Rancho Spenardo

No More Four-Door

2011-11-30T19:10:00.007-06:00

It is with great sadness that I announce the death of my little four-legged miracle chicken. I ended up naming the bird Four-Door Dostoyevsky. I liked referring to the legs as front/rear driver side and front/rear passenger side. But since the parasitic twin (ie. the passenger) was on the bird's left side, that actually made Four-Door a right hand drive chicken. You know, like in England. The car comparison also gave me a delicate way to refer to his two...um...exhaust pipes.

The official cause of death as ruled by Spenardo del Sur's coroner (a.k.a. me) was pulmonary hypertension. In smaller words: freaky chicken had a bad ticker. It may or may not have had anything to do with the parasitic twin. Pulmonary hypertension is pretty common in factory farm refugees. They grow so big so fast and it can put a great strain on their developing hearts and lungs.

I was holding Four-Door when he died. The moment of death is pretty easily recognizable: pupils dilate, head flops over and they shit themselves. It's pretty much the same for all of us when we die (yep, you're gonna shit yourself when it happens).

My right hand was under his left wing. He didn't have many feathers there yet so my hand rested against bare skin. For almost four full minutes after Four-Door died, I could feel his parasitic twin's heart continue to beat.

It probably would've stopped beating sooner if I hadn't been giving the bird mouth-to-mouth. As long as I was getting any heartbeat, I was holding out hope. I am a crazy chicken lady and that's what crazy chicken ladies do. Me and Four-Door had big plans for this coming spring, dammit!

Of course, there was an autopsy. Of course, there were lots of photographs taken. Of course, I will post a bunch of them here - just not today. The end of the month snuck up on me again and I wanted to be sure November at least had one measly post. For now, I'll post a photo that better represents how I'd like to remember Four-Door (instead of flayed, splayed and filleted on the kitchen counter). Here he lounges on the poop deck in an old pie pan.

You are now thinking of some kind of food joke. Perhaps something about chicken pot pie. This will inevitably lead some of you to wonder if I ate Four-Door Dostoyevsky.

I did not.

Not that there was anything wrong with Four-Door's flesh (though the extra legs had absolutely no meat on them whatsoever - quite literally skin and bones). It's just that several days had passed before I was able to conduct the autopsy so I wound up feeding the meat to the cats. I saved the skeleton though. It will be an awesome souvenir of the time I had that stupid idea about homesteading in rural Alabama.

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen!

2011-10-06T19:49:00.005-05:00

The universe has heard my cry and given me a distraction from my drudgery.

First it sent Pilgrim.

He's about a year old and is a factory farm refugee. He showed up on his own Saturday. Found him sleeping in a stand of tall grass near the driveway. Looks like he spent a few days traveling the underground chicken railroad before finally reaching Spenardo del Sur.

I don't need another rooster. Pilgrim makes eight. That is a stupid number of roosters. But I'm a sucker for a hard luck story and he seems to be getting along with the three roosters he lives with - Pasha, Bart and Zevon - so he can stay.

The universe sensed that I was not impressed enough with this gift so it sent me another chicken.

An incredible chicken.

A stupendous, fantastical chicken that will amaze and delight kids from one to a hundred. Step right up and take a gander at the most awesome sight you'll see all day. Trust me when I tell you that you don't want to miss this. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you....

THE FOUR-LEGGED CHICKEN!!!!

It was culled from a commercial chicken farm yesterday. Sentenced to death for the crime of producing twice as many drumsticks as anybody else. What kind of country do we live in where someone is penalized for that? So I have commuted its sentence to life as a happy free range chicken who moonlights as a sideshow freak.

I don't know yet if it's a boy or girl. I certainly don't need a ninth rooster but, if it is a boy, I'm leaning towards the name Sideshow Bob. If it's a girl, I'm thinking Suzi Quatro.

This morning I put it with ten other baby chicks I have behind the house. The four-legged chicken is only a week older than they are. The meeting seemed to go okay. Nobody was openly hostile but they were all very curious about the extra appendages.

Post in which I piss and moan a lot

2011-09-30T21:45:00.000-05:00

Gah! This place has robbed me of my will to write! That's the only explanation.

I think a lot about writing. Really, I do. But when I sit down in front of the computer...nada, zilch, kaput.

I'm not just talking about slacking on the blog either. I wish I could say I've been busy writing that novel or working on essays or at least churning out poetry like I did in the golden days of yore. But no. My repertoire seems to consist of nothing but Facebook updates and shopping lists of things I can't afford to buy (fucking socks have been at the top of the list for fucking months).

I think this place feeds on the creativity of its people - some sort of artistic vampire. It sucks the marrow out of any creative bones in their bodies and shits out hymns, humidity and horrendous creepy-crawlies (like the scorpion I killed in the kitchen last night).

Maybe it's just the PMS, but this place is really chafing my ass even more than usual lately. I'm sick of dumb people. I'm sick of nowhere to go and nothing to do. I'm sick of racists. I'm sick of the word nigger. I'm sick of tea baggers. I'm sick of racist teabaggers using the word nigger. I'm sick of people who think Applebees is fine dining. I'm sick of people thinking Boone's Farm is real wine. I'm sick of people thinking drinking is a sin.

Gah! The more I dwell on it, the angrier I get. Angry at the people who think and do these things and angry at myself for ever agreeing to live amongst them.

Sigh. It's not all bad. There are good people here too. Even people I would go so far as to deem cool. I know enough cool people within a thousand square miles that, if they all had the same night off, I could assemble a decent-sized cocktail party without having to import too many people from Atlanta.

Grrrrrr. I know a lot of this is PMS. I get extra angry/sad every month around this time. Just because I made this stupid bed doesn't mean I have to enjoy laying in it. Oh, woe is me. Just ignore this shit, okay?

Look! Here's a picture of me at a party earlier this month:

It's actually a nice picture. I look half-way decent. But you know what? I don't really look like that. It's a Herculean effort to look that civilized. I actually think I'm turning feral in this environment.

You can't tell from that picture how bad my back and right hip hurt damned near every morning. You can't tell that the stupid pipes under my stupid trailer are leaking and I had to shut the water off, turning it back on once a week for scheduled showers and laundry, hauling water inside two gallons at a time the rest of the week. If you saw me now, you'd now I'm overdue for a hosing down. Nor can you tell I whacked myself in the face with a two-by-four this summer and lost a tooth in the process. If I can't afford to buy fucking socks, do you think I can afford to go to a dentist? Don't even get me started on how the car's transmission is at death's door.

Gah! Maybe it's not just the PMS. Maybe this place really does suck ass and I was an idiot to ever leave Spenard. Hmmmmm.....I don't think there's any maybe about that. I am currently inclined to believe that leaving Alaska was the dumbest dumbshit thing I've ever done - and trust me when I say I've done a lot of dumb shit in my life.

Okay, I'm going to go to bed now. Tomorrow is a brand new day, a brand new month even. Perhaps after I wake up and hobble over to the stove to boil water hauled from outside to make a cup of coffee, I might feel a little better. Probably not but, stranger things have happened. It would probably be cathartic to take the shotgun out and blast some shit but, sadly, bullets are also on the shopping list.

I'm really not searching for sympathy here. Honest. It's just the final hours of the last day of the month and I needed to write something. I was just in no mood to write about current chicken events. So, instead, you get this wailing and gnashing of teeth. Sorry 'bout that. I'll make it up to you later with pictures of the new adorable baby chicks.

August in a nutshell

2011-08-30T22:08:00.007-05:00

I had a birthday in August. I'm now 43. Sometimes feel much older though. If I knew I'd live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself.

Went to a hula party. It was my friend Evan's birthday party but it was the day before mine so I just celebrated early. That's Evan in the coconut bra.

The Freaky Tiki

Lightning struck Spenardo del Sur again. This time it hit a dead tree next to the goat shed. I'm sure the goats were not pleased since they were in the shed at the time - a mere 30 feet away. I watched the strike from a more comfortable distance of 500 feet.

It wasn't until the next day that I saw the damage the blast did to Frankencoop 100 feet away. The east wing of Frankencoop has been closed off for a long time now. The eastern outside wall was in bad shape. I mean bad. The ceiling ain't great either. Got too scary going in there everyday to collect eggs so I sealed it up.

The day after the storm (which only lasted 45 minutes but left an inch of rain and numerous lighting strikes within three Mississippis), I stepped into Frankencoop and noticed that this dresser was face down on the floor.

The dresser helps block the hole in the drywall that leads to the east wing. (On top of the dresser are old feed boxes salvaged from the barn I tore down, repurposed as nesting boxes.)

When I looked through the uncovered hole, this is what I saw:

The lightning had been the straw that broke the camel's back - or in this case, broke my grandma's kitchen wall. The entire door frame, which I'd boarded up when I first started work on Frankencoop, came crashing down which, in turn, knocked the dresser over. The window which had been next to the door actually had fallen out a couple months back. If you click and embiggen the picture, you can actually see the trunk of the stricken tree. It's currently being obscured by the mass of kudzu covering the outside of the wall (or, should I say, where the wall used to be).

I knew the day would come when that wall came down. And that day came in August. I think I really need to finish tearing that old house down this winter while some of the vintage wood can still be salvaged. That means a new chicken coop because the 19 birds currently living there have to go somewhere.

Here's a pic of the tree. It's to the left of the shed. It's just a trunk. It died a few years ago and all the branches had already fallen off. I'm surprised the shed is still standing . The goats have absolutely destroyed it over the last four years.

Celeste and Rosemary mug for the camera.

I was bummed to see that the pine struck back in June is starting to die. I noticed last week that the needles on a number of branches are turning brown. Damn it. I liked that tree.

Other stuff happened in August too but it's late and I have to be up early.

You either get it or you don't.

2011-07-31T10:42:00.005-05:00

Chickenfight Girl's son just graduated college. He cleaned out his apartment in Auburn and dumped all his stuff at his parents' place. She gave me a couple lamps. She pulled a small coffee grinder out of a box. "What's this?"

Me: A coffee grinder. For grinding whole coffee beans.

Chickenfight Girl: Huh. I've never seen one. I never buy whole coffee beans.

Me: I don't much either anymore. But I prefer whole coffee beans. Just can't always afford it.

Chickenfight Girl: Why is the stuff in here green? That's not coffee.

Me: Let me look at that. (removes lid, scrapes a fingernail across the green powder and takes a whiff) Nope, that's definitely not coffee.

Chickenfight Girl: What is it? It's not coffee.

Me: Uh...well...You can use it to grind other stuff too. I've used mine to grind corn for tortillas. You could technically grind up a lot of different stuff in there. Wheat, rice, beans...

Chickenfight Girl: So it could be, like, wheat germ or something?

Me: Yeah, wheat germ. Or something.

Chickenfight Girl: Do you want it?

Me: Yes. Thank you.

For those of you who didn't really get the above exchange, please enjoy this picture of Lemuel hula-hooping around the bonfire one recent summer evening:

There's something awesome about watching an almost-7-foot farmer bust a move with a hula hoop. Lemuel is really quite good with a hoop. Lemuel and Shadrack actually make and sell hoops. If you're at a farmer's market in East Alabama/West Georgia and you see two dudes spinning hoops and selling okra at the same time, tell 'em Jackie from Spenardo del Sur sent you. You won't get a discount or anything - it would just be a cool thing to do.

Old school from waaaay back

2011-07-11T18:08:00.006-05:00

Among the many things I salvaged from my grandmother's old house (before turning it into a chicken coop) were lots of school textbooks from the '30s and '40s.

Here are some of my favorite color illustrations from the 1936 edition of "The Body and Health." The book credits the illustrators as Mildred Lyon Hetherington, Helen Bilger, Irene Dorcy and Grace G. Mitchell. As always, you can click to embiggen.

It must be the end of the month

2011-06-30T23:24:00.003-05:00

Once again, I'm slipping in under the wire, posting at the end of the month simply because I cannot bear to have an empty month in the archives.

So here's some photos of a pine tree that was struck by lightning - only 100 feet or so from the house. One of the few exciting things to happen around here and I wasn't even home to witness it.

I'd always liked this raggedy old pine because it had somehow managed to be the only tree on this open field to survive the kudzu - although the kudzu did kill the bottom branches. I spent many hours removing all the kudzu from the pine in hopes that it would thrive. I doubt it will survive this lightning strike, though I can still hope.

As always, you can click on the photos to embiggen.

Intense heat turned moisture in the tree to steam and blasted off strips of bark up to 30 feet away.

The bottom seven feet of the trunk was scorched black.

You can see the house in the background.

The tree as seen from the poop deck (aka the front porch).

Further encounters with the wild kingdom

2011-05-29T16:55:00.005-05:00

For the last two weeks this damned gray fox has been coming to the house at night. Not only was it sniffing around the chickens, it was getting into fights with the cats. In these two weeks I have interrupted three cat/fox fights. The Rat Patrol is currently on Old Yeller watch.

