Today I saw an ad on tv for Hormel Natural food products. They were serving pre-sliced ham, and ‘there are no preservatives!’ Um, isn’t the whole POINT of making ham to preserve the pork? What is the salt, if not a preservative?
Now, I’m the sort of guy who likes a big salty country ham. And it worries me somewhat that folks are more concerned about the preservatives in their preserved meat than, I don’t know, where the actual meat is coming from and how it was raised annd processed.
I finished spray painting one of the sets of lockers this evening to store our shoes in. Only took 4 cans of spray paint! And look how well it matches our recycle bin…almost like we planned it.
Yesterday Anya turned a month old. Every month for the first year or so, I’m gonna try and take a photo of her in the same place to see how she grows. So, here’s the first one.
I’ve read lots of journals of parents where they post milestones their kids have hit during the last month or whatnot, so here’s Anya’s list of achievements for these first four weeks:
+ does a great imitation of Wallace when he’s just found some tasty cheese
+ speaks perfect squirrel
+ won a local farting competition
+ explored her inner toad
+ practiced camoflage techniques (as shown below)
I never imagined a tee-tiny, wee little baby could produce such foul smelling and giganto farts.
Baby says, “Who me? I don’t fart! I toot.”
And just because, here’s a picture of the baby after a bath. She likes to put the little towel hood on her head like a crown to pretend she is royalty.
While I spend my days as a piece of furniture for the baby to sleep upon, Andy has been keeping very busy with tons of projects around here: building sheep shelters, repotting basil plants, planting beans in the garden, trying to keep the fences moved to keep the sheep on grass.
To top it off, he got a bee in his bonnet (not really, that’s my hat he keeps wearing, not his) and started painting the workshop. He wanted to paint the house to remove from it the nasty poop color the previous owners thought would be lovely, but the house doesn’t need to be painted. The workshop…it probably hasn’t had a new coat of paint since it was built ten years or so ago. In some places, it doesn’t look like the workshop was ever painted. Maybe it wasn’t. To be technical, Andy hasn’t really been painting. He’s been primer-ing.
We haven’t decided on an actual paint color yet. Andy’s suggestion, “Whatever color we can find a 5-gallon bucket of in the OOPS section at the store?” I’m thinking stripes myself. When we do paint the house, I want big polka dots. You can’t have a polka dot house in the city.
Another painting project in the works involves some clearance bin spray paint called “sour apple.” Last weekend we went to this out-of-business donut store/daycare center and bought some old lockers. (There’s a story about the trip that maybe someday I’ll write out.) For some reason, we’ve been lusting after old lockers for a while. Here’s one of the locker thingies.
You can see the other locker thingy in the back of the truck next to some logs we also got at the donut store/daycare center. The place was in a log cabiny-type structure, and it appears to retrofit the structure for the donut kitchen, the owners had to cut down/out some of the beams. They will make a nice raised bed or small retaining-wall-type terrace thing or something.
The plan is to spray paint the lockers a happy color (I guess “sour apple” is happy) and put at least one of them in the kitchen next to the coat rack to use to hold shoes and bags and lanterns and sheep vitamins. With the happy little doors, Buddy will not be able to pee upon the shoes and bags and lanterns and sheep vitamins, and our lives will be just a wee bit less smelly.
At the donut store / daycare center, we also picked up a bunch of legos, a bunch of wooden blocks, two neato stained glass-ish hanging lights, half a box of nails, and an aluminum cake pan.
(Side Note: Yesterday, Sydney said, “Baaaaaatman.” Maybe Andy is Sydney’s superhero.)
I’ve been hearing voices in strange places lately. Last week, I distinctly heard Sydney (the ram) bellow out, “Baaaaaaaaaaaandrew!” I’m not sure what Andy did, but it must not have been good to have been called by his full name.
The other sheep haven’t been speaking…at least not in English. I’m guessing they speak in Icelandic, but I can’t really say. On Sunday, Andy and my dad moved the sheep to a big pasturey area (aka part of our front yard). Andy built cool sheepy shelters so the sheep can stay out of the elements. There’s only one in this field right now ’cause the sheep have trees to shelter under, too, but there will be more than one. Just so ya know.
Back to the voices, my boobie pump talks to me. I’ve been dealing with “supply issues,” and so I’ve been pumping to help keep things flowing. The pump says lots of things, and I have lots of time to listen to it. My favorite phrase is, “Donna Reed don’t you leave NRA.” Sometimes, the pump is conflicted and one moment says merely, “Run away!” and then “Don’t you leave.” (not necessarily to Donna Reed). It also seems to know where it came from as it frequently talks about Roanoke.
You can see the talkative pump in the upper right of this photo. This is my view from Baby Feeding Central. In addition to the pump, you can see my friend the clock (who does not speak). Also the trash can into which I toss things like kleenex (which I use plenty of now that I had to stop taking my allergy medicine) and Hardee’s bags.
I toss in this last picture because I think it’s silly. Yesterday (or the day before…or maybe it was last week…who knows) I took Aniela in the sling down to the garden to do some weeding. I also lugged down her bouncy chair and made a little roof with the sling to keep the sun off. Don’t worry. I covered up her feet.
My wedding ring has been lost for, I dunno, 4 years or more. It has been a very sad thing. I put it in my pocket one day, and then it was gone. I always assumed it rolled out in the couch or something, but we could never find it. We searched all the cushions and stuff, and came up empty. I had this theory that it was in the couch somewhere, and before we finally trashed it we would have to take it apart to be sure.
So today, Cabol’s mom was digging under the cushion of our brown chair for something, and said ‘Wow, no one must have vacuumed here, there is so much stuff! What a neat ring!’ Yes, that’s right, she came up with the missing ring. Someplace we’ve looked repeatedly over the years, and vacuumed periodically as well. I’m not sure where in the chair it was hiding that it managed the survive for years and not get sucked up, or fall out the bottom where the bunnies have pulled the chair apart, or roll out during the move…but there you go. I guess I’m married again.
As to be expected, it’s all about the sleeping around here.
Larry wants to know where his cute, fluffy, pink blanket is.
Our pepper seedlings didn’t grow very well, so we stopped by Slaughter’s and got some plants there. Of course, the day after we planted them, the temperature promptly dropped to freezing two nights in a row. Today I finally had a chance to go check them out, and it looks like about half of them have died. I suppose if the rest do ok, we’ll still have more than enough peppers for our needs (after all, we’re still using the frozen ones from two seasons ago).
