I am taking comments away for the time being so you can just think I’m a self-absorbed dick who’s dooin it rong rather than a non-technosavvy dick who cannot be bothered with MT. I would rather sew up my own cervix then look under the hood of yon gentle Movable Type.

What People Need to Understand (that sounds like a great lead-in to the craziest part of the manifesto, doesn’t it?) is that oh god oh god I so need a box to write into and a button to push at the end. I thought about chucking it and going to paper journals (WHAT is that cheering sound?) but I cannot write faster than I type. I also think I’m addicted to hyperlinking now. Sometimes I am writing my shopping list and I am like Jesus God we’re out of artichokes and then I think HA HA that reminds me of that picture of the guy with the artichoke crammed into his…and then I look up and realize that I don’t have twenty-eight tabs open in front of me, I have only the kitchen table with granola crusted on it even though Hey I Just Washed This.

Anyway, on the fence about the new neighbors here. I think about my neighbors a fair amount, because when you live in a duplex, you share a wall with just one set of people, whom you see coming and going and such, unlike in an apartment, where you may be totally surrounded and don’t want to see or think about any of them. This is just a little theory I’m working on.

So, points against, they are kind of dingbats. On first meeting them, it was revealed during the discovery process that they had designs on our green tomatoes, which did not, as it happens, just fall out of the fucking sky or magically sprout out of the ground. In fact, we haven’t eaten any of our tomatoes yet. I like to share as much as anyone, but don’t be a tomato plotter if you haven’t earned it. There is other social retardation as well, in the form of the inability to introduce oneself before launching into a tirade about something or other that was the verbal equivalent of tl;dr.

Pro: At work all day. Woo!

In the four days that the unit was empty, I took a break from shooshing the girls for yelling or elephanting up and down the stairs or bashing their heads into the shared wall. They went completely feral in that time, and forgot that we live in a shared building. It’s been a challenge getting them to simmer down again, but it’s going okay.

Today I am waiting for a call for the job I interviewed for the other day. I am feeling like it’s a bad sign that it’s 2 p.m. and I haven’t heard anything, but I am also generally pessimistic right now, so who knows. If they do make an offer, I am thinking about what to negotiate for, since the job description is totally different than the actual job. Like on salary.corm, the listed job and the job as described are two different categories all together, but supposedly you segue into the real job description after three months or so. What do you do in a case like this? I guess I will ask for the flensing salary and see if they can throw in a knife so I don’t have to bring my own every day.

Further, I have been up since 3:30 since the cat decided that was the time to learn a new percussion instrument (door banged against wall) and I could not get back to sleep. I sure I will sleep soundly tonight with a stomach full of pot pie. (Flavor: cat.)

I also managed to find a new doctor for my girls. Their family doctor of seven years UP AND FLED like a bandit in the night. I called the clinic to make an appointment and they said no dice. Where did she go? We don’t have that information. ORLY.

I cannot begin to tell you how disappointed I was when I googled her ass and there she was in California. I really, really wanted the sordid backstory: fraudulent credentials, a jewel fencing operation, SOMETHING. But no. Just rudeness. Send a letter or a postcard, FFS, people. Seven years.

Speaking of FFS, I am beginning to recieve harassing phone calls for my ex-husband on my cellular telephone. Awesome. I love a harassment break in the middle of the day, don’t you? The downside of still being connected to him enough that they call me is mitigated by the fact that I get to say, Oh, so sorry, we are not married anymore. I could be harassed all day. I love it. This explains how I thrive as a mother, I reckon.

Tonight I was at Le Fred after being overcharged for some wee rain boots. As we were in line, we were considering buying their entire stock of Hannah Montana posters as an alternative to painting the office.

“Only if she’s half-naked, like on her myspace,” I said.

The customer service clerk took exception to this. He was somewhere between twenty and twenty-five, and obviously In Charge of the Internet, possibly even a Keyboard Gangster.

“No wai,” he said. “Those things are photoshopped all the time. You can’t believe that stuff. They make fake pages all the time. I mean, Albert Einstein and Sartre has a myspace,” he concluded, kindly educating the oldsters who stood before him.

I waited until he finished our transaction to hiss to P., “I have seen many shops in my day, and I know those are not shops.”

“Yeah, it was on the news and everything.”

“I KNOW, RITE. Now who’s the lamezor noob?”

My friend took me to Zayda Buddy’s in Ballard, which is the newish “Midwestern style” restaurant and it offers pizza and things like gravy fries and fried cheese. I am not saying that I am the Queen of Virtuous Living or anything, but I had a really hard time finding anything on the menu I even wanted to order. I was sad to see my friend pay ten dollars for tot casserole. I pretty much agree with most of the people on yelp who have said MEH. I can’t really slam it, though. If you know you are getting nostalgic bland bar food at the prices of say, midprice Thai food which would be thrice as delicious, then you can’t complain. I am not the audience for this place, because unlike my Iowan friend, I am not nostalgic for dump casserole. I have Stockholm Syndrome and now all I care about is shit like nam pla. I decided to get really drunk, which made me forget that I was eating cheese curds, tots, and hotdogs.