I'm positive this is the same fox I've been seeing over the course of the last six months. I've probably spent an entire box of ammo on just this one fox. I've had way more sightings of this single fox than all my other fox sightings combined - often with no more than 25 feet between us.

Last night I was startled by the sound of a screaming cat just outside the window. I ran to the back door and caught a glimpse of the fox's tail as it ran around the corner of the house. I ran to the front door, grabbing the loaded .22 on the way. I stepped out onto the poop deck and saw the fox stopped on the other side of the driveway at the shadowy border between porch light illumination and the inky black.

I brought the gun down and hesitated just long enough to ask myself Are you sure that's the fox and not one of the cats? A flick of the tail assured me I was in the clear and I fired. Shot it in the head on my first try.

Now before you go thinking I'm some crack shot, I'll fess up and admit that I wasn't even aiming at its head. Didn't want to mess up the skull for Angela.

God help me, I think I'm going to attempt skinning it.

Spenardo Showdown

2011-04-24T21:27:00.017-05:00

It's been chaos with the chickens. Got eight new concentration coop refugees yesterday, one of which is a rooster. I normally don't take roosters but the guy had already brought him here and I didn't have the heart to say no. I knew if I said no the rooster would just be killed and thrown in the incinerator. I'm hoping to find him a new home because I absolutely cannot keep him.

Sad factory rooster

They're all sequestered right now in a coop addition I've been working on behind my house. It started as a temporary pen to house some refugees last summer and evolved into this third world-looking affair. It's still a work in progress though I don't think it'll be any more impressive when it's completed.

Note the hen on the bottom left. She's laying an egg. Every spring, when they start laying eggs again after the winter, some of the hens will insist on finding their own hiding spots for eggs, no matter how many nice cozy nests I have built for them. Eggs turn up in tufts of grass, cardboard boxes, under the stairs, any random nook or cranny. This is where the Easter egg hunt comes from.

The two roosters who already live at my house are not happy about the new guy. Pasha wants to get at him because he lives to kick the ass of any rooster that gets in his way. Bart wants to get at him because he dreams of doing the ass kicking for a change.

The pecking order of the hens had already been in flux since the recent death of two porch chickens one of which was Murray, the long-time reigning queen of the porch chickens. This comes right on the heels of the demise of Cheepacabra, queen of Frankencoop. Spenardo del Sur has no chicken queens!

One of Bart's hens recently defected over to Pasha's coop. I didn't want to fight about it so I let her. Tonight, another of Bart's ladies decided she didn't want to sleep under the back stairs anymore either. Instead, she wanted to sleep alone on the porch behind some buckets in the corner.

Normally I wouldn't allow such a thing. The porch is undefended territory where any critter could just mosey up the steps. But I shrugged and figured it's been a long time since anything other than a cat or chicken has been on the porch. What harm could come of it? It's like a kid asking if he can pitch a tent in the yard and sleep outside for a night. I didn't want to fight about it so I let her.

About an hour after dark, I hear her making a fuss on the porch. I flip on the light to see her waddling down the stairs. I look in the corner and find a big fat possum sniffing about. I run out the door and scoop her up, taking her around to the back stairs. I explain to her that she's just going to have to sleep with Bart tonight and I'll arrange different accommodations tomorrow if she so desires.

I dart inside through the back door and make a beeline for the front door, picking up the already loaded .22 on the way. By the time I get back onto the porch, the fat possum is squeezing through a gap that leads to Pasha and his ladies.

Porch chickens aren't nearly as secure at night as Frankencoop chickens. Frankencoop is a fortress compared to my front porch and back stairs which are only kinda sorta secure. But in three years of porch chickens, this is the first time a possum has attempted this maneuver (although the cats do it all the time).

Even though its big fat possum ass is pointed straight at me, I don't really have a good shot at it. We're in pretty close quarters and I have a lot of crap on the porch right now. Instead, I run down the stairs and hope to prevent the possum from making it through the gap.

Too late!

I didn't feel like I could get a good shot without risking hitting something else. You can't see it in the picture, but there's a cat right behind that corner post (you can see her a little better in the next photos). I used that two-by-four on the bottom right a couple times to help "guide" the possum. Rather than let me guide it outside the chicken wire where it could scurry into the dark night, the possum insisted on taking the more perilous route up the porch's south face.

When it finally made it to the top, I took the two-by-four and tried to nudge it off the railing and back onto the porch. When it wouldn't budge, I gave it a good thwack. Possums have one hell of a grip.

I realized that, if I was standing on the other side, I couldn't ask for a better shot at it. I ran back to the top of the stairs and took aim. For a moment, it felt like I was playing one of those carnival arcade games. I imagined the possum with a bulls-eye on its side and, if I hit it, I'd win some dopey prize like giant sunglasses or a comb.

What I actually got was a bleeding possum that almost took out a tray of tomato seedlings when it fell from the rail.

It huddled in that spot between the buckets with its back to me for several minutes. I could see it was still breathing. After a while, it slowly emerged, bleeding from the mouth. I hadn't shot it in the head. I'd gone for a body shot, hoping to keep the skull intact for Angela.

It left a trail of blood across the porch as it made its way for the stairs. I figured I'd finish it off when it got on the ground and I could get a clear shot. I didn't feel comfortable shooting at something so close to my feet. Plus, I didn't want to be forever explaining the bullet hole in the stairs.

While the possum traversed the porch, I peered between the buckets where it had huddled, bleeding, with it's back to me. I wanted to see how much blood had been lost. To my surprise, blood was not all she lost.

Yep, the possum was a she.

It had been a body shot alright. A two-for-one shot. You can see the bullet wound on the baby's right side. It must've been not-so-safely nestled in mama possum's marsupial pouch. If this had been the carnival arcade, I might have won an invisible dog or transistor radio.

But this wasn't the carnival and now I felt like a fucking monster. I looked back to the wounded mama possum. She turned to look at me one last time before lumbering down the stairs, bleeding on each step. My mind searched for a fitting song to play over this dramatic scene: The condemned descending the stairs into the dark night, bleeding, leaving behind a dead child, a gun pointed at her back. I couldn't think of a song but it would probably be something by Nick Cave or Johnny Cash.

When we were both finally on level ground, I positioned myself for the second shot. The damned cats kept getting in my way and she was moving closer and closer to the shadows beyond the reach of my porch light. I quickly pulled the trigger before it was too late. She bolted and I was able to squeeze off one more round before she melted into the darkness just a few feet away. I might've chanced a third shot if she hadn't been running in the direction of the propane tank.

The grass is high and my flashlight is weak. I have no desire to try and track her through the yard in the dark moonless night. I hope she dies quick. She no doubt had other babies. They will die too. I also hope its quick. I will look for her in the morning. Maybe Angela will get a new skull after all.

Cheepacabra has left the building

2011-03-14T15:30:00.004-05:00

Flown the coop. Bought the farm. Whatever you want to call it. Cheepacabra, Queen of the Chickens, is no more.

Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet queen,

and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

Archaeological find of the day

2011-03-03T20:41:00.003-06:00

Walking around Spenardo del Sur after a good rain is sorta like beachcombing. You never know what you'll find.

While piddling around in the garden today, I found this die-cast toy car - a Fiat Abarth. The internet tells me it was made by Tootisetoy in the seventies. I had a bunch of these little metal toy cars when I was a kid. There's a good possibility that this one was mine.

I found this in garden where the old barn used to be. The barn fascinated me as a kid. It was full of all kinds of cool stuff and I wasn't allowed to go in there. "Too dangerous" they told me. "It could fall down any minute." Of course this made me want to go in there even more.

I took this picture of the barn in the early 1980s:

By the time I was finally allowed to go inside, it looked like this:

Of course, just because I wasn't allowed to go in the barn as a kid doesn't mean I stayed out of the barn. Which is why it wouldn't surprise me if this little toy car was dropped by yours truly 35 years ago right smack dab in the middle of the barn.

This is what the barn looks like now:

Except that this photo was taken a year ago and I've since removed those last few boards on the right (but the big pile of rusty tin in the upper left is still there) and I put up a sign that says "NO CHICKENS ALLOWED." Too bad chickens can't read.

It'll look nicer in a month when the veggies and flowers come up.

Shadrack, Lemuel and Lazarus

2011-02-14T21:11:00.009-06:00

These are my friends Shadrack and Lemuel.

Of course, those are not their real names. I let them pick their own names for the blog and they got all biblical on me. That's Shadrack on the left and Lemuel on the right. That's Shadrack's house behind them. Story has it that the oldest part of the house dates back to the 1850s (an addition was made in the 20th century).

Shadrack hates having his picture taken so this will probably be the only photo I post of him. Lemuel's okay with photos so you'll probably see more of him. I sometimes work for Lemuel on his farm. He lives in a very tiny home that is only slightly bigger than Shadrack's front porch. Seriously. It's small. And Lemuel is a big guy. You can't tell in the picture because he's slouching but Lemuel is 6 foot 10.

Back to Shadrack's house: Look at the walkway leading up to the front door. It's all made out of big random stones. Looks like it's been there forever. (As always, you can click the pictures to embiggen.)

Look closer though. Notice the really big stone at the bottom of the photo? It doesn't quite look the same as the others.

Hmmm....there appears to be some writing on it. Let's take an even closer look.

Yep. It is the 127-year-old gravestone of Lazarus B. Ware. How it wound up in Shadrack's walkway is a mystery. So apparently is the resting place of old Lazarus' bones. Lucky for me, I like to solve mysteries.

I was able to turn up a little info on Lazarus. He was a white farmer who lived in the same West Georgia town Shadrack lives in. He had a mess of children and still has living descendants in the South. Much to Lemuel's disappointment, Lazarus B. Ware did not have a sister named Betta.

Rosemary's babies

2011-01-31T18:09:00.007-06:00

My nanny goat, Rosemary, gave birth to two adorable babies on Saturday. They both look just like her.

Ice Ice Baby

2011-01-12T20:17:00.008-06:00

In case you haven't heard, a big storm swept across the Southeast. Snow to the north of me. Rain to the south. Freezing ice here in the middle with me.

Spenardo del Sur and surrounding regions have been encased in a candy coating of ice for three days and counting.

(Click to embiggen)

On Monday, traffic halted. State troopers declared all roads in Randolph County and seven others as impassable.

One neighbor took advantage of the empty road and turned Pet Kittle Hill into a monstrous 2500-foot sledding hill. He drove his son up to the four-way stop on his four-wheeler and then let the kid slide 2500 feet back down. He'd follow his son on the four-wheeler and then take him back up to the top again.

I shot some shitty video from the porch. Go ahead and skip to about 30 seconds in. Imagine Helter Skelter playing in the background.

On Tuesday, one of my neighbor/cousins took matters into his own hands and hooked up the front loader to his tractor and plowed the road himself.

On Wednesday - today - some semi-official looking guys showed up to shovel gravel off the back of a truck.

It's not supposed to get out of the 30s tomorrow so I suspect we'll still be slippin' & slidin' here at Spenardo del Sur for another day or two.

If I squint just right, it kinda looks a little like home.

Can't prove I'm poor

2011-01-04T20:13:00.006-06:00

There's some kind of state program here in Alabama that helps poor people pay for propane in the winter. I tried to get in on it last year but couldn't find my Social Security card. Alabama requires you to show your hard copy Social Security card for everything. I'd lost mine 20 years before moving here but never needed it for anything. Nobody ever asked to see it. But I couldn't even get a driver's license in Alabama without showing the card. Had to get a new one from Michigan.

Anyway, I tried again to get in on the free winter gas program. Chickenfight Girl gets it for her family and her elderly father-in-law. She's the one who told me about it.

Went down there today to do the initial paperwork - having found my stupid Social Security card which they didn't even ask to see today. This time, there was a different kind of paperwork I was unable show them.

My problem is that I cannot prove that I am poor.

I told them I was self-employed. They said they wanted to see my employment records. Employment records? I don't need no stinkin' employment records! This dude paid me $20. This lady paid me $20. I sold some silver jewelry. I sold some crap on eBay. I don't have any records other than my PayPal account and some chicken scratch on my calendar.

She looked at me, exasperated. There was no little box on her paperwork to check off for me. A little lightbulb went off above her head. "Do you get food stamps?"

"No."

The little lightbulb exploded above her head.

Truth is, I collect no government stipend of any kind. No food stamps. No unemployment. No disability. No nothing. I either scrape up $250 a month or stuff starts getting shut off. If I come up with more than $250, I can buy something extravagant like cheese or popsicles.

The lady behind the desk rolled her eyes and sighed, as if to say how could she help me if I wouldn't even help myself. "You really should get food stamps."

I just wanted to fucking scream "I DON'T NEED FOOD! I NEED PROPANE! ME WANT PROPANE STAMPS!"

But I kept my cool as she flipped through page after page of regulations, looking for the one that applied to me. Finally, I was told that I had to go to all the people who had paid me twenty bucks here and twenty bucks there and get notarized statements so as to provide detailed records of my income in December.

