Alecto's Ophelia

On the Art of being Inappropriate

Posting has become very difficult. Commenting has become very difficult but nobody should take that personally; I’m certainly still reading and I have a lot to say but if your comments require authentication I can no longer post a comment during the day and at night, well at night I just haven’t been able to. I’d offer up excuses that anybody would buy in a heartbeat but what the hell would be the point in that? This is a life blog where we strive for honest, forthright communication. Well, I do anyway. It’s my purpose for being here. Here is where I write the things I might not say otherwise. Here is where I document the things that matter in my life in a way that I cannot easily communicate elsewhere.

And it was all good until my family members started reading my blog and I had to start filtering. And then I started having real feelings for the sensibilities of my readers and I had to start filtering there. And then life got hard again and I stopped writing all together because I didn’t feel I could write most of my truths without pissing off or offending somebody and no matter what anybody tells me about people pleasing paranoia and all that, this is real for me. Conflict, real or perceived, makes me curl up under the proverbial bed with my thumb in my mouth and my eyes squeezed shut. That right there might be too much information for some of you.

Anyway, I don’t want my family members to stop reading my blog. It’s pretty much the only way you know I’m still breathing. I do want you to take what I write with a grain of salt and recognize that it’s about me, not you. I don’t want my blog friends to stop reading and if I offend any of you with too much information or a conflicting opinion, belief or behavior I’m sorry for that but I value your presence and your input. Actually, I love that you’re out there. Somehow it all makes me feel a bit more human and connected. So I’m going to try this again, one more time, because most of the time it keeps me grounded.

So that’s it. That’s all I really wanted to say right now except I’ve been looking down a pretty deep black hole lately and I’m doing my best not to tip in and the beloved kitty who has been with me through three marriages and two divorces went over the rainbow bridge on Saturday but the three remaining chickens are good and Simon is cool as hell even though I’m pretty sure he just passed the 50 pound mark (he’s fifteen weeks old today) and I quit my night and weekend job (the one at home that makes me happiest but won’t pay the mortgage) at least until my family pulls their collective heads out of their collective asses and starts pitching in unconditionally and I’ll write about all of it in the very near future. I’m pretty sure it’s a good story.

 

 

Don't you have chickens on your front porch?

 

I know our neighbors have struggled with the idea of our chickens. I know this because our neighbor right across the street makes her granddaughter catch and lock them up (ha ha ha, like putting them in the chicken pen keeps them in) when they cross the street and our neighbor to the left yelled at Little Girl one day (and I'm thinking she needs her meds adjusted for yelling at a little girl instead of talking to her parents) and said her dogs would eat our chickens because they cross the invisible boundaries from two acre yard to two acre yard and our neighbor diagonally across the street said, 'oh, I thought that might be you.' In reference to our birds.

And I want it noted that we have wild turkeys on the loose in this neighborhood. And I want it noted that the vet's wife two doors down feeds them morning and night too. And I want it noted that our neighbor directly across the street (the one with the granddaughter) rescues raccoons. I just want it noted that in all this wild life we raise eyebrows because we keep chickens and, gasp... eat their eggs and stuff (so dirty, apparently).

I guess the truth is I don't find it even remotely remarkable anymore. What I find remarkable is that we appear to be alone in this neighborhood.

I can't wait until the meat birds arrive in the spring.

That should have been the end of the post but I know I'm going to be too distracted next week to remember to tell you this but...

1. I waltzed about like a lunatic (I was fully clothed at the time, I swear) scattering assorted seed six weeks ago and now I have assorted greens coming up all over the place.
2. I planted many things in this one little patch back in April and May (that gave me nothing but radishes this year) and I see carrots coming up?! Now?
3. The fat chives (I don't know how else to differentiate them from the skinny chives that put themselves to bed already) are making a concerted move on the potato beds.
4. The dill has reseeded itself. Everywhere.
5. My oregano has lost it's mind and headed for the swamp. Everywhere.
6. The Romaine reseeded itself EVERYWHERE.
7. The celery is delighted with the weather and looks better than it ever did.
8. And I am glad I was late putting in the stiff neck garlic because the daffodils are coming up already (they'll duck down again shortly).