In conclusion, the best part was the drunkenness and the bathroom:

SOOOO I think I told you that I dropped a cup size some time in the past few months. I have heard the way cup sizes work is expressed in two ways. One is to measure the boobs in weight, as if they are well, melons, and the other, simpler way is to say that for every cup size, your boobs will stick out more or less one inch, once you cram your junk into the appropriate globulareque shape, instead of what they would be doing on their own after two children, which is trying to get away from you like sea cucumbers.

This means that since I dropped from a D to a C-cup, I have lost, in theory, six ounces, or they have gone in one inch closer to my torso. This means that my boobs weigh somewhere around twenty-one ounces, or roughly a pound and a half. HOWEVER. Dropping from a D-cup to a C-cup has made a major difference somewhere else. My bra straps have gone from a practical and comfortable 3/4″-1″ to a flimsy half an inch or less. Once you hit C-cup, they decide you’re all smexy and don’t need to be practical or have the twenty-one ounces supported properly or something.

In FURTHER conclusion, bra scientists can turn in their badges.

Many of the other Web pages devoted to urban chicken farming say nothing at all about butchering. At sites like thecitychicken.com, you can learn about coop construction, hatching eggs, feeding, protecting, and diagnosing chickens. Everything, in short, except what is for me the most satisfying part: the bloodying.

From There Will Be Chicken Blood.

Seriously? Because I think the best part is you know, eggs. And raising them up, and letting them sit in your lap and stuff. I have killed chickens, and it’s not that bad, but c’mon. Maybe you should stop backyard birding and work in the Tyson factory?

Speaking of chicken melodrama, batch number two is now three weeks old. The two Silkies have not yet acquired names, but Strudel stepped in and named the Polish hen.

Figure 1: Meet “Mr. Klassy.” I was going to quash it, but the “Mr.” won me over, really.

Veronica and Calliope happily putter around the yard like the big ladies they are now, and Marty has gone to a new home, where no one will mind if he crows. Too bad. He was a beaut.

Figure 2: Nomnomnoming Thai curry that Strudel did not eat.

Oh! And you have to know the house is done. It is jolly blue. Ye Olde “Chooks’ Respite I” was green. I am going to be extra creative and name this new house “Chooks’ Respite II.” I should say, too, that there are now chicken ladders attached under the doors, so they don’t have to just fly/jump.

Figure 3: The run is in a dead zone under a laurel and hawthorne, but they have grassy sunny backyard access most of the time, too. So there is a “front” door to the yard, and a “back” door to the run only, for when we are gone all day.

Figure 4: And then there is the big door for cleaning and food/water access.

Figure 5: The inside not yet showing the two perches and hilarz wood-patterned linoleum. It’s like some kind of Norwegian Disco in there are something, or a roller rink.

Dig if you will the picture, of a pipe burst in my duplex neighbor’s bathroom. As we discovered with the other pipe-bursting fiasco, the water shut-off is in the neighbor’s house. Since he had water running down his walls, he decided to shut it off. So here I am, who just happened to start my period for the first time in two months (hooked on IUD worked for me) and my hair licked into the shape of an ice cream cone by a drive by llama licking. OKAY, that is a lie. But there are filthy children who cannot be washed, filthy dishes that smell in my kitchen, toilets that cannot be flushed, freshly planted tomatoes that cannot be watered, and filthy me who is bleeding and covered in sawdust from working on the henhouse all weekend. O Modern Conveniences I am your bitch.

Last night I kept dreaming about my gay high school boyfriend and that I tried on all these really holike promdresses. I think it’s because I was in Ballard on Friday night with my friend and we kept seeing white stretch Hummers. I suspect the white stretch Hummer market is now exclusively taken over by high school kids and Mariah Carey, and I know that wasn’t Mimi cruising up and down Market Street.

I was standing on Ballard Ave. and I loaned some drunken middle-aged guy my pen, and followed him out to use it since it has sentimental value. He had that kind of hair that looked sculpted or perhaps injection-molded, and like his name was probably Bill or Harold or Fletch. He claimed the person he needed to write his phone number down for disappeared and I socked it away back into my purse. He took a look at me.

“Nice tits!” he threw my way.

“Alright!” I said. “Nice complete lack of guile!”

I forgot to tell you: Yesterday the girls were playing in the hose and filling up a bucket. Over the winter not one, but both sprinkler heads have disappeared, leaving them with only the plant sprayer. Franny yelled at her sister: “Let’s play Mad Jesus!”

I immediately stopped sawing and listened, pretending to work.

“Okay, Strudel, Mad Jesus is a fun game. Here is the sea,” she said, indicating the bucket. “You are The People and I am The Jesus. The Mad Jesus. You act like a people.”

Strudel obediently waggled her hands in the water, acting like the innocent and sinful masses.

“Mad Jesus! I’M MAD JESUS! I’m spraying The People to Death!” Franny drenched Strudel and her sinful hands. “Okay, The People are dead. Now you be Mad Jesus.”

GHEY

This is the same cockloaf who brought you Britney giving birth. All I can say to recommend this is that it’s gold. I think this man should have a cock and balls tattooed to his forehead and all his profits should be forwarded to ME.

Moar tomorrow with pics.