Fuck it. I may just cut more wood.

Year-end round up

2010-12-30T22:30:00.008-06:00

Been lots going on and nothing going on.

Since my last post I've been working a lot around the old homestead. I also helped Chickenfight Girl butcher a hog - turning it into 172 pounds of delicious sausage. After months of putting it off, I finally killed my rooster, Philosophy, and served him up with pasta to an Alaskan friend, Hal Gage, who came to visit.

On an cold and icy day, a woman slid off the road and crashed her car into a stand of trees in front of Frankencoop. I just happened to be on my way to check the mail when it happened so I got to be first responder. She ended up in the hospital for two days and the car was totaled.

A photo I submitted to Skulladay.com last year was among those chosen to be in their upcoming book. Another photo I posted to the blog a couple years ago is going to be used in an episode of A&E's new forensic reality show, Bloodwork. Sadly, there's no money in either of these transactions. Just the glory that comes with a credit.

I missed the lunar eclipse but got to have some cool close encounters with hawks and armadillos. The parents came for a short visit. One of the cats died. One of the goats delivered two babies a month early - one was stillborn and the second lived for ten minutes.

Grandma Guthrie passed away yesterday. She was 89 years old. Her funeral is tomorrow, New Year's Eve.

I've never really posted a photo of Grandma Guthrie - at least not one where you could see her face. But today I will. It was taken this past summer while we were sitting out on her carport.

She was wearing a skateboarding t-shirt that her grandson gave her. I cracked up the first time I saw her wear it and asked "Can I take a picture of you in your boarding shirt?"

She got all huffy and blurted out "No!" Then she muttered "Besides, I don't even own a bathing suit!"

Once she understood what I meant, she consented to the photo.

Grandma Guthrie 1921-2010

I'm not real big on New Year's resolutions but I resolve to post more in 2011.

The story thus far...

2010-11-08T12:00:00.004-06:00

Okay, so Grandma Guthrie went into a nursing home. She's very unhappy about it and I can't say I blame her but neither of us got a vote in the matter.

I was a bit apprehensive about losing such a big percentage of my meager income heading into what's going to be a very lean winter. The garden sucked ass this year, thanks to 4 months of almost no rain. The big freezer is only half full. At least I put in a bunch of extra hours during the two weeks preceding Grandma Guthrie's incarceration so I was able to have all my utility bills paid up before going into a budgetary lockdown.

Fortunately, I snagged another job immediately afterward - picking vegetables at a small organic farm. Unfortunately, I am currently only being paid in food. If I can hang in there for a while, there is some paying work down the road.

I was introduced the the organic farmer at a local Slow Food gathering where I finally met the secret underground group of cool people who live in Randolph County. It took almost four years to find the cool cabal here but I finally did it. I was beginning to think they didn't exist. You'll surely be reading more about them here in the future.

My other assorted odd jobs earn me enough every month to scrape by for about three weeks. Property taxes are due soon. So is the property insurance but that bill will just have to go in the shredder because there is no room for it in the budget. Not to mention (but I will anyway) that my car has been out of commission for what seems like forever.

In a couple of weeks I'll be helping Chickenfight Girl and her husband butcher a couple hogs and will get paid in large quantities of meat. At least I will not starve this winter.

So far, the worst part has been being out of coffee for the last two weeks.

The decline of Grandma Guthrie

2010-10-13T22:22:00.005-05:00

As I predicted, Grandma Guthrie has gone downhill since the death of her husband almost two months ago. It hasn't helped that she's had quite a few falls in that time. Each fall made her that much weaker and that much more likely to fall again the next time she tried to stand up by herself.

She needs someone to keep an eye on her pretty much 24/7. She won't sit still. Turn your back on her for 5 minutes and she tries to stand up and walk to another room.

I'm proud to say, she's only fallen once on my watch - and that was over a year ago. She wanted to go outside, walk around the yard and look at the summer flowers. Back then, she got around pretty well (if pretty slow) with her walker and I didn't need to shadow her as closely as I do these days. She stumbled over some uneven ground and fell to the ground. She begged me not to tell her children about it for fear they wouldn't allow her to go outside anymore. Since I never did tell them, they actually think my record is spotless.

These days, she falls a lot. Like I said, turn your back on her for 5 minutes and there's a good chance you'll be picking her up off the floor. She needs help getting dressed. She needs help going to the bathroom. She is afraid and so desperately wants you to just sit with her because she doesn't want to be alone.

I talked to my mom in Michigan today and her stories about watching her toddler grandson (my nephew) sounded eerily like my stories of watching 89-year-old Grandma Guthrie - right down to our matching tales about letting them wash dishes because it made them feel useful but re-washing the dishes when they weren't looking so their feelings wouldn't be hurt.

Grandma Guthrie's children are divided on whether or not she should go to a nursing home. Grandma Guthrie has made her feelings very clear on this matter: She does not want to go to a nursing home. I'm with her on that. It'll kill her sooner and create a hell of a lot of paperwork. Also, I'd be out of a job.

I'm putting in a lot of extra hours right now. I used to stay with her about 14 hours a week. This week I'll clock in around 30 hours. Her son and I took her to a doctor's appointment today for the shoulder she injured in a recent fall and she ended up being admitted to the hospital. This was not unexpected. Tomorrow I will spend the day sitting by her hospital bedside. Somebody has to be close by to make sure she doesn't try to get out of bed by herself and to help her go to the bathroom. The hospital staff doesn't do that stuff. That's up to the family.

I don't mean to knock the local hospital. I'm sure they do the best with what they got. But it is a sad, dingy place. My judgment probably has a lot to with the fact that the majority of my hospital experience comes from thirty years of watching General Hospital, so take my opinion with a grain of salt (and a shot of tequila). I'm just saying that stains on the walls, dustbunnies under the hospital bed and a fly in the room made me wonder just exactly where and when I was. Sadly, those are the two things Grandma Guthrie wonders about too. At least we both still know who we are.

Have you missed me?

2010-09-30T21:03:00.000-05:00

Just haven't found the motivation to post anything for a while but I'll be damned if I let an entire month pass without a single post to show for it.

Grandma Guthrie has been extra depressed since her husband died. Her memory is also slipping further away and she knows it which makes her even more depressed. It's getting more and more like babysitting a toddler - except the toddler talks about death a lot.

By all accounts, she was the hardest-workingest woman that ever was. Even at 89, she can't sit still for very long. She's up and down all day, shuffling from room to room. She's not allowed to cook anymore except for the microwave. She's too likely to start frying something and then shuffle off to another room, completely forgetting anything is on the stove.

She tries to do the dishes but does such an awful job, mainly due to her poor eyesight, that I rewash them when she's not looking. If she catches me rewashing dishes, she either gets mad ("I already washed those! They don't need to be washed twice!") or she gets sad ("I just can't do anything anymore.").

About the only thing she can do without risking bodily harm is laundry. And she does a metric fuckton of laundry. It makes her feel useful and I don't have to pay the electric bill so who am I to stop her? Aside from the one day she put too much soap in the washer and produced an almost sitcom level of soap bubbles, it's a harmless pursuit.

She washes dirty clothes, clean clothes and even unworn clothes with the tags still on them. She washes them, dries them, folds them and puts them in piles in her bedroom or crams them in the overstuffed closet. Sometimes she has me iron clothes - which I hate to do. I am from the school of unwrinkling clothes by tossing them in the dryer for a few minutes.

I usually do a half-assed job of ironing for her. She'll never know anyway. The freshly pressed clothes will just get crammed in the closet and washed a week later anyway regardless of whether they're dirty or not.

Anyhoos...If I'm going to get this post in before midnight CST, I'd better wrap this up. Here's a photo I took of a praying mantis eating a big moth on my livingroom window.

Praying mantis + dirty window + flash = MANTIS IN SPAAAAAAACE!

So long, Grandpa Guthrie

2010-08-19T20:37:00.010-05:00

Grampa Guthrie died a couple days ago. He's the husband of Grandma Guthrie, the little old lady I help take care of.

For a little over a year, Grampa Guthrie has slowly withered away in a nursing home 30 miles from here. He went from being a big, strapping galoot to a frail, bed-ridden shell of a man. I often took Grandma Guthrie to visit him at the nursing home. Sometimes they were sweet and tender. Sometimes they fought. Often during the same visit.

Today is the funeral. I'm trying to whip myself into presentable shape. Scrape the chicken shit off, comb the twigs and leaves from my hair, paint my nails to hide the always-present dirt beneath. The hardest part is deciding what to wear.

Most of my wardrobe came from Alaska with me. The only new clothes I've acquired since arriving in Alabama are shorts, t-shirts, overalls, work boots and flip-flops. There is very little in the closet appropriate for a church funeral on a very hot & humid afternoon. All I know for sure is there's no way in hell I'm wearing pantyhose.

And I can't just duck in and out. I'm sorta "on call" during the funeral. Grandma Guthrie probably won't have the stamina to stay for the complete church and graveside services. When she is ready to go, I'm to swoop in and carry her home where we'll wait together for the others.

This is going to be a trying day. There had better be food.

But rather than leave this post on a downer note, I'll show you these pictures of three baby birds that recently hatched in the old electric meter box on the back of Frankencoop.

I think they're nuthatches. At least that's what the internet told me when I first tried to identify the tiny eggs.

I hope they don't fall out of the nest. The chickens below would probably gobble them up.

So long, Uncle Ted

2010-08-10T20:23:00.009-05:00

Damn. I always thought Ted Stevens was too ornery to die. I was wrong. But then again, I'm wrong about a lot of stuff.

If I was back in Anchorage tonight, I'd head downtown to one of my favorite watering holes and get drunk with friends while swapping Uncle Ted stories. Everybody in Alaska has an Uncle Ted story.

But I'm not in Alaska. I'm in Alabama - in a county with no bars. Nobody here knows who Ted Stevens is which means nobody wants to hear my Uncle Ted story. Instead, I am drinking a strong coffee and watching my tape of the 1996 debate between Ted Stevens and Theresa Obermeyer.

I was surprised to find that I couldn't find any of the debate posted online. So, in honor of Ted, I'm posting one of my favorite moments. Sorry about the quality. It's an old VHS tape and I'm just recording it off the TV with my digital camera.

Accordion concert

2010-07-19T22:07:00.004-05:00

Spent most of the day with Grandma Guthrie. Recently, there have been visits from physical therapists and nurses who lead her through simple exercises and check her blood pressure.

This afternoon, I was present for the physical therapist's visit. He asked her a few general health questions and then had her do some exercises that are probably designed to increase mobility - or at least prevent atrophy. (I don't think they realize just how mobile this little old lady is. She has no off switch.)

The best part though was that he pulled out a gleaming accordion and provided music for her workout. He played Rocky Top, The Tennessee Waltz, Golden Rings, Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain and - for Grandma Guthrie's rest period - Amazing Grace. Sadly, he knew neither Freebird nor Lady of Spain.

A free accordion concert in the middle of the day is a pretty sweet treat - like finding money in an old coat pocket.

Auction Extravaganza!

2010-07-17T18:53:00.010-05:00

Today, Tom and I went a mile or so down the road to watch the giant McMansion get auctioned off to the highest bidder. There are many places that this 13,000 sq. ft. house would fit right in. My neck of the backwoods is not one of them.

I'm not going to use this blog to spread small-town gossip about why this mansion was built in the first place or why it's being sold only a few years later. Gossip like that is better spread in-person over a cup of coffee or a couple beers.

Not many people came out for the auction - maybe 75 at best (and that's including kids in tow). I bet more than half were looky-loos like myself and most of the rest were thinking about bidding on some of the contents. If you were looking to buy, bargains were to be had.

The only item I would've really liked to have was this little mostly-finished cabin. I could've turned it into the most awesome chicken coop ever. Already on skids and ready to move - a mere mile from my property - it went for $600.

The McMansion itself sold for a little more than a third of the original asking price. Along with 13 acres of land, it went for $450,000.

My entire crappy mobile home might fit on that second floor balcony, but I still have the better view.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

A couple nights ago, clear skies allowed the Talladega Mountains to cast their shadows across the sky at sunset. According to Wikipedia, it's the very tail end of the Blue Ridge Mountains - located about 40 miles to the west. On a clear day, you can see Mt. Cheaha from my place - the highest point in Alabama. (At 2413 feet, the Alaskan in me has trouble calling it a mountain. If trees can grow on top of it, it is not a mountain.)

If you click on the picture for the bigger version, you can see Venus just above and to the right of the new moon in the upper left corner. I took this picture from inside my livingroom. You won't see anything like this from the big McMansion (which is located in the darkness a little above and to the left of the dot of light in the bottom right corner).

After the McMansion had a new owner, we went to my neighbor's place to pick their excess blueberries. We filled a two-gallon bucket before a sudden downpour drove us back to my house.