I put up no cold frames, have done nothing other than turn over a few beds and pull up the tomato and bean stakes and I just want you to know that on November 16, the garden is very much alive and well.

Passing by the open windows

It is really very easy to get yourself lost in the world and wind up serving your soul sunny side up to some cosmic parking lot attendant at the train station. I was sitting in my car at the station this morning, not feeling all that balanced, staring at the platform and thinking, what the fuck? My ears and throat hurt and I've yet to recover from the lost sleep incurred during the trip into the city Tuesday night with the big kids to see one of the final productions of Rent (I'm still crying over that one).

And then I got out of the car and approached the platform. I'm reading Jack Kerouac's On The Road from the original scroll which means it's like reading the inside of my own brains at nine thousand miles per hour minus any sort of punctuation or spell check. I rather like it a lot. The rest of you might get to feeling a bit sea sick as most people eventually out grow the desire to be hung upside down by ones feet and spun around until the world forgets the lie of linearity. After awhile I forgot about the soul sucker in the parking lot and got lost in Kerouac's version of reality (I quite like it).

None of this resolved the soul sucking and its really just a bit of a bandaid. Sometimes I need to come home and just get hit upside the head with the desires and textures of my own life. You know, the real part where I operate under the illusion that I'm making up at least a good portion of my own rules. So you know how this goes; I take off my monkey suit, pour myself a glass of wine and head out into the great and mighty jungle which calls itself my back yard.

Some of you might remember this little guy in a prior iteration when he was quite a bit smaller and I questioned Audrey's ability to keep him hanging off the deer mesh. Well, here he is and I suspect he'll hang here, slug free, for quite some time. This is food people. Through the garden walls and into the mini jungle, this is food. It's awfully hard sometimes to find a way back to something real and true in all the muck of soul suckage out there. And to reiterate an earlier point, I do actually love this thing they pay me money to do. I LOVE it. However, it is still corporate america, not my life and a bit of a soul sucker all the same. I need grounding, people, and here it is.

This is a little hard to see but it's one giant mutha of a sugar pumpkin (they are supposed to be TEENSY) resting in a bed of corn. I'm just going to wait and see what it does despite the fact that the slugs (that I thought I didn't have) have finally moved in and consumed the first of my ripening sugar babies (bastids).

When Little Girl shakes this pumpkin it sloshes.

Here is a butterfly stuck in the meshing. We freed him without contact and he flew away...

  To the tiny cupola on the roof top. You can see him, he's the little beige spec, on the peaked roof of the cupola.

  You can see the bottom of the new chicken coop behind Little Girl who is doing her own version of geeking the camera (does anybody out there besides me recall the origin of the word geek and it's relation to chickens specifically?).

  And then there's this seven nearly eight year old version of peace. Yeah, I do actually buy it.

In the light...

And finally, I know it's kind of hard to see, but this tobacco type plant I bought two of that got no more than 18 inches high at any point in time suddenly makes this gianormous offshoot that's nearly four feet tall (not that you can tell because those cone flowers are nearly eight feet tall now) and he stands up like some porn star out of the seventies and says, come 'er, babe. let me show you what I've got...

Have a great weekend. I'll be rolling about in the dirt and other such scandalous things.

Close the what?!

Two nights ago at dinner Little Girl asked how the eggs were getting out of the chickens. Being too tired to remember the word vent or even have the foresight to not answer at all I said,

"The eggs come out of the egg hole." 

This was, apparently, uproariously funny. I went to bed.

Yesterday NoMans was working from home. He was standing on the second story porch overlooking the chicken pen where Little girl sat with a chicken in her lap, chicken tush pointed slightly up.

She looked up at him and said,

"NoMans, how do I close the egg hole?"

He stood speechless until he realized she meant the small doors in the side of the chicken coop.

Sunday Mini Farm Report

I have no idea why I strung up the beans. None whatsoever. Can somebody please explain this to me (Mom?)? They're black beans, by the way. What I harvested today from what I planted awhile back from the pound I was about to cook up and eat.

