life is.

Stalker Monkey!!!

Yesterday, I was in Port Jefferson with my friend Gwen, and our moms took us to Starbucks to hang out while our little brothers had an acting class together. So we were just talking, munching, and drinking soda,  and laughing our heads off almost every time the other said something. It was extremely fun. Now, this arrangement has been going on for a while, because the acting class has been going on for two months, every Tuesday. So every time, I tag along to hang out. Now, way  back at the first class, I brought along this little guy to show to Gwen:

So we were fooling around with it, tossing it in the air and stuff, and we got freaked out because EVERY TIME it landed, it landed on its butt, sitting there, facing us. So it was officially named 'The Stalker Monkey', and now it's our private joke and weird little game. Now, we usually go to this playground before Starbucks, and there are these two beautiful trees that are being strangled to death by English mistletoe. It's really horrible, and both being lovers and protectors of trees, we decided to put an end to it. So right before we left, I took my dad's Swiss army knife, which has one long blade, one short blade, a bottle opener, a pair of tweezers, a toothpick, a cork popper, a hole-puncher, an assortment of weird-shaped little sharp things, and a miniature saw, PERFECT for sawing off vines of English mistletoe. So we sawed away at the  playground while we chatted, and by the time we were ready to head to Starbucks, we had freed one of the trees. Victory was nigh, so we took a shortcut through the mall and went to Starbucks for a treat.  ****   We sat down at the little bar stools in a cozy nook inside the window with two bottles of  Izze, a cheese, fruit, and nut snack pack, and a blueberry scone. It was pretty nice, but there was some college-age geek tucked away in the corner watching Transformers on a laptop, so we didn't have total privacy, but it was good. He was wearing headphones though so I'm pretty sure he didn't hear anything. So anyway, the swiss army knife was in my pocket, and I took it and the monkey out to eat my scone. Then, once we had opened our soda, I put my bottle cap on the monkey like a little hat. It covered his eyes, though, and we both agreed that he looked like a gangster. It was very funny, and to complete the picture of junior delinquentism, I opened the  big knife and propped it up against him. It was totally hilarious, and Gwen and I took a bunch of pictures of stuff we saw/did at Starbucks, in the mall, and in the shop windows on the way back. So this is a post that YOU should be thankful for- thankful that you're not being stalked by a rabid, knife-wielding monkey!!........

.......................Welllllll............................................Just be careful. Because maybe you are!!

I

I kill you!!!!!

More Halloween!!

Well. This Halloween was AWESOME, but not as awesome as usual because we didn't go to Evelyn's neighborhood first like we usually do. And the people there get really crabby for some reason when you show up at nine o'clock at night. Don't ask me why, but they do, so even though we got a bus-load, we didn't get as much candy as we usually do. But trick-or-treating was a blast! Here's how it went:


- We put the finishing touches on our costumes


- We carved the jack-o-lanterns


- Our friends Amie, Evelyn, and Sadie showed up at two after Evelyn's school let out, and we put on costumes and set out to trick-or-treat in our neighborhood after pictures (courtesy of Rachel)


- At about five and staggering under our burdens of candy, we went back to the house for a homemade pizza dinner, again courtesy of Rachel



- Rachel left for her friend Angie's house to go trick-or-treating there at about six



- After dinner, we did the rest of our neighborhood, which lasted until about eight thirty



- Ben wanted to stay with Dad at the house, so we left him and the rest of us drove to Evelyn's house, where we finished our candy roundup in her unfourtunately crabby neighborhood



- We went back to Evelyn's house for candy trading at about nine and then headed home for the end of a successful and very fun day.


Just to refresh your memories.....I was a zombie, Emma, a peacock, Ben, a samurai, Evelyn, Luna Lovegood, Sadie, Princess Lollipop from Candyland, Rachel, Buffy the vampire slayer (lucky nobody was a vampire this year!), Mom, a medieval princess, and Amie, the Queen of Hearts. So I hope everyone else had a good one too, and happy Halloween!

Halloween!!!!!!