But the rain stopped as suddenly as it started and we took off back down the hill to the East Alabama Goat and Poultry Auction. Again, neither of us were looking to buy anything but I always enjoy checking out all the different kinds of chickens (and occasional guineas, turkeys, quail, pheasants and even pigs and bunnies).

Here's a little taste of good old-fashioned auctioneering for ya:

A post about something other than chickens

2010-07-13T21:09:00.004-05:00

During my time here in Alabama, I have been on the lookout to accumulate authentic rural southern experiences (ARSE). I have butchered hogs, sorted eggs in a factory farm, played dominoes with old men in a shack in the woods, attended cockfights, spent a night in the pokey, traipsed through the woods with my faithful yeller hound dog, eaten boiled okra (the nastiest thing I've ever eaten - far more disgusting than pig lungs or intestines) and, of course, drank my fair share of moonshine.

Well, add a new one to the list because I finally actually got to witness the production of moonshine. Yep, one of the locals trusted me enough to show me his still. Even let me take a picture of it. He went so far as to offer to let me take a picture of him standing next to it but I declined. See, his trust was not misplaced.

In case you don't know how this works, let me give you the basics. The modified beer keg on the right is holding homemade apple wine made last fall. It's heated by propane (the keg is out of frame but you can see the tube leading away from the keg). The alcohol in the wine is the first thing to evaporate and it rises up the copper tubing on top of the keg that leads to the blue barrel full of water. The water cools the alcohol which then condenses back to liquid form, finally dripping out the pipe into the jar on the left.

Notice how the moonshine is blue? At first I thought it was just reflecting the color of the barrel but it was explained to me that the color is actually caused by the corrosive alcohol dissolving the copper, giving the first jar of moonshine a blue tint. The color fades as more alcohol passes through the tubing.

The first jar is also very potent. The alcohol in the jar pictured above is probably around 130 proof. Subsequent jars have lower proofs. When all the jars are mixed together, the final product will hover somewhere around 90 proof. I was told the leftover apple wine still has an alcohol content roughly equal to beer but I didn't think to ask if they drink it or dump it.

I even got to take home a souvenir Mason jar full of moonshine - for display purposes only, of course.

And then there were thirty-five

2010-07-08T07:38:00.009-05:00

Sigh...So Mirabel died, though it had nothing to do with the incident that caused her to lose sight in one of her eyes. She ended up dying of heatstroke - the first of my chickens to die of such a thing.

I found her shortly after it happened. I had been in the backyard pen collecting eggs not long before she died and saw nothing out of the ordinary. Since the backyard birds are usually confined to the pen, I always make sure they have shade and water in there. In fact, Mirabel was sitting in the shade when she died, just a few feet from a full water dish.

She'd only been dead a short time before I found her so I was able to salvage the meat. Since I had Couchsurfers last weekend, this meant I was able to provide a tasty meal of chicken curry to my houseguests.

I've been slowly working on integrating the backyard and front yard flocks. The hens all get along fine but the two roosters, Bart and Pasha, still hate eachother. But it's getting better. They now seem to be able to share the hilltop (and hens) without trying to kill eachother. Today will be the real test as I will be gone for most of the day and they will be unsupervised for the first time.

The fact that the hen with the bad leg is still living on the front porch just adds to the chicken chaos (though she usually spend the daylight hours in the grass behind the house).

Of the three chicks born this spring, at least two have turned out to be roosters. The jury's still out on the third, though I suspect/hope that one may be a hen. If so, it will be the very first hen born in Frankencoop. Not counting the very first batch of chickens I hatched and raised by myself over three years ago (of which four remain), every chicken born here has turned out to be a rooster. With three full grown cocks in Frankencoop and two at the house, I don't need anymore roosters. Guess there'll be more chicken curry on the menu this winter.

What might not be on the winter menu is a lot of vegetables. In the last month, I've gotten about half an inch of rain. I've watched plenty of storms pass close by - some dumping rain just a couple miles from my place. Lots of stuff just withered and died. For the second year in a row, the corn is toast. Been working overtime to make sure the tomatoes and hot peppers survive. Even the kudzu is starting to wilt.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the old pear tree. So far, this has been the best year for that tree. It's chock full of hundreds of almost ripe pears. I'm thinking about pear wine...

Gonna be another hot one today. Forecast calls for triple digit temps - not a drop of rain in sight. It's only quarter after eight in the morning and it's already 85 degrees inside the house.

49 Days

2010-06-16T22:57:00.000-05:00

I recently read that factory-farm chickens raised as fryers are ready to send to the slaughterhouse 49 days after they hatch. Fryers are the chickens you buy whole or in pieces at the grocery store. If you bought a package of drumsticks for a BBQ this weekend, those legs came from fryers. Those chickens were roughly seven weeks old when they died.

Today, my baby chicks turned 49 days old. They don't look anywhere near big enough to eat. They've barely passed the kabob stage.

Of course, fryers from the concentration coops are fed a special diet of shit that makes 'em grow real big real fast, unlike my little 49ers who eat real food.

I can't help but think of all those people who shun veal because omg it's baby cows but scarf down dozens of baby chickens. Sure, they're big chickens, but they're still just babies.

By request: Snake Autopsy

2010-06-09T23:52:00.003-05:00

Angela asked me to video the retrieval of plastic Easter eggs from the chicken snake I killed yesterday. So I did. Ask and ye shall receive:

Turns out there was only one plastic egg inside the snake - the rest were all real chicken eggs. The snake must have eaten the eggs right before I killed it because the shells weren't crushed when I took those earlier pictures. I wrongly assumed it had eaten four of the brightly colored fake eggs.

The disturbing part is, several plastic Easter eggs are still missing. Where is the snake that ate those?

I've had it with these motherfucking snakes in this motherfucking chicken coop!

2010-06-08T19:27:00.005-05:00

Found another chicken snake helping itself to eggs this afternoon. This time, it swallowed four plastic Easter eggs I'd put in some nests to encourage the chickens to lay there. It also ate at least two real eggs. I'll get a more accurate count when I chop it up for tomorrow's kitty breakfast feast (and retrieve my decoy eggs).

I was more than a little impressed with my aim this time. The first shot hit it just below the head, causing it to duck back into the nest on top of an old dresser. I patiently waited for it to raise its head again and, when it did, I shot it right in the face. It raised its head up about a foot high, waving back and forth like a snake charmer was playing a tune. I squeezed the trigger again and managed yet another head shot. This time, the snake collapsed back into the nest.

I fished it out with a broom handle and carried it outside. But, even with a bullet in the brain, it still wasn't dead. I don't like to see anything suffer - even an egg-thieving snake - so when it kept writhing around, I squashed its head to jelly with the heel of my boot. Even then, it refused to give up the ghost.

I thought for sure it was over when it shit. Everything shits and/or pisses itself when it dies. Over the last three and a half years I've seen enough things die up close and personal to know that's the cue to drop the final curtain. So when this snake let out a great spurt of shit two feet into the air - more of an ejaculation really - I was surprised to see it still squirm and twitch for another ten minutes.

Before it finally shuffled off this mortal coil (get it? snake? coil?), it vomited up egg yolk. I found some scars that make me think this wasn't even the first time it had been shot. All in all, this snake wins the award for the longest, most melodramatic death scene. I bet it tastes like ham.

Mirabel gets to keep her eye after all. When the swelling went down, her eyelid opened. But it was all droopy and made her look like a stroke victim - or a stoner. It's almost back to normal but she's now blind in that eye. Her biggest trouble seems to be maneuvering stairs. As she descends, she drifts further and further to her right until she usually drops off the side of one of last steps.

The unnamed chicken with the bad leg is doing better. She can stand on it and walk a little bit but she's nowhere near full recovery. Still no definite word on whether or not she'll be able to join the general population again or be slathered in herbs and spices. She currently lives on the porch a.k.a. the poop deck.

Sometimes I put her in the grass behind the house, next to the pen where I've been keeping the latest refugees and Pasha the rooster. She's safe from roosters back there because Pasha's penned up and Bart won't go behind the house because Pasha's back there. Pasha is content in the pen with the refugee hens but, if he saw Bart, he would move heaven and earth to get out and kick his ass. So Bart has no problem staying on his side of the house.

Took six of the latest refugees down to Frankencoop. One refugee died the other night. Don't know why she died. Factory farm refugees just have a lot of health issues.

That leaves seven birds in the triage coop behind the house - Pasha, five refugees and Mirabel (she likes bossing the newbies around). Bart and six other hens live under the poop deck with full access to the yard. One recovering bird confined to the poop deck. Frankencoop is holding twenty one birds - the six new refugees, three roosters, nine hens and three babies. Thirty six birds in all.

That's a lot of eggs. Even with thieving chicken snakes about.

Chicken Chaos

2010-05-28T16:17:00.009-05:00

I still have the 12 new refugees living in a pen on the west side of the house with my rooster, Pasha. Six other hens live on the east side underneath the porch with the newest rooster, Bart. During the day, the porch chickens have free range of the yard. Anywhere between 4 and 5 am, the two roosters start crowing on either side of me while I'm still trying to sleep. Earplugs have made it possible to sleep as late as 6am.

Bart is showing signs of becoming hostile to me. He hasn't fully attacked me yet but has taken a few swipes at me when he thinks I'm not looking. If he keeps this up, he and Pasha will have to trade places again. Too bad because they are otherwise content with the current living arrangements.

But these living arrangements are only temporary anyway because I plan on moving the newest refugees down to Frankencoop soon. Just waiting for the three baby chicks to get a little bit bigger. Plus, I have clean-up work to do at Frankencoop before I move more birds in. Lots of chicken shit to shovel out and spread on the gardens.

I also have to rearrange some stuff in a corner that made it all too easy for this freeloading visitor to hide. I suspect it's the reason why so many eggs were disappearing for almost a week.

Not poisonous but six feet of any kind of snake is the exact opposite of what you want to find in a nest when collecting eggs.

No one is more amazed than I am that I managed to get a head shot. But don't be too impressed. I put a lot more holes in the wall than in the snake.

At least the cats ate good. I chopped the snake up into six-inch sections which, to my surprise, looked very much like unsliced sushi rolls.

So, while all this craziness is going on, the last thing I need is injured chickens. But, sure enough, the universe can always be counted on to send me the last thing I need.

First, one of the older refugee chickens at Frankencoop lost use of her right leg. Have no idea what's wrong. Found her outside the coop, scooting around on the ground with her one good leg. For the last week she's been living on the porch while I wait and see if she gets better or I'm getting chicken curry. She seems to be able to put a little weight on it now so I'm still hopeful she'll pull through.

Then, this afternoon while bringing fresh water to Frankencoop, I found Mirabel hiding in the tall grass. Mirabel is one of the few big white refugee hens that has a name. I have trouble telling most of the white hens apart. Mirabel has a crooked toe (and a tendency to peck at my legs when she wants attention) that makes her easy to identify.

I initially thought she was laying an egg but closer inspection showed she had a little blood on her face. Even closer inspection showed she had a small puncture wound above her left eye. Really close inspection revealed her left eye is completely destroyed. The lid is intact but the eye is deflated. I don't know what happened. Maybe a run-in with one of the cats. So now she is on the porch too. Mixed a little crushed aspirin in with her water. Now I just wait and see.

But how long to wait? That's the murky question. When is it time to throw in the towel and take the hatchet down off the wall? I'd prefer the chickens to be alive and producing eggs - I'm sure they'd prefer it too - so if there's a chance they'll get better, I'll give them that chance. But I certainly don't want to unnecessarily prolong their pain. There comes a time when not only is the chicken unhappy but I'm spending too much effort on the care of a single chicken that would be better spent on other projects.

I'm far too soft to ever be a successful chicken farmer.

But lest you think it's all been bad news, I did make a new friend. A real live normal person who has recently moved to this neck of the backwoods. His name is Tom and he's a retired political science professor fresh off a two-year stint in Iraq with the State Department.

He grew up around here but moved away a long time ago. He's come back to an old piece of family property where he's living in an Airstream trailer until he builds his cabin. You can read all about his new rural Alabama life at his blog: Welch Super Service.

You have no idea how nice it was to hear someone start a sentence with "I was reading this article in The New Yorker..." Hell, it's just nice to know someone who reads.

Five more refugees

2010-05-13T10:45:00.008-05:00

The owner of the nearby factory farm dropped off five more hens today. One had eluded capture and fled the warehouse, spending the last couple nights outside where it managed to not get eaten by predators.

The other four had been living beneath the floor slats in the warehouse where they long ago tried to escape their doomed existence as sex slaves - breeders for The Man. This allowed them to keep all their feathers but left them in a position to get shit on alot. To them, I guess it was the lesser of two evils.

Welcome home, sisters.

There are now seven chickens under the front porch and thirteen in the triage coop behind the house. That's twenty total living up at the house - more than are living in Frankencoop right now, which is currently housing fourteen adults and three baby chicks. Thirty seven chickens in all.