Today was one of those days I went to the garden for celery, basil and oregano because I was about to cook up and can 30 pounds of farmer's market tomatoes and make some sauce for the week and I discovered so much extra unharvested yummies I squatted in the dirt using my skirt to hold what my bucket could not because I'm not one for going back and getting another bucket if I can just sit there and fill up my skirt and the holler until Nomans laughs at my ass and comes down to the garden with a bag and still I don't really want to give up what's in my clutches... 

I don't know where this pumpkin above came from. I come in and out of these rows just about every day and somehow I flat out missed this bugger and isn't he just delightful? I have this supermarket idea of how sugar pumpkins should look and this ain't it. I'm pretty much OK with that. And below, can you imagine the tenacity it's going to take to support that thing on the fence as it grows? It's like taking pictures of a new baby, once a week and still you miss all the changes.

  Here are some gratuitous chicken pictures (speaking of new babies). This one makes me think of the movie Chicken Run where they turned all the chickens into pies, sort of like Cruella De Ville (except you have to face it, chickins is yummy).

And here she is (Belinda) on her way into the hollow that became the perennial garden to mess with the flower bugs. We know she is Belinda (even if she isn't) because she's the only chicken willing to jump the fence these days. Speaking of which, we've been keeping the girls in Homer's old puppy crate locked up in the shed and it took only a few days before they decided that was home and refused to come out of it in the morning (until they're good and ready).

We have done two things (I'll discuss the second later when I've found her). The first was to purchase a pellet gun. I'm not much of a gun fan and that's really about where I live, not what I believe on the whole. Also, I've spent a good part of my adult life believing I'm too trigger happy to have one in the house. I think I'm a little more sure of my ability to survive these days (I used to keep an electric chain saw by the bed when I slept alone but I don't much expect to be assaulted in my sleep these days). In any event, we have this thing in this residential neighborhood and Nomans is currently using the old pitch back as target practice and later he's going to put a donut in the middle of the yard and do his damn best to take out a couple of raccoons who will not leave well enough alone (having made one fresh chicken meal they'd just as soon have five more and they are PERSISTENT sons of bitches). If I do what I'd like (which is skin the bastids and hang them on a pole as a warning to other rodents of unusual size) I'd be run out of town so I'll make an attempt to behave myself (yes, we put the dog away before he started shooting at that thing from one level up).

Lastly, these sweet things I photograph in the early evening light mean everything.

Vignettes

Rollerblade

There is a man who rollerblades to work in Stamford. Do you remember rollerblades? I remember that I could go very, very fast but that it was hard to stop and falling down hurt a lot. This man rollerblades in and out of traffic like a man on a bicycle making deliveries in New York City. He seems to be fearless. He carries only a small messenger bag across one shoulder. I suppose they hold his shoes.  A few weeks ago I noticed him coming out of the train station at about the same time I do even though it's hard to tell because there are so many trains coming and going that time of morning. I saw him sitting on the steps putting on his blades and then a little while later he skimmed by me like a water bug into the moving traffic. I wonder if the cars even have time to get nervous. Last week I got on the train in Cannondale, turned left and plopped myself down in a quasi open four seater and then looked across to examine my companion who happened to be vaguely snoozing and probably not as unaware as you might think. He had a small over the shoulder messenger bag and a pair of rollerblades. I stared at him for 33 minutes. The entire way I did not even read my book. I wanted to reach out and touch him and see if he was really there.

Chickens of the free range variety

Why is it OK for the wild turkeys to wander all over the neighborhood but not OK when my chickens cross the street? My chickens are crazy and that might just be a state of chickenhood, I'm not sure yet. My chickens like to be picked up, turned over on their backs and then stroked and kissed. My chickens like to be kissed. Whoever thought? When I approach one of my chickens, in or out of their pen, they kind of crouch down low as if in anticipation of being picked up. If I walk right by without at least bending down to stroke the back I get squawked at until I turn around and at least say hi. My chickens like to lay their eggs outside the pen. At least I know where to find them. My chickens wandered all over our yard and woods and finally crossed the street. Together. Like a chicken brigade. Our neighbor was not pleased. That very evening, off came their wings. OK, we didn't take the wings off we just clipped them a bit. The buggers get out anyway but lately it's just one at a time and they don't wander too far. The day after the raccoon visit not a single one left the pen.