I just wanted to say that I can't WAIT for Halloween! This year I'm going to be a zombie, but not just a run-of-the-mill, typical zombie bride or a dumb thing like that. We're going to go to Seldon Thrift and get some old clothes that I can rip up, and put coconut oil in my hair to make it greasy. And now the best part. I first got the idea when I had ten billion bug bites and slept with calomine lotion on my arms. When I woke up, it looked like my skin was peeling off my arms! So at first I wanted to do calomine, but who ever heard of a zombie with a bad sunburn? I mean, they live in their graves and stalk people at night. So we talked about dying it pale green, but Mom was freaking out about it 'flaking off all over the house' so Dad suggested a flour-and-water paste, but we ran into the same issue. So Dad came up with "Why don't we do something heavier, that won't come off very easily.Something like ... oooooooaaaatmeal?" So that was all WTH Dad??? but now that I think about it, it seems like a good idea. I mean, it's heavy enough to not peel very much, my skin will look lumpy and diseased under the oats, it's easily dyeable....so we decided that we would give it a try. But Dad being Dad, it probably won't get done until the day before Halloween....oh well. I'll try to drop a few hints that I need a costume soon. So wish me luck, and happy Halloween!

Never ever ever ever EVER try to do this to a cat

This is Bo.



He is our official weirdo cat. He will sleep on banisters and fall off of them promptly, go through the house miuing very very very VERY loudly for his sister who's asleep in the next room, cram himself in windowsills that are only open three inches,bite himself  until he bleeds (although that, to be fair, isn't really his fault-he has fleas)
and sleep in our drawers for two days without food, water, or litter box. He's in love with our outdoor cat Lila, who despises him, and he will stand at the screen door on his hind legs and mew, purr, and carry on until she hisses or smacks him through the door and gets her claws stuck in the screen, then runs away and leaves him heartbroken. After this procedure, he parades tragically through the house for a few days, preferring to flop around the house like a dying fish as oppose to walking, and then forgets about it until the next time he sees Lila, which is the time he completes the cycle yet again.


Needless to say, he is by far the craziest pet.


So anyway, this is a post about how you should never ever ever ever EVER try to give a cat a bath. Now most people know this already, but in the craziness of youth we were ignorant until Bo taught us a hard lesson this afternoon.

                                              * * * * * * *


I was sitting reading a book when I happened to observe Bo sitting on the sideboard chewing away like his scabs are the most delicious wonder ever to be created, and so I said to Ben and Emma, my fellow classmates in the world's school of hard life lessons, "Why not try to get those fleas off of Bo? let's vacuum him!"  After all, I was thinking of in Ramona's World, how her friend Daisy's cat, Clawed, likes to be vacuumed. Hey, maybe we would discover that Bo had amazing hidden depths and liked, even adored being sucked on by a huge noisy machine................................OR, as I was forced to observe after ten minutes of being scratched, mewed at protestingly, shrieked at by Rachel to quiet down, and trying to hold on to a Bo squirming like a snake out of my arms, maybe not.
But being a naive, optimisticly blind fool, I said in a desperate display of stubborn bravado, " Okay, so this isn't working too well. Let's try a bath!"


........................What a fool I was..........................................



Now, I am not going to tell the whole miserable story, only tell that it involves:


-Bo, obviously


-A flowery pillowcase


-Three dog towels

-The kitchen sink

-A wooden shield, a pair of shin guards,a rain jacket, one pair of rubber boots, and two oven mitts


- A lot of spilled shampoo


-And a pink pitcher.



So of course it was pandemonium, and I can only warn you NEVER to do this to your cat. And I fear I've shattered Bo's trust for a while.


So, as Peter, Paul, and Mary say, ......"A sadder man, but wiser now, I sing these words to you."

My most annoying pets: ie. the chickens

Now, this is an 'annoyed' post. The reason it falls under that category is because it is ( as you could probably glean from the name) about my chickens and their annoying habits. Now, I just was thinking about them because I was feeding them this morning, and they were being really dumb and I was also thinking about writing a new post and I said to them, "Hey! maybe I can write about you guys! Then the whole world (or at least the five people who read this random junk) will know how annoying you are!!!"  Now I don't know what kind of random geek would care about reading about my annoying chickens, and I bet you aren't a random geek whoever you are and you didn't want to read about my annoying chickens, but then why else would you have clicked on this title? And if so, how could you be anything BUT a random geek? Well anyway I bet you didn't want to read about chickens but too bad because that's what I'm writing. OKAY.
This is a list of their annoying habits.


#1: They find some pleasure in being exceedingly, ridiculously loud. Don't ask me why, but they do. All day every day, they just walk around going BAAAAAAAWWWWKKKK BAK BAK BUCKAWK BAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUK BUK which, in case you have never heard it, is incredibly annoying. And people think roosters are the loud ones!........ Maybe it's because they know somehow that they're not going to live very long, so if they are going to be loud and annoying they want to be as loud and annoying as they possibly can. That's probably it.