I now have a rooster on each side of the house - both under open windows. This is the most effective alarm clock I have ever owned. Sadly, you can't choose the time it goes off nor does it have a snooze button. There is no oversleeping when you sleep with the chickens.

Cue the tiny violins

2010-05-11T21:46:00.001-05:00

A whole month without a post. Frankly, I just haven't felt like writing - or doing much of anything beyond life's necessities. Been in a deep funk. No one specific reason. Guess it's just a whole lotta shit that's built up. It seems as though it's all I can do just to keep my head above water these days and I have trouble convincing myself that writing about it is going to make me feel any better. And when I'm not writing - whether it's blog entries or anything else - that's just one more thing to feel bad about.

Broken tools and equipment. Manage to fix something and something else breaks. And the shit that does work is inadequate for the task. Car hasn't run in months and there's no money to fix it. Without a car, I have to turn down work that could help pay for the repair. It's probably something so damned minor but I know as much about fixing cars as I know about fixing space shuttles. For every step forward, I get pushed back two.

Some nagging health issues that I'd love to get taken care of but there's no money to fix me either. The closest thing I have to health care is the care package my friend Colleen sent that included a big bottle of OTC pain killers and antibiotic ointment (along with many tasty treats - like a whole quart of capers! - so life ain't all bad. Now if I could get my hands on some gin...).

The job I spend the most time at - taking care of Grandma Guthrie - is so incredibly depressing. Over the last couple weeks I've had to take her to visit her husband in the hospital, visit her dying brother in his final hours and spend a day with her in the emergency room when she was experiencing chest pains. The other day she wanted to go to the cemetery where much of her family is buried - where she too will be buried. There is little comic relief in this job.

Okay, enough pissing and moaning. One of these days I'll do a more in-depth rant about what a day with Grandma Guthrie is like. But for now, let's meet the new chickens:

This is Bart. Check out those fancy feathered feet! Me and a neighbor did a little trading - they got my little rooster, Sophistry, and I got this big black cock. While roosters are still the last thing I need, I just couldn't turn down this stylish dude.

Pasha, the rooster that lives under my front porch, is pissed as hell that I brought Bart up to the house. All he wants to do is kick Bart's ass. Bart is a lover, not a fighter.

Living arrangements for the house chickens are in flux. Currently, Bart is now living under the front porch with six hens and has free range of the yard. Pasha has been confined to a roomy new pen behind the house that he shares with seven new factory farm refugees. Just got them yesterday from a nearby concentration coop. Here are three of them:

I plan to move the new chickens down to Frankencoop in a few weeks. I think it'll be easier on them if they have a bit of an adjustment period before I throw them in the mix. Besides, I'd like the new baby chicks to get a little bigger before I make their environment even more chaotic than it already is.

They're two weeks old now. Mama Graybie took them for their first trip outside today. The next couple weeks will be a dangerous time for the little ones as they explore the grounds. So many things that want to make a snack out of them.

And now for something completely different:

It is spring and love is in the air. Recently caught these two jumping spiders getting it on in the kitchen. Behold! The mating dance of the jumping spiders:

One man's trash is another man's treasure.

2010-04-11T12:19:00.000-05:00

It's that time of year: Food saved from last year is almost gone but fresh food in the garden is not here yet. Not that I ran out of food - not by a long shot. But the food choices dwindled down to a few measly meal options.

Rice and beans? Rice and venison? Beans and venison? Rice and beans with venison? I could cook it in chicken stock - I still have gallons that. Maybe crack an egg over it? Should I use that last bag of summer squash in the freezer or save it for another day? Hot sauce or sweet & sour? Tortillas or frybread? Wash it down with coffee or lemonade? Ice water?

You wrack your brain to come up with new variations of the same few basic ingredients. After a month of that kinda culinary monotony, you'd kill somebody for a Cobb salad. If you had fresh mushrooms and a jar of Tom Kha Gai seasoning, you might even kill a chicken.

But this gap between seasons is also the same time other people are getting their spring clean on. They're making room, emptying freezers and pantries. And a number of them are bringing their throwaways to me. Much of it is still fit for human consumption but it also makes fine fodder for the chickens, goats and cats. If I won't eat it, someone else here will. I mean, there's just no way I'm going to be able to eat a whole institutional-sized, six-and-a-half pound can of sliced carrots by myself. Nor would I want to. But I will gladly take it off your hands and give you a dozen fresh organic eggs in the bargain. (There are currently enough eggs in the refrigerator to recreate that famous scene from "Cool Hand Luke.")

I also have a pyramid of unlabeled cans in the kitchen. No idea of what's in them. They're not old or out of date - just mysterious containers of mysterious mystery. Like a pile of food lotto cards. Will it be something yummy or will I dump it outside for the cats and chickens to scrap over? Will it be a dream? Or a dud?

One favorite chicken treat is old junk food snack cakes. Chickenfight Girl knows of a place that sells past-date bread by the truckload. For twenty to thirty bucks, she fills the back of her pickup with bread, bagels and rolls that she feeds to her horses. There are always boxes of individually wrapped junk food snack cakes. She considers unwrapping them a major pain in the ass so she gives them all to me. Can a chicken eat Twinkies and still be called organic?

I also scored half a dozen five-gallon buckets with lids. Man, you can never have too many of those! Now if the universe would just see fit to send me a dozen tarps, a can of butane and two back tires for the riding mower.

Another freebie that recently fell into my lap was two new goats. One of my neighbor-cousins knew a guy who had two pet goats that he didn't want anymore. He introduced us and I became the proud owner of two more kudzu-eating machines.

The white one is a nanny named Bella. The brown and white one is her year-old son, Daisy. Daisy was named by a young child who didn't care that Daisy is not a traditional boy's name. I kinda like it in a Boy Named Sue sorta way so, for now, the name stays.

A visit from BMac

2010-04-01T16:45:00.013-05:00

My old friend, BMac, stopped by for a few days on his way to New Orleans. He brought beer, steak and news of the outside world. Sitting around the bonfire with an Alaskan was the recharge I sorely needed.

On a trip south to Chambers County for more beer, we took a side-trip through Roanoke, Randolph County's largest town. BMac wanted to see the deserted and dilapidated buildings that litter the old downtown.

Downtown Roanoke has lots of cool old brick buildings. Sadly, many are not only uninhabited, they are in varying degrees of decay. The place definitely has a ghost town feel.

We peered through storefront windows, ooohing and aahhing over all the great things these buildings could be turned into or the lost opportunities of buildings so far gone they could only be gutted. Of course, most of our ideas had to do with bars, pubs and cute little sidewalk bistros with nice wine lists.

There was a Saturday Night Live sketch with a guy that looked at any kind of container and said "You put your weed in there!" That was Brian and I looking at old buildings: "You put a bar in there!" Since Randolph County inexplicably still clings to its economically crushing status as a Bible-thumping backwater that bans the sale of demon booze (plus me and BMac's lack of necessary capital), they were just silly daydreams.

You could totally put a bar in here.

This place didn't even have glass on the storefront windows anymore.

Notice the light streaming out the doors from the inside? That's because the entire roof has collapsed. If you were to buy this property, you'd essentially be getting just the facade - if that. (As always, you can click on the pictures for a larger version.)

I've been told downtown's decay started when the bypass was built. Not sure when that was - maybe the 70s? 80s? Soon after, ugly boxy stores popped up like zits along the bypass and a lot of downtown died. Now everybody shops at Mall-Wart and eats at McDonalds. Same story as a lot of other towns across the country.

My favorite falling-down Roanoke building is the old Martin Theatre.

Note how you can see blue sky through the windows. That means no roof. If you look closely at the top right of the building, you can see what appear to be bare tree tops.

The mural has to be post 9-11. The fireman is the obvious clue. I'm guessing that flag is supposed to be Afghanistan's. The colors are right anyway - for the Afghanistan of 1992-1996, before the Taliban took over. After we invaded Afghanistan, the pre-Taliban flag was used again for another year before a new flag was introduced. (Afghanistan holds the record for nation going through the most flag design changes.) But Afghanistan's flag didn't have a big bird on it. And I have no idea why the bald eagle is wearing a big gold necklace.

Last but not least, another favorite abandoned building of mine:

I'm guessing the cave motif is from the 50s or 60s. Somewhere along the line, somebody said "Paint an eye on it and it'll look like an elephant!" I'd much rather buy gas at a cave/elephant than at Mall-Wart. People need more whimsy in their day-to-day routines.

Randolph County is poorer for letting such cool architecture crumble to dust.

Say hello to my little friend

2010-03-26T07:47:00.006-05:00

All you chicken-killin' critters better listen up: There may not be a new sheriff in town but the sheriff sure as hell has a new deputy.

It was a gift from David. He was appalled to read that I went out in the woods looking for cougar but armed for rabbit. I won't be getting rid of the .22 or anything. It still has its place in Spenardo del Sur's armory: 2nd place, just ahead of my knife and a wooden club with nails sticking out of it.

My nipples get hard just looking at this gun. I think I now have an inkling of what it feels like to have a penis.

Target practice starts this weekend with the arrival of BMac. Gotta learn how to use this thing without spraining my wrist or knocking myself unconscious.

Recently whacked two of the excess roosters. One of the cats, Fetish, stole a head off the chopping block while my back was turned. Aside from a few feathers, she ate the whole thing. Om nom nom nom. That's one skull that Angela won't be getting.

Go ahead, make a pussy/cock joke. I know you want to.

Can this be called progress?

2010-03-17T15:49:00.000-05:00

I was talking with one of the locals about the upcoming election for sheriff. The current sheriff is retiring and at least four people are running for his job.

One is "Johnny Law" - mentioned in an earlier post, Spenardo & Chickenfight Girl get Strip Searched Part Two (yeah, I know, I still owe you parts three and four). The local and I both agreed that Johnny Law is a prick and we'd never vote for him in a million years.

Another guy seems to be running on a "throw more druggies in jail" platform. The moldy old jail is already overcrowded and throwing more potheads in there ain't gonna do anything but funnel more funds into the courthouse coffers (and that worthless re-education camp they call the Alabama Court Referral Program).

I didn't know anything about the third guy but the local assured me he was a prick too.

That left one guy. I'd already decided that he was who I was voting for. I'd dealt with him a number of times during my community service and he seemed like a decent person - one of the very few I met during that experience that seemed capable of treating people fairly. I told the local that my mind was made up - I was voting for that guy.

The local replied "That's who I'm voting for too. Even if he is a nigger."

Sigh...

Hot damn! Now I'm cooking with gas!

2010-03-10T16:40:00.005-06:00

Actually, I won't be cooking with gas until tomorrow. That's when I'm having 100 gallons of propane delivered. It's been three long weeks of cooking with a toaster oven, taking whore's baths in the sink and having the fireplace as my sole source of heat. I'm looking forward to a long hot shower, a slow-cooked pot of chicken soup and cranking the thermostat back up to 60 degrees (okay, maybe 55).

Had to officially shut down the east wing of Frankencoop last weekend. It's the room that used to be my grandmother's kitchen. The eastern exterior wall is crumbling fast. The sturdiest part of it has to be the door I boarded up three years ago.

See the white area above the door? That's drywall. You know it's bad when the drywall has become a structural element of the building. You can also see where one of the panes of glass fell out of the window. Boarding up the window isn't an option since the surrounding wood is so rotten it probably wouldn't hold a nail. The ceiling leaks really bad in that room too. It was just too nerve-wracking to go in there everyday to collect eggs.

The west wing is still open for business though. All the chickens were already sleeping in that room anyway so the change didn't cause too much of a ruckus. But I will miss the sight of hens laying eggs in grandma's old oven.

Flyover country

2010-03-05T18:37:00.001-06:00

As I've mentioned before, Spenardo del Sur lies directly in the flight path of Navy jets on their way from North Carolina to the Naval Air Station in Pensacola. In the three years I've been here, I've seen them pass by hundreds of times. Sometimes they fly a little to the east or west of my property but they often fly directly over my place. Sometimes they fly low enough to see me and will tip their wings to me.

I always love it when they appear. It turns me into a little kid for a few seconds. When I hear the approaching roar, I drop what I'm doing and scan the skies for the plane. Today was no different.

Oh wait, yes it was!

I was locking up Frankencoop for the day when I heard the unmistakable sound of a jet. I could tell it was going to be to the west of me. I turned to look and saw it just on the other side of my house. Then something amazing happened.

The plane banked extremely hard to the left. It had abruptly changed course and was coming right at me! The jet rotated 90-degrees so that its wings were perpendicular to the ground. For a fraction of a second I wondered if it was going to crash into my chicken coop.

The wings were brought level right as the jet screamed directly over my head, perhaps a mere 200 feet off the ground. I felt like I could've reached out and stroked the belly of the plane.

I raced to the other side of Frankencoop to watch as the jet's wings rotated 90-degrees in the other direction. It was only a couple hundred yards past me when it banked hard to the right and continued it's southerly route to Florida.