The nanny is inscrutable

She's a lovely girl, very caring and nurturing with Little Girl and has had at least one near death experience with Cletus behind the wheel of the car. She tells us when she's going out, doesn't stay out all night and is downright respectful of the dinner hour. If I bring her a present it makes her smile in a way that reminds me of very young children who can still experience unadulterated joy at the very smallest things and yet she is so remarkably grown up. Our nanny is very competent. She surprises me on a regular basis by driving herself to another town or going to the social security office to apply and walking by all those drug dealers and not making a fuss about it later. Our nanny is very social. She makes new friends easily and shares her day when I come home. She thinks of all kinds of things to do with Little Girl when the schedule reads structured play (structured play doesn't mean structure, in nanny speak it means interact with my child, do not sit her in front of the television and then cruise the net). Overall I think we and she will do all right together. I think. You see, I don't really know because the nanny, she is inscrutable. There are moments when the sun shines off her face like a little kid but there are also many, many moments when she is completely deadpan and blank. She has gone elsewhere, I think, when something is difficult or hard to understand. It is hard to speak into inscrutable but I'm not sure I need to.

Speaking the unspeakable

I have been asked if I'm going to blog this and I'm not sure I can. There are two things and the second is much easier to write so I'll write it first. Last night one of my six chickens was murdered savagely by what can only be raccoons. I'm not exaggerating the brutality of the death. She was dragged from the coop (I think they lifted it right off the ground), over the fence, across the lawn and into the swamp shrieking the entire way and leaving a swath of blood and feathers that will have to be cleaned up before Little Girl comes home this evening. I was afraid NoMans was going to sit out there in his bathrobe for the remainder of the night throwing rocks but we put the dog in the pen instead and despite his diminutive size (he weighs all of 22 pounds) he sure does have a deep and ferocious sounding bark. And before anyone gets up in my face about it, yes I do know what those raccoons might have done to my dog but they didn't and he won't have to stay out there again.  Tonight the remaining five girls will stay in Homer's old puppy crate in the shed (which is fort knox) and the new fort knox will be delivered by fork lift on Tuesday of next week. There. That's that and I just wish I wasn't so damn upset about it but I am because I should have known better.

Here's the other part. The first part. My son came home last night. I called him on Tuesday because it was Cletus's birthday and he actually answered the phone. I asked him to come to her party but he was working and I asked him to come to dinner last night and he said he would and he did and I kept my judgmental mother mouth firmly shut and it was lovely. 

Doesn't sound like such a hard thing to write does it? Well, unless you're me and you were beginning to believe you were never going to see or hear from him again (it's been 17 months) it wouldn't sound so hard at all.

I can barely breathe and if I start crying now I will probably never stop. So listen, any of you out there not speaking or being spoken to by someone you love maybe now would be a good time to get over it. Seriously. We are all any of us ever has. Good, bad or indifferent.

p.s. there are a boatload of little baby eggs. we are eating all of them as fast as we can.

If you could hear what he says...

The light was all wrong for my current camera settings but I didn't want to take the time to change anything because then I really would have lost whatever light was left. When you look at this picture I want you to imagine that this uptight, starch glands in the back of his neck, hair has never been out of place in his life, worked in a filling station for five years filling tanks and changing oil and other filling station related things and never once had dirt under his nails... I want you to imagine that what is coming out of this man's mouth resembles chicken sounds so closely I had to actually look at him to be sure he was speaking. This is my husband, he is cooing at his ladies. And make no mistake, these birds are his.  He tucks them in at night, he cleans out the coop and pen and he hangs onto their baby eggs as if they were teeth right out of the mouths of his own children. Peeps, I present to you NoMans at home with his girls:

Apparently none of them stayed in the pen today. I'm perfectly all right with that as long as they all come home again in one piece. By the time we got home, at about 7:20 this evening, all but one were back in the pen. Here is the one holdout who may or may not be Frankie trying to get blood from a stone (bugs?):

The light is bad, but still, I think you can see what's going on here. I have a great deal of faith in these tomatoes if only because they appear to be so damn impossible.

