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.