In the space of about 2000 feet, the pilot made two 90-degree turns as well as rotating the plane 90-degrees then 180-degrees in what I can only assume was a private airshow just for me.

Thank you, whoever you are. That was fucking awesome!

Three new hens

2010-02-25T19:58:00.005-06:00

Got three new hens from a local factory farm - or 'concentration coop' as I now like to call them. I picked that term up from Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead. It's a Troma film. Troma makes great films. I love Troma films.

I also got over 200 pounds of leftover feed to go with the hens.

I'm getting pretty used to having the heat off during the cold nights. Woke up this morning and it was 39 degrees inside the house but it felt like 50. Hopefully I can get some more propane next week. I've got less than 15 gallons left. As soon as I get the tank refilled and can run all the hot water I want, I'm butchering me some roosters. The poor hens of Frankencoop are being run ragged by so many roosters. It's cock city down there.

If me and the resident hens are lucky, the new arrivals will offer a little distraction for the younger roosters in the meantime.

Spenardo del Sur in the news & on the map

2010-02-19T21:59:00.010-06:00

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

Yours truly is the feature story in the newest issue of the Ancho rage Press. Check out the cover:

Click on the picture for a larger view

The author of the article, David Holthouse, along with his wife, Priscilla, came for a visit last fall with the idea of writing this article. During that weekend, I killed and butchered one of my roosters to provide my guests with a lunch of sweet & sour chicken. That's poor Tweak in the pot. Here's Tweak in better days:

If anyone wants Tweak's dried preserved feet as a memento of this grand occasion, make me an offer. Angela already has all the dried chicken feet she can use right now and I'm still trying to scrape up enough scratch to get my propane tank refilled.

I'm also still in shock that Google Maps has gotten around to adding my neck of the woods to their street view feature. Below is Frankencoop as seen from the road:

It's not very clear but, if you look just to the left of the building, you can make out a couple white dots. Those are chickens. I'm just glad Google's camera didn't catch me peeing outside.

Again, I say "You read it here first!"

2010-02-18T16:23:00.004-06:00

Some of you who've been reading this blog for awhile may remember when I told you about a corrupt county commissioner who was using community service workers as slave labor for his own lawn care business. I wrote about it here and here.

Well, it took a while, but he was finally indicted this week. About fucking time. The wheels of justice move awfully slow in this place when they're running over one of the power structure's own. No surprise either that this is the first I've seen about the subject from any news source anywhere since the one and only article in the Randolph Leader last August. I'm not holding my breath either that he will actually face any punishment or even lose his seat on the county commission. But, man oh man, what I would give to see him in an orange vest picking up trash on the side of the highway.

Help support an Iditarod musher

2010-02-17T12:56:00.009-06:00

A number of you (the Alaskans anyway) already know that one of my nearest and dearest friends, Emil Churchin, is running his first Iditarod this year. For the rest of you who don't already know: One of my nearest and dearest friends, Emil Churchin, is running his first Iditarod this year.

If you don't know what the Iditarod is, well, all I can do is roll my eyes at you. I mean, c'mon! It's only the roughest, toughest dogsled race in the whole damned world! Almost two weeks of mushing a team of huskies across more than 1,000 miles of the Last Frontier. It doesn't get any more Alaskan than this.

Not only is Emil the only Anchorage entrant in this year's race, he is also the only National Poetry Slam competitor to ever run the Iditarod. On top of all that, you may also remember him as the guy who spent most of his vacation last fall fixing my leaky water heater.

Running the Iditarod is an extremely expensive venture. Since I am a poor dirt farmer and can't contribute anything but moral support to the fulfillment of his dream, I am appealing to you, dear readers, to help get Emil to Nome.

If you go to his website - www.emil2nome.com - you can read his training blog, see pictures of his dog team and make a donation to help defray the costs of a man's dream. There are only 16 days left until the Iditarod starts and every dollar helps.

If you saw him at the bar, surely you would buy him a beer or two, wouldn't you? Instead, donate five or ten dollars through his website! If you're an important corporate mucky-muck, give big and get your company name on his parka or even on all the dog vests. How cool would that be? All the info is there at www.emil2nome.com. Be sure to tell him Jackie sent you!

There is also a Facebook page dedicated to his quest where you can leave your messages of support and goodwill. Join today!

The locals don't think I'm crazy

2010-02-16T05:47:00.007-06:00

Well, actually the locals do think I'm a little nuts, but not because I claim to have seen a mountain lion over the weekend. A number of them claim to have seen the occasional mountain lion in these parts in recent years. They're not common by any means, but not unheard of.

Just because the Department of Conservation and Natural Resourses says there ain't any don't make it so. People around here probably wouldn't bother calling the state to report one anyway. The state would want proof of one before listing it as an official sighting and the locals are more likely to shoot one with a gun than a camera. Since mountain lions are a protected species in Alabama (how can you protect something that doesn't exist?), the last thing you want to do is tell the government you killed one. Instead, you follow The Three Ss: Shoot, Shovel & Shut Up.

I wandered the woods the following day, looking for any sign of the big-ass cat but found none. I can only hope that it was merely passing through, much like the six-foot rattlesnake I saw next to my driveway last year. While it is amazing to see something that big and scary in your own backyard, one time is more than enough. Not exactly something you want to make a habit out of.

While the snow has melted, the cold temperatures are expected to hang throughout the week. By cold, I mean mid-20s during the night. This is a bit of a problem for me only because I am once again dangerously low on propane. I ran through that last 100 gallons pretty quickly. That's what I get for cranking the thermostat up to 60 degrees.

To put off ordering more propane (at least until I can scrape up the dough for the minimum 100 gallons) I have once again stopped using gas for just about everything except hot water for washing dishes and the occasional whore's bath in the sink. All food is cooked in the microwave or toaster over. Using the coffee pot instead of the superior French press. While this is all well and good for conserving my precious propane, I am not looking forward to my next electric bill.

The heater still kicks on when the inside temp drops below 47 degrees - the lowest setting on the thermostat. No matter how warm the fire heats the house at night, the inside temp drops low enough by morning for the heater to kick on. Last night, I left a bare light bulb burning next to the thermostat to trick into thinking it was warmer than it really was. When I woke up this morning, it was 40 degreees inside.

I don't mind the cold. Hell, just wear a sweater and extra socks. But I do worry about running out of propane. I guess if you actually run out, there's some extra shit that needs to be done when you do finally refill the tank. Not sure exactly what that extra shit is, but it probably costs extra money. I don't have regular money, much less extra money. My only other genuine concern is the pipes freezing up.

I also am expecting a couple CouchSurfers Friday evening so I want to hold onto enough propane so I can splurge on keeping the place reasonably warm enough for one evening/morning, offer a couple hot showers and use the stove to whip up pancakes and eggs for breakfast. (Oh yeah, at least three chickens are now laying eggs. Yay!)

So, the heater has kicked on again - warming the house to almost 46 degrees. It's currently 25 outside and won't start warming up at all for a while (the sun's not even up yet). I have to go watch Gramma Guthrie this morning so I don't want to start the fire back up since I have to leave in a couple hours anyway. Hopefully the sun will warm this drafty trailer up enough to keep the heater off while I'm away. I'll saw up some more old barn rafters when I get home this afternoon and start a fire then.

I am not crazy. I really saw one.

2010-02-13T20:30:00.005-06:00

It goes by many names: c ougar, mountain lion, puma, panther. Whatever the hell you want to call it, I saw one on my property today.

According to Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, the last confirmed mountain lion in Alabama was killed over 60 years ago. "At present, reports of sightings in Alabama are relatively common, but these probably are released captives or cases of mistaken identity."

I don't know where they keep captive mountain lions around here (around 30 game breeders in the state have licenses to keep them) or why they would release one but, trust me, there is no way I saw anything but a mountain lion.

I was sitting at the computer when I glanced out the window. I saw something in the woods and grabbed the binoculars to get a better look. I often use the binoculars to spy on the chickens and goats from inside the house.

I scanned through the trees until I found what I was looking for. I thought perhaps it was one of the goats or maybe even a big dog. As I messed with the focus I clearly saw the unmistakable sight of a long tail swishing behind it. It could be nothing but a cat. A big-ass cat. While I have a horde of domestic cats on the property, there was no way this was one of them. I can't even imagine having noticed one of them 200 yards away in the woods by just glancing out the window. I probably wouldn't have even noticed this big-ass cat if it hadn't been silhouetted against the three inches of fresh snow we got yesterday. Nor was it a bobcat. Bobcats have short, stubby tails. This cat had a loooooong tail.

In retrospect, I should've looked a little harder at the details - not just the of the animal but its location as well. All I knew was it was close to the goat pasture, possibly even inside the fence. I grabbed the gun and ran down the hill. I was out the door within seconds of spotting it through the binoculars. That's how sure I was.

I walked the perimeter of the goat fence, searching for the mountain lion or it's tracks, finding neither. But I did notice that the baby goat was nowhere to be seen. After walking all the way around the goat fence, I went into the pasture through the gate. All the other goats were on the opposite end of the enclosure and I hoped they'd stay there since my billy goat, Preacher, can sometimes be a bit hostile unless I bring food to distract him.

I was headed to the wooded section of the enclosure but stopped by the shed that the goats use for shelter. It was there I saw the baby goat, laying dead on the dirt floor. He was not killed by a predator. I'm not even sure what killed him. He'd been healthy when I saw him the day before. But there he was, laid out flat on the ground.

If I was to guess, I'd say he perhaps got squashed by the other goats during the night. A guy I know who raises goats had recently told me about how it happened to one of his baby goats last year. During the course of the night, the goats were probably huddled together to keep warm and the little baby got smashed under the pile.

At that point, I forgot about my hunt for the mountain lion and focused on getting the little dead goat out of there. By the time I thought about going back into the woods to look for signs of the big-ass cat, I realized any tracks would be unrecognizable in the rapidly melting snow (it was sunny and 50 degrees).

Perhaps tomorrow morning I'll take a walk in the woods and see if I can spot any fresh tracks. I really hope that I don't find them.

Recently took inventory of my remaining winter food supply

2010-02-03T21:39:00.005-06:00

It's a damned good thing that I like venison and squash because it looks like that's going to make up most of my diet for the next two months. Only a couple days into February and I've already been able to transfer everything from the big freezer into the one in the refrigerator.

There's still a bit of pork left - including five pounds of liver as well as the heart and lung I'm saving for that Filipino dish (as soon as I can afford tomatoes, onions and rice). A couple gallons of ham stock. Some oatmeal.

Lots of condiments. A few assorted items that don't really do me much good until I get other things to go with them. A bucket of lard. A few pounds of flour and sugar. No yeast though so the only breadstuffs I'll be making are tortillas and frybread.

If the chickens are laying eggs, they're either hiding them or eating them before I find them. There are way too many roosters though so there are definitely some chicken dinners in my future. Out of 23 chickens, 7 of them are roosters. I'm breaking up at least one cockfight a day, sometimes three or four.

I'm taking care of Gramma Guthrie two days a week and part of the deal is I get to help myself to her food so that offers a little variety. That's good since I get paid about the same as a preteen babysitter for taking care of a depressed 88-year-old woman with a slipping mind who asks me questions like "Do you think you go to Hell if you kill yourself?"

Here's hoping this year's gardening goes better than last year. Between the droughts, deluges, late frost, broken equipment and chickens raiding what was left, it's a wonder I was able to save anything at all for winter.

Don't fret, dear readers. I did eat well up through January. A little too well really. I've got a bit of extra insulation to work off, which I've been trying to do now that the weather has warmed up and the days are getting longer. I'm real close to finally removing what remains of the old barn and transforming the site into a large garden spot.

Enough pissing and moaning. Here's something to be happy about: a brand new baby goat!

Finally! A new year and a new post.

2010-01-11T23:55:00.001-06:00

Okay, it's a new year and a new chance for me to try to put up more regular posts. Or at least a new chance for me to make up new excuses for not posting.

As you've undoubtedly heard by now, it's cold in the south. Everybody is whining and moaning like it's never ever snowed here before. We got less than a quarter-inch of snow (I could see more grass than snow) and life ground to a halt. Schools closed, mail went undelivered, cars spun off roads and I took a leisurely walk in the quiet woods.

I've had four different neighbors call or stop by to make sure I was okay - as if I'm some elderly shut-in in danger of freezing to death. I've slept in my car at 10 below zero in the Canadian Rockies. When it got down to 27 below zero in Anchorage, it didn't stop me from going to the bar. The current weather conditions remind me of Anchorage in late March, early April. This is springtime!

Frankly, I'm a little insulted that people think I need to be checked in on when nighttime temps dip into the low teens. They should be calling me for pointers. They should check on me in the summer when it's 105 sweltering degrees and I'm hosing myself down in the plastic kiddie pool.