There are no chickens in this hollow at the moment but this is where at least one of them likes to spend her days. This is the hollow that was created from what was a small hill after the 12 cubic yards of dirt were dumped and then carted out to the garden. Before I was aware of having a soil issue I planted a mess of perennials and then scattered the nasturtium, morning glory and cosmos about at will. What I got, while disturbing in some ways, is rather beautiful and I can understand why a chickin might like to hang out in this damp and sheltered hollow eating up the excess bugs (oh please, please, please be eating grubs and Japanese beetles and you can have some worms too). Here is Audrey's only baby. All those vines and just the one green sugar baby. If it doesn't rot on the vine it'll make fine batch of pies.

This is one of the butternut babies coming off the vine from the compost bin from the final squash I didn't eat in the winter that got tossed without thought and would you just look at that?

And finally, here is my garden gate. Every year it gets like this for one reason or another but this year it is pole beans and Audrey and I open it carefully and slip through the gap into the green...

I made the photos smaller by half. Please tell me if the site loads any faster or if I need to make them smaller still.

Just pickles I suppose

Well, you know I really wish I'd taken the time to use the camera at least once this weekend. On the other hand this will cause no download problems for my dial up peeps! I mentioned at the end of last week that my head was spinning from the nanny revolution and I think it still is, or will continue to, until we're settled in with just the one. In the mean time we've got territorial battles, language issues and food issues I was definitely NOT prepared for (you eat only lettuce? really. OK. Am I responsible for your getting scurvy if it comes to that? Probably not but you still need to set a reasonable example for my children.)

Big segue bump here. A very wise man wrote a blog entry a few days ago (OK, maybe only yesterday) remarking that a ton of people started gardens and then had fits when only half the garden worked out and he mentions in his blog that 50% seems pretty good... 20 watt light bulb flickers on over her head momentarily... but does not go out.  He might just have something here.

This is what I wish I could show you:

1. There are no less than forty tomatoes growing on my 20 very scrawny plants. They might not be strong enough to stay tied to stakes and hold up the weight of the fruit but they sure are producing.
2. I made a mess of pickles. My first ever. That fermentation disaster from last year does not count because even the dog would not eat them and also because I can blame that on Nomans (hands down). I only made five jars because apparently that was the end of my seals. Off to acquire more. They are, however, quite beautiful and made from my pickles and my dill. I can't discuss the garlic or the vinegar.
3. From the local farmers market I purchased a mess of tomatoes and made a marinara thick enough to stand up a spoon which was used on pizza which used up the remainder of my harvested veggies for the day.
4. I also made a bolognese and a gazpacho but have yet to convince new nanny that gazpacho is liquid salad and should be at least tasted before turning up one's nose and demanding lettuce (boy is she going to love it when I explain that the butter crunch I will deliver up to her this evening grows wild in my swamp because that's where I let it bolt and bolt and bolt again).
5. And there were two batches of bread, the cheese and the no knead wheat. I am wondering if new nanny will eat them. Old nanny will not.

The chickens are hilarious. We have one small poult egg that Nomans wants to frame on the wall like first dollar bill. He suggested we put it up in formaldehyde like St. Thomas's finger in Rome (really, we saw a finger in a jar of fluid, I am NOT making this up). I suggested he eat it but I'm not sure I'm going to be able to get it out of his clutches long enough to crack and cook it.

We are learning that while some chickens roost at home (like the coop, ladies, come on, please) other chickens run amok. One of these prefers roosting in the bushes in the front yard. I'm tempted to leave her there except she'll attract more raccoons. Old Nanny chased her back to the pen yesterday. I'm not sure New nanny will even acknowledge her presence (although I'm not so sure that's accurate because I believe her family kept chickens in the back yard until fairly recently, she just won't eat them or their eggs).

Overall it was a very productive weekend. I question my sanity and my choices periodically but I suppose we all go there periodically.

Now if I could just get my heart rate under 120 and get a decent night's sleep I'm sure everything would be just peachy.