#2: They are little escape artists!! We have this length of green fence that we curl into a circle and put against the sides of the permanent run. Then, we open the little door and they hop onto the doorframe and into the grass. We close up the edges of the fence, and move them along every few hours so that they don't destroy the lawn too much. But when they get bored, they almost always find a way to escape. And chickens run really fast.




#3: They really poop a lot. They are like little pooping machines. The run is always really stinky. That's really all there is to say.







#4: They are spoiled brats! If you don't get them out in the grass soon enough, I swear they will weak you up!! They reach the limit at about nine. They start clucking louder and louder, and if that doesn't work, they start screaming and flapping to about the decibel level of a jet plane so I go, "Huh? what? are they being attacked out there?! I bet there's a huge rabid raccoon out there! Oh my God what if it's a hawk?!?!?!!? MY CHICKENS ARE OUT THERE BEING ATTACKED BY A HAWK!!!!!!!!!"  So then when I come racing out the door with pepper spray, they are just standing there cocking there smug little heads innocently and after I feed them, they actually figured out that noise=food so they start doing it AGAIN and when I get mad they're like, "Hmmmmm? you don't want us to wake the whole neighborhood? you don't want us to contact the ASPCA? We thought you said there was a hawk...."




#5: The little jerks will break and eat their own eggs if you don't feed them soon enough in the morning. Sometimes their faces will be yellow from the yolk. This habit is particularly upsetting because we even had to buy eggs from the store, it was so bad! How humiliating, right? I even started getting up at seven in the hopes of catching them before eggs were broken. The only good thing is that they never break their eggs in the grass.





So if you ever want chickens of your own, beware, because some are cursed with the ancient burden of annoyingness! Beware! Also the neighbors might want to beware of number four. But if you do want chickens, they make good pets. At least some of them.

Bird's-eye view

Hellohello!

Now, today I want to tell you about one  of the many tomboyish hobbies I have. This one is, as you could probably glean from the picture, tree climbing. Now, the picture up there is my favorite local climbing tree, because its seventy years old and I can climb super high. The first time I  (or anyone) climbed it was last fall, with my best friend in the whole world, Evelyn. After it had torn clothes, caught hair, poked, prodded, scraped, and generally banged us up, it was officially christened Technical Difficulties by an indignantly scratched Evelyn. The highest we climbed then was a cowardly fifteen feet to a convenient resting place, a majestic split in the trunk covered in creeping ivy and glossy needles, with comfortable branches and stumps for sitting. It struck us as a beautiful, perfect, clubhouse, and since it was a perfect example of natural splendor, with the dancing sunbeams striking the ivy and gleaming needles just right and a soft breeze playing through our pulled hair and ruffling the shining needles, we named it the Palace. So for almost a year, the fifteen-foot Palace was our limit of climbing, especially since Dad had, after having a conniption fit seeing us fifteen feet up a tree, forbidden us to go any higher. Poop. But I, being an adventurer at heart, ended up breaking Dad's rule, ha! Unfortunately, and please forgive me if you're reading this, Ev, but you were a bit more cowardly about it. BUT maybe you'll change your mind once you see my pictures!! Haha! Hahahaha! So now I will show you, readers, the best view in the WORLD!!!

This is Technical Difficulties, the best tree in the world! I <3 you, big guy!

Here are a couple of pics of the view from the Palace.

This is the neighbor's roof and the little chair in his back yard.

There's Emma from fifteen feet up. Hello down there!

Here's the view from between the branches. That little red blob is the other neighbors' roof, the ones who live behind us.

Here's a random picture of me climbing up. Onward, soldier!

Here's a better picture of the neighbor's roof from almost twice as high! Ha!

Here's a random picture of the sky when it was still blue, before the rainclouds.

I can climb so high, I outdistance the ivy!

Here is my favorite view of the neighborhood. Now you know why I named the post that!

Here's a better picture of the 'little red blob' house, just much higher!

Here's an even better picture of Ed's roof and the neighbor's houses. Now I feel like a stalker. :(




And that concludes my post. Plant, climb, and love your trees!






I love you, Technicjhamcfzdfczs okay, I totally screwed that up. Let's try that agaimmbjnnk NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO the key board is malfunctioninnjfhvxgdvb!!!!!!!!! DANG! I'm going to sign off before it starts writing out curse wordsknbbnblc. 'Bye! and remembexzdfh, love your treesjml!

All the things that matter

I want to show you something.




I want to show you some things that are important. I mean REAL important things, not money or fancy cars or home insurance. I also want to say something: I belive we were put on Earth to make a difference, but also there's no point in living if you see, but don't bother to savor these rare important things.