The truth is I almost ran out of propane a few days into the cold spell. Thought I had about 40 gallons but it turned out to be closer to 12 gallons. It was three days before I could come up with the money to get more (got an advance payment on taking care of Gramma Guthrie). I turned the thermostat to 50F and stoked up the fire in the fireplace. I stopped using the gas stove and made hot water with a coffee pot.

It hardly qualified as "roughing it." I still had electricity and internet. Just had to wear a sweatshirt and an extra pair of socks. But I didn't tell the concerned neighbors about this. No need to worry them anymore than they apparently already are.

Since my last post, I completed another task in my quest for Authentic Rural Southern Experiences. Along with "drink moonshine out of a Mason jar," "go to a cockfight" and "play dominoes with old men in a shack in the woods," I can now add "hog butchering" to the ARSE list.

I helped a couple locals turn two big hogs into several hundred of pounds of sausage. I was paid for my time with delicious sausage as well as lots of unwanted organ meats, gristly bits for the cats and a giant pile of bones. I also got to keep a couple choice cuts of pork. We even fried some up on a hot plate while we were working. Can't get much fresher than that.

It was quite the experience cooking with all that organ meat. I guess it counts as another Authentic Rural Southern Experience. I love liver but never had to face ten pounds of it. I made lots of liverwurst and pork liver pudding (it's kinda like meatloaf made out of liver). I still have five pounds of untouched liver in the freezer.

The lungs were the weirdest thing to cook. I boiled them in a big pot. They float on top of the water because of all the air inside. Duh - they're lungs, right? But it's just so unappetizing. I had to keep flipping the lungs over to make sure they cooked thoroughly. I assumed they were done when the tiny bubbles frothing out of the main tube turned from pink to white.

Remember those pictures of a healthy human lung compared side by side with a smoker's lung? Raw pig lung looks a lot like the healthy human lung. Cooked pig lung looks like the smoker's lung.

But, Jackie, how does it taste?

I don't know yet. After I boiled the lungs (and a heart), I cut them into pieces and then put them in the freezer. I plan on using them in a Filipino recipe I found on the internet. I didn't taste the boiled lungs before freezing. I figured I'd wait until they were fried up in a pan along with real food.

A visit from Drunky McDrunkerson

2009-12-10T19:41:00.005-06:00

Looking at the local police blotter today, I saw that Drunky McDrunkerson was recently arrested on some sort of domestic assault/harrassment charge. You may remember that Drunky was the guy I suspected of running over one my hens in the driveway and taking a shit in my yard when I wasn't home.

I hadn't seen Drunky in a month or so. Figured he was due for a visit. Sure enough, he came knocking at my door this evening.

He was surprisingly sober. Usually Drunky has only two speeds - drunk and fucking blotto. I let him in and he told me his tale of woe. Between the thick southern accent and my not really giving a damn, I don't even remember enough about it to tell you what happened. Him and his old lady got in a fight. Not a physical fight, just a yelling match apparently. She called the cops and they took him to the Graybar Hotel where he ended up spending two weeks.

He was released today and discovered that his old lady got a restraining order. So he can't go home. He wanted to know if I knew someplace he could sleep tonight.

No way was I gonna let Drunky stay here. I just don't need the drama. Sadly, it's a testament to how few friends Drunky must have if he came to me for help. I don't care that it's gonna get down to 24 degrees tonight and he'll end up having to sleep in his car. I once slept in my car in the Canadian Rockies when it was 10 degrees below zero. Drunky will be fine.

Randolph County, you've disappointed me once again

2009-11-26T22:45:00.005-06:00

As I've mentioned numerous times before, I spent a good portion of this year having to use an old PC running Windows 98. Actually, I have more than one of these dinosaurs.

I got them in trade about two years ago from B.J. Boomhauer. He'd bought an entire lot of them at some auction. I took them all home and - one by one - hooked 'em up, plugged 'em in, turned 'em on and separated the wheat from the chaff. In return for my time and effort, I got to keep a few for myself. I knew that someday my laptop would fail me and I'd be stuck between a rock and a hard place without a paddle. At least these out-of-date machines would give me something to fall back on.

I'd previously glanced at some of the documents left behind by previous users. It was obvious the computers came from the Randolph County school system. None of the stuff looked interesting so I focused my attention on more important things like Facebook status updates and other time-killing sites.

Now that I have my groovy PowerBook G4 (thanks Dean & Ana!), I wanted to get these old computers out of the way. But, before I did that, I wanted to check for any documents I may have saved to them.

While munching away on Thanksgiving leftovers, I set up the first computer and started poking around. While looking at a folder full of text documents, I opened a few from the previous user. This time, I was very interested in what I saw.

This particular computer was used by the school nurse for Randolph County schools. A lot of the documents were form letters to be printed out as needed. But there were plenty of documents that had students' names and their various medical conditions. Who got sent home with ringworm or pink-eye. Which kids had head lice. Who had what kind of medication in the nurse's office. It covers elementary, middle school and high school kids. Some of the documents were dated 2004 so many of these kids are still in the school system.

This computer has all kinds of info that I'm sure both kids and parents alike don't want to share with random people. I wish the school system felt as strongly about keeping students' medical information confidential.

So far, I've only spent about 20 minutes looking at these documents. Who knows what else I might find on this - or the other five - computers?

Yeah, yeah...I'm still here

2009-11-22T21:17:00.004-06:00

I've been slackin' again. Sorry 'bout that. That's just my nature.

So, like some sort of cosmic joke or hackneyed O'Henry story, my digital camera died shortly after my new-to-me laptop arrived. At least I had the good sense to transfer the hundreds of photos that had accumulated on the camera's memory card during the time I was without a computer manufactured in this century.

A while back, I promised you that the new-to-me laptop meant more photos on the blog. Since, I don't want to be a big fat liar, I will post some of those photos taken over the last six months. It surely is no surprise that a number of these are of chickens.

Watermelon Party!

Ah...the halycon days of summer when watermelons were plentiful and the roosters were peacefully coexisting. Standing tall and proud in the back is Sanchez, the alpha male of Frankencoop. In front of him is Pasha, the young rooster who decided to move in under my porch when he discovered there were hens living there without the benefit of male company. The black and white rooster in front of him is Tweak - he has since gone off to that big chicken coop in the sky.

Tweak was the first chicken I ever killed in front of another person. David & Priscilla came for a weekend visit earlier this month and wanted to see the complete transformation from fluffy bird running around in the yard to plate of sweet-n-sour on the table.

On the right is Buddie, a hen who used to think she was a rooster (complete with crowing) but now she thinks she's a hen again. The black bird with her ass to the camera is Betty. Her and Buddie, along with Biddie and Cheepacabra, are the only remaining birds from the eggs I hatched in the kitchen almost three years ago. These four original chickens comprise the core of the alpha male's harem, regardless of which cock is filling that role. They comfortably sit at the top of Frankencoop's pecking order.

The number two rooster, currently being played by Babyman (left), has a bevy of factory farm refugee beauties to keep him company. But that doesn't stop Babyman from occasionally jumping out of the bushes to ravish Sanchez's women.

The Watermelon Party is over

On another note: Does anyone know what kind of bug this is? It's the only one of its kind that I've seen. My Google-fu has failed me. Click the photos to enlarge (unless, of course, you think bugs are icky).

*UPDATE: I should've had more faith in my Google-fu. The above bug is an anisomorpha buprestoide a.k.a. a two-striped walking stick. And it's a girl. It certainly doesn't look like the walking sticks I'm used to seeing around here but it must be true because the internets don't lie.

Guess who's from Randolph County, Alabama?

2009-11-11T14:17:00.009-06:00

Today, during an internet search for something completely different, I learned that Lewis Thornton Powell (1844-1865) is from Randolph County, Alabama. His family moved to Georgia when he was three but that doesn't change the fact that he's originally from my little particular corner of nowhere.

I can already hear a collective "Who?" coming from the readers of this blog.

Lewis Thornton Powell was the man who unsuccessfully tried to assassinate William Seward.

Again, I can hear a number of you saying "Who?" I'm pretty sure though the Alaskans in the audience have some idea who Seward was.

Seward was Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State. At the same time John Wilkes Booth was gunning Lincoln down in the theater, Powell was repeatedly stabbing Seward, injuring a number of others in the fracas, including two of Seward's children. Powell was one of the four conspirators hanged for the Lincoln assassination.

Powell is second from the left.

Considering how many locals here still haven't stopped fighting the Civil War, I'm surprised this has never come up in conversation before.

Even more surprising is the fact that Powell was kinda cute.

RIP Professor Ray B. Browne

2009-10-27T22:00:00.011-05:00

You probably never heard of Ray Browne. Chances are though that you've heard or read him quoted before.

I learned yesterday that Ray Browne died last week. I read it in the Anniston Star - a paper from the not-too-far-away town of Anniston, AL. I was saddened to read of his death but even more saddened by the shitty AP article the Anniston Star published instead of a proper obituary. The article didn't even mention that Ray was from Alabama or that his first work in the field of popular culture was done here. Not just "here" in Alabama, but "here" in rural east Alabama - where hardly anything of note ever happens. I'm guessing no one at the Anniston Star even knew who he was. Probably just had some empty space left on the obituary page and pulled something off the wire.

Here's another - much better - obituary that was published in the Toledo Blade. And, unlike the Anniston Star, the Toledo Blade doesn't require a subscription to read it. But I'll put the text here anyway for those of you too lazy to click. Go ahead. Read it. Then I'll tell you what this has to do with Spenardo del Sur.

RAY B. BROWNE, 1922-2009
BGSU professor began popular culture center

BOWLING GREEN - Ray B. Browne, 87, who created an academic discipline and a national movement by studying the stuff of everyday life - whether comic books, fast food, pop tunes, or situation comedies - died Thursday in his home of congestive heart failure.

"He's the father of popular culture studies," said Gary Hoppenstand, a professor of American studies at Michigan State University, and a popular culture graduate student at Bowling Green State University and protege of Mr. Browne's. "He's done more to affect studies in the humanities than any other individual the last 30 or 40 years."

Mr. Browne began the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in 1968 at BGSU. The Popular Culture Library followed.

In 1973, despite detractors, he began a distinct department of popular culture. His history of the popular culture movement's early struggle is called Against Academia.

"Ray opened the windows of the academy, just opened them up," said Michael Marsden, one of the department's first faculty members, now dean and academic vice president of St. Norbert College, De Pere, Wis. "We have the people's culture being studied, and we're learning how complex and wonderful and significant it is."

The BGSU department was the first of its kind.

"Today there is a course in popular culture studies in every major and minor university in the country," said Mr. Hoppenstand, also editor of the Journal of Popular Culture Studies, founded by Mr. Browne in 1967.

Mr. Browne's expertise landed him in the popular culture. Reporters from all media, worldwide, sought him out to decode the latest pop phenom or the enduring - detective novels, soap operas.

"My dad was very much a populist," his daughter, Alicia Browne, said. "While he loved Dickens and Melville and Shakespeare, he thought it was far too hoity-toity to think that only those few people created anything of value."

"He might not personally have liked it, but if someone is reading it, if someone is singing it, or saying it, he believed there was value to it, or at least we should understand it," she said. "[He was] endlessly curious about anything." He arrived in 1967 at the BGSU English department intending to bring the study of popular culture to the academy.

He retired in 1992 and was a distinguished university professor emeritus. He worked until recently and had agreed to write the foreword to an anthology being edited by BGSU popular culture faculty, said Jeremy Wallach, an associate professor in popular culture. The book will be dedicated to him. "He has a very robust legacy," Mr. Wallach said.

Mr. Browne was born Jan. 15, 1922, in Millport, Ala. The Depression ruined his father, a banker, and the family was poor. With the help of an older sister, he went to the University of Alabama and received a bachelor's degree. He served in Europe during World War II in an Army artillery unit.

Afterward, he studied at universities in Birmingham and Nottingham, England. He received a master's degree in Victorian literature from Columbia University in New York City. He taught at the University of Nebraska before he attended the University of California at Los Angeles, from which he received a doctorate in English and folklore.

He taught at the University of Maryland and Purdue University.

Surviving are his wife, Maxine "Pat" Browne, whom he married Aug. 25, 1965, sons, Glenn and Kevin, daughter, Alicia Browne, and three granddaughters. Visitation will be from 6 p.m. to 8 pm. Tuesday in the Holman Funeral Home, Ozark, Ala. Graveside services will be at 11 a.m. Wednesday at Woodlawn Memory Gardens in Ozark. Bowling Green arrangements are by the Dunn Funeral Home.

The family suggests tributes to the Browne Popular Culture Library at BGSU.

Back in the early 1950s, Ray Browne traipsed across Alabama, collecting and recording rural folklore from rural folks. One person he interviewed during his travels was my grandmother.

About five years ago, when I first started going through the things left in my grandmother's house, I found the following letter from Ray Browne sent in the summer of 1953:

Dear Mrs. Mitchum,

Thank you very much for your answer to my article in the paper about folklore.