Chickin Poop

I am not making this up. I did not photoshop that thing into my garden and yes, that is my garden (and that would be the tentacles of Audrey slithering past the bolted romaine) and no, he is not smoking, um, anything, that's a butterfly on his finger. It just sort of looks that way. The truth is I've wanted one or more of these things since that scene in The Full Monty where they 'borrow' the garden gnomes and drive that man pretending to still have a job just a little bit more bonkers than he already was. So this is my garden gnome. I haven't named him yet but I'm open to all sorts of suggestions. Yes, that was an invitation.

Here are the rest of my potatoes that I dug up on Saturday after the rain stopped and the heat wave came back and I did this in an effort to not have my husband throw any hammers in my general direction as we were beginning the process of erecting the chicken pen.

I haven't quite worked out what's going in the potato bed for the remainder of the season because the concept of succession planning is still a novel one and I'm just not that organized. My guess is I'll work it out by the weekend. Also, open to suggestions.

So Saturday morning rolls around and I'm supposed to be 75 miles north at the funeral of one of my best childhood friend's mother. Unfortunately it was a bad night and I was most assuredly not fit for human consumption. I will note here briefly, and I do mean briefly because I don't much want to go on about it, that I can have any number of bad nights that leave me feeling physically beaten to smithereens. Not sure what it is, suspect a readjustment of meds having just come off (completely) the heavy stuff I might be in a period of deep detox. Anyway, I woke up, had Nomans call one of the girls and then laid there on my back trying to work out how to get on with the day.

I can get on with the day in a state of extreme physicality and little to no human interaction and come about just fine in a handful of hours. Lucky for me it was Saturday and all I blew off was a funeral. That didn't come out well, did it? I got into the car with NoMans and we drove to the local Agway.

Gosh I sure have missed the local Agway. Haven't had any reason to visit one in years and I must say this one smells just delightful. Only it doesn't want to be called Agway anymore. It wants to be called a garden center but you can't fool me, it still reads Agway right up there on the window and since when can I get vet tape at a garden center? I digress.

A few things happened at the Agway.

1. NoMans saw a real chicken coop (bahahahahahahah)
2. I told him he couldn't buy one (bahahahhahah)
3. We purchased just under 100 feet (they only had 89 feet in stock) of galvanized 36 inch 1 inch mesh fencing.
4. Weensy little u-posts that aren't going to be worth a damn and will have to be replaced with probably cedar posts.
5. And a gate.
6. And some chicken implements of destruction (and when I said that I SWEAR he knew exactly what I was going on about - you know, those nifty little chicken feeders that hold nine bazillion pounds of chicken feed ok I exaggerate maybe five pounds and hang from the inside of the coop and that nifty water thingie that gives a good supply of water WITHOUT letting the delicate little ladies POOP in it - have I mentioned that the delicate little ladies POOP EVERYWHERE BUT MOSTLY IN THIER WATER SOURCE?)
7. And 900 more pounds of chicken feed because have I mentioned all the POOP? What comes out must have an equal source going in.

(I'm sorry, the font is about to do something truly heinous but I don't have time to fix it now.)

While NoMans worked out a thing or two without the benefit of said know it all wife, said know it all wife took some nifty pictures (after digging up all the remaining potatoes).

This is the inside of my compost bin. Boy do I love this compost bin and my raccoons love it too. Can't tell it's a compost bin, can you? Looks more like a potato and squash patch, doesn't it?

Here is the squash that escaped the bin and is wandering about the wild buttercrunch (which has been reseeding itself all summer long and I can't tell you how happy that makes me) getting ready to make something interesting. I thought you had to have a male and a female of the same species to make a fruit and maybe I really do have two of these but this is the only flower so far and it sure does look like it's about to be squash like. The only things I can think of that might have been tossed in there are either an acorn or a butter nut. Ideas? What's it look like (besides pretty)?

Look! Corn! Skinny corn, but corn all the same.

And and and and... THIS!!!!!

And finally, the moment you've all been waiting for (OK, humor me, it's the moment I've been waiting for), THE CHICKIN PEN!!!

Like I said, those u-posts are next to useless. More later on the roosting habits and general lunacy of chickins.