I think we can all make a difference, if we can avoid being overcome by greed and hold on to what's really important.

Needle-felted creations

Now, is anyone reading this a fiber geek (like me)? Because if you aren't, you probably don't even know what needle-felting is. So that's why I'm here, as your genuine geek, to fill you in.

Felting is an ancient art of fibers (wool, llama fiber, etc.) that began in A.D. something. It was sort of invented by accident by a man traveling somewhere on a long journey. So the theory goes, the man put some raw wool in the bottoms of his shoes for comfort (see, humans were wusses even back then!) and upon the end of his trip, he discovered that the wool had formed itself, with a little help from him, into a soft, firm whole. The theory was that the wool had gotten wet with rain, sweat, etc. and with the pressure from his foot, the fibers in the wool had bonded together to create a foot-shaped mat that fit perfectly into the bottom of his shoe. Since it was discovered first, this technique is called true felting, original felting or wet felting.


Needle felting is the same idea, with the fibers of the wool bonding to create a firm piece. But instead of using moisture, you use a very special needle whose bottom half is covered in tiny barbs. For this reason, it's also called dry felting. When you stab the wool, the barbs catch on the microscopic scales that coat each tiny string of wool. Then the strings are driven together by the needle, and the scales on each string rub against each other and catch, thus sticking together two pieces of fiber. And all the steps of this fascinating process are accomplished in one quick jab of the needle. This is why it has to be real, 100 percent wool, because  cotton or anything besides natural fiber doesn't have any scales, and therefore won't bond. From the first moment I started needle felting, I was hooked, and now I make all sorts of awesome stuff. So now, I'll show you some pictures of what I've created.*


*Just a word of warning: the felting needles are incredibly sharp, so just be super-careful when felting your own creations. You can get nasty stabs on the fingers of the hand that isn't holding the needle.

The adorable little penguin I felted just today! I call him Oreo.

This is Comet, the first in my collection of felted llamas. I make them by wrapping 100% wool yarn around a wire frame, and then felting it all together.

And this little sweetheart was a Christmas present for a friend of mine. I forget his name though, unfortunately.



So this is a post about a great hobby for us geeks. Thanks for reading!

Labor Day

Hellohello!




Now, if you expected a long, satisfying post telling about some infamous adventure of mine and full to the brim of humor and witticisms, you will probably be extremely disappointed by this post.



                      I just wanted to tell everybody happy Labor Day.



So that being said, goodbye







Well, not really goodbye, because if it doesn't rain, my family is planning a fun day at the beach, so I might post pictures of that later.





                                     So  now  goodbye.



                                        For now.

Go away, mean Irene!

Alright.........in the weather-induced terror that's gripping the nation, you have probably heard about the hurricane Irene. In fact, I'm willing to bet all my worldly possesions that unless you are a bozo or a little baby, you have definitely heard about Irene, but in which case you wouldn't even be reading my blog so that doesn't even make sense. ANYWAY I'm posting this to show you pictures of the horrendous damage that it did as it struck Long Island.









.....................................Ready? Deep breath.....

Hehe, just my little laugh. But seriously, it wasn't just castle-in-the-fish-tank damage, although the hurricane was diluted to a tropical storm by the time it reached us. We actually got a couple of power lines, and three or four trees in my neighborhood.It was estimated that about three thousand households on LI lost power during last night's bout of rain and gusts of wind, and thousands were evacuated to higher grounds. So not everyone was as lucky as we were in terms of destruction, and now let's have a moment of silence for the hundreds of thousands of trees, birds and squirrels whom they and their homes suffered grievous damage.



.......................................................................................................................................

Thank you. Just for instance, Ben and I were walking around, looking for damage to take pictures of in in the neighborhood, we came across a dead baby bird in the street. It had probably blown out of its nest only a few hours before we came across it. It hardly had any feathers, it was mostly skin and bones, and it was only about two inches long. I estimated it at a few days old and we gave it a decent burial at the foot of a towering beech tree using a stick, three beech leaves and a white pebble. But on a happier note, all the evacuated families can come back very soon because we got mostly wind and hardly any rain, so there was almost no  flooding. But we shouldn't forget all the other destruction, of course. And so here are the pictures of REAL damage.






Brace yourselves!

                 So this is a thankful post-- I'm glad that not much damage was done, and that things could have been much, much, worse.





           P.S. : I was wrong about the flooding.......there were ducks swimming in the road downtown today. So I guess even hurricanes can be beneficial.



                                         At least for ducks.