I don't know at this time exactly when I shall be up to see you but surely intend to come in the next few weeks. I would appreciate your thinking about this old material at your leisure during the next few weeks, and I will surely see you before too long.

Very truly yours,
Ray Browne

He did come to visit her. Over a dozen stories she told him that day were eventually published in his book "A Night with the Hants and Other Alabama Folk Experiences." (By the way, Amazon still has one copy in stock if anyone is wondering what to get me for Christmas...)

I can just imagine the two of them in the kitchen, Ray with his tape recorder and grandma with her endless stories. That kitchen is now the East Wing of Frankencoop - home to twenty of my chickens. So you see, this was relevant after all. (Though sometimes I think I can make any subject come back around to my chickens.)

In other news, I am oh-so-pleased to announce that I have a new computer! Well, new to me anyway. My friend, Dean, and his wife in San Francisco donated their Mac Powerbook G4 to me when they bought a new laptop. It feels great to have one foot back in the 21st century again. I'm looking forward to finally being able to post photos again. That clunky old Windows 98 dinosaur is going back into storage, hopefully never to be used again (except maybe for target practice).

Lie Bot, what is the saddest thing?

2009-10-07T22:48:00.008-05:00

Today, Gramma Guthrie decided she wanted to visit her husband in the old folks home. I first found out about it when I heard her tell her daughter on the phone "Jackie said she'd take me to visit Grampa Guthrie." Her daughter didn't seem to protest so I figured Well, I guess that means we're going to town.

It's been really hard on her, living apart from her husband of almost 60 years. He can't be cared for at home and the family can't afford to put them both together in the old folks home. Since she can't drive herself anymore, she's dependent on family members to take her when it fits their schedule.

So I put Gramma Guthrie's walker in the back seat of her oldladymobile and we drove forty minutes to the assisted living center where her husband has been living for about six months.

I hadn't seen Grampa Guthrie for almost a year and hardly recognized him when we walked into his room. This once large and imposing man seemed so weak and frail.

Gramma Guthrie sat by his side and they held hands. They touched their foreheads together and both started crying. "I told you I'd be back," she told him. "Even if I had to crawl here."

He thanked me for bringing her. I said "You heard her. She would've crawled here if I didn't bring her. I don't need to tell you how stubborn she is."

He told her that she probably wouldn't have to come too many more times because he wasn't likely to last much longer. She assured him she wouldn't be around much longer either. Could it get any sadder?

I gave them a little alone time and wandered the halls, talking to a few of the inmates - just soaking up the Cuckoo's Nest vibe. I got high-fived by a drooling tard sitting in a rocking chair in the middle of a busy hallway, talked to a man in a hospital bed who (I think) wanted me to look at his foot (if that's not what he wanted, I feel really dumb), ran into a nurse I'd worked with in community service (she was in for bounced checks - think about that next time your bank slaps you with a $20 NSF fee), sat in on a brief gossip session and contemplated the posted schedule of events that included lots of Bible study and Christian music. A number of residents could be seen through the open doors of their rooms, laying silently in their beds and staring at the ceiling.

I half expected to see a big, mute Indian propping up one of the walls. I wanted to pull a McMurphy and take 'em all on a wild and crazy field trip.

I'm inclined to believe Gramma Guthrie when she tells me that I shouldn't get old. It looks like it sucks ass.

What in the FUCK?!

2009-10-06T23:27:00.004-05:00

This afternoon I was writing a blog post in my head. It was going to be about the 88-year-old lady I've been spending a couple days a week with. For the sake of story-telling, I'll call her Gramma Guthrie.

Gramma Guthrie's brother-in-law unexpectedly died this morning so I spent the day helping her contact relatives and then drove her to her sister's house where mourning family had gathered around the new widow.

The house was full people I'd never met before, except for the widow whom I'd met only briefly last week when she and another sister dropped by Gramma Guthrie's house. I suspect the visit was in part to check out the woman who'd been hired to take care of their older sister.

Being such a small town, I also know one of Gramma Guthrie's brothers - though I didn't see him this afternoon. He was the local farmer that, in 2006, lent me his incubator and gave me a bucket of eggs with which to start my very own flock of chickens. Four of those original chickens (Betty, Biddie, Buddy and Cheepacabra) as well as two generations of descendants are still here.

(In another funny small town twist: It was another sister that called 911 when I wrecked my truck in front of her house last December.)

I was going to write a post about how I tried my best to blend in with the couch while the dead man's children and grandchildren grieved around me. The great-grandchildren, oblivious to the circumstances, ran freely through the house creating happy distractions for those who weren't expecting to face mortality head-on today. I'm not really a "kid person" but I really do think children are necessary at times like this.

I averted my gaze from crying women and men discussing financial matters. I listened intently as the widow recounted the evening before when she and her husband each ate an apple in the very room we were sitting in and she fell asleep in her chair and he covered her with a blanket and when she woke up she saw him in his chair and knew something was terribly wrong because his dentures had fallen out.

I was also going to write about how it turned out that the hospital nurse that was there all night and was so kind to the family turned out to be the very same woman who's marrying Gramma Guthrie's grandson this month.

I was going to write about this and a whole lot more but that all changed when I got home a couple minutes after 4pm. The first thing I noticed as I pulled into the driveway was that a couple of the resident crows were hanging out in the driveway with some of the cats. Cats and crows do not generally hang out together.

I then noticed the non-moving white lump about the size of a chicken. Fuck.

Nothing ruins my day like an unexpectedly dead chicken. At least it was white. That meant it was a factory farm refugee. There's about half a dozen factory farm hens that I can't tell apart from each other. Maybe it was one of them.

No. This one has spurs on her legs like a rooster. Shit. That means it's Diamanda - the squawkiest of all the chickens. I liked her. She'd been here for over a year and a half.

She hadn't been dead long. She was still warm. Ants had only begun to congregate around her lower intestine that was splayed across the driveway. Her head was covered in blood but I couldn't see any other injuries. Twenty other chickens milled around Frankencoop 100 feet away. What the fuck happened?

Her neck was broken. One eye had popped out of it's socket, thankfully still hidden behind its bulging lid. Earlier this year, one of my cats got run over by a car and his eye also popped out - though it did not stay behind the lid. You don't really forget a sight like that. It slowly dawned on me that someone had run over Diamanda in my own driveway.

But who? I hadn't been expecting anyone. There's maybe two dozen people who might drop by unannounced.

Unlike cats or dogs, chickens don't have the sense to get out of the way of a moving vehicle. They like to hunker down in the shade under a parked vehicle but won't get up when you start it up. This is how my very first factory farm refugee, Lemon, died - and she was the smartest damn chicken I ever met.

So, giving my fellow man the benefit of the doubt, I can see how Diamanda might just not have gotten out of the way of an approaching vehicle and the driver might not have even seen her. Often a dozen chickens will block the long driveway up the hill to my house, refusing to move out of the way. (A bit of food thrown from the car window will send the birds running out of the way so I always try to keep a little something handy to "pay the toll.")

Accidents happen, I tell myself.

As I approach the house, I see another clump of white in the grass. I quickly realize it's only some paper and so I ignore it while I carry Diamanda's carcass into the house past the horde of yowling cats. I liked her but I'm still gonna eat her. If it makes you feel any better, I probably won't enjoy it very much. I'd much rather have the company of what was a very lively hen and the couple hundred eggs she would've given me.

After some kitchen prep, I went outside to get a headcount of the birds (all present and accounted for) and locked up the remaining 20 Frankencoop chickens. Back at the house, I threw a little feed to the five chickens that sleep under my porch. There's three long-term resident hens: Murray, Miss Lillian and Annie. The newfound hen, Serendipity, lives there now but doesn't seem too happy so I may move her to Frankencoop. My young rooster, Pasha, recently moved in when he discovered a bunch of unserviced hens were living there.

After ascertaining that all the other birds were okay, I went to pick up the paper that had apparently blown into where the long driveway dead-ends into the yard. That's when I had my truly WHAT THE FUCK moment.

It wasn't just any kind of paper. It was toilet paper. And it wasn't just any kind of toilet paper. It was USED toilet paper. USED TOILET PAPER SMEARED WITH GODDAMNED DIARRHEA! I know it was goddamned diarrhea because the toilet paper was laying on the ground next to a pile of the shit (pun definitely intended).

I'm still willing to give my fellow man the benefit of the doubt and I understand that sometimes you gotta go when ya gotta go. I can totally sympathize with the realization that you are about to shit your pants and looking around and seeing you're completely out of sight from God and everybody and just dropping your drawers and letting loose with the Hershey squirts.

I can even identify with the relief of finding toilet paper in your car with which to wipe your sorry, splattered ass after such a horrifying experience.

BUT WHO THE FUCKS JUST THROWS THE TOILET PAPER IN THE DRIVEWAY?!?!?!

Please tell me what kind of inbred motherfucker just tosses shit-soaked toilet paper in someone's driveway? Trust me, if it was my ass and your driveway, I would've wadded that toilet paper up and stuffed it in my pocket before just dropping it in your yard. Seriously, dude.

If not for the toilet paper, I would've probably never even noticed the shit. Even if I did, I would've just blamed it on the chickens or cats. But not when there's a pile of fucking toilet paper next to it!

I have seen a lot of fucked up shit in my time and can be forgiving of a tremendous amount of trespasses, but this crosses the line. Grind your cigarette butt out in my garden? I'll pick it up when your back is turned and silently curse your name but this is the kind of thing that gets you blacklisted from my life.

So I steamed over this while butchering poor Diamanda. The more I thought about it, the madder I got. I thought about the finite number of people who could've possibly done this. This certainly wasn't the work of a Boomhauer Brother. Contrary to what I may have written about them, they are much classier than this. It certainly wasn't any of my neighbor-cousins. The mail lady would never do anything like that. No way was it the nice Jamacian Jehovah Witness lady that's stops by once a month to drop off the newest copy of The Watchtower.

As I crossed off all the potential visitors in my mind, there was only one I couldn't completely exonerate: An obnoxious drunken hillbilly that I've never written about simply because he's never done anything of note except be drunk every single time I've seen him - whether it's 10am or 10pm. I guess I'll just call him Drunky McDrunkerson.

I hate to accuse Drunky McDrunkerson of shitting in my driveway because that's a pretty heinous thing to accuse somebody of. But fuck if I can think of anyone else that would be capable of doing such a thing. I can totally see him, drunk as fuck, driving up my driveway to talk about hiring me for some job that will never actually materialize, realizing he's about to shit his pants, dropping trou in my driveway, wiping his ass with toilet paper fortuitously found rolling around on the truck floor and absent-mindedly tossing it my yard. I can see him driving off and running over Diamanda without even realizing it. I can see him not remembering any of this tomorrow.

Jesus. Why do I even know people like this?

Oh yeah, that's right. I live in rural Alabama.

Just call me Dr. Doolittle

2009-09-27T16:26:00.009-05:00

Over the last few years, I've picked up a little bit of chicken-speak. I'm not fluent and I understand it better than I speak it. Chickens have a wider range of vocalizations than you probably realize.

I was pleasantly amused at the newfound hen's reaction when I "spoke chicken" to her. Her head whipped around and she got right in my face and just stared at me. Like an ape scientist finding out Charlton Heston can talk. She was flabbergasted. Or, at least she looked flabbergasted. To be honest, chickens always kinda looked flabbergasted.

I've named her Serendipity - Sarah for short.

I also had a cool interaction with a bird of a different feather this afternoon - a turkey vulture. They are very common here. I see them almost daily, up to twenty at a time, lazily circling the sky and playing in the thermals. Since I live on a hill, I often get to look down on them as well.

Today, as I burning off trash outside, a few of the vultures came in low over the treeless yard. When one was almost overhead, I whistled at it. It came to a stop and hovered directly above my head, about 30 feet from the ground. I whistled again.

"Aaaak," it replied without a hint of melody. The huge bird hovered for another second or two before flying off to rejoin the others.

Not once in the almost three years I've been here have those vultures uttered a sound. That was so cool.

Now if I could just get the cats to listen to me...

It was bound to happen

2009-09-17T19:03:00.007-05:00

Today, after locking up the chickens for the night, I walked towards the road to check the mailbox. Imagine my surprise when I saw a white chicken roaming in the nearby grass. All the birds had been present and accounted for when I locked the door. Who was this new hen? I'd never seen her before.

It took me about 15 minutes to catch her. She was in an overgrown area where the weeds are up to five feet high. I wasn't thrilled about traipsing through the thick brush in shorts and flip flops, especially since it was only a couple weeks ago I came across a six-foot rattlesnake as big around as my arm not far from this very spot.

Since I'd already given all the feed in my bucket to the other chickens, I cracked a couple freshly-gathered eggs onto the ground to distract the cats and used the shells to attract the stray hen (chickens love eggshells). I finally got close enough to grab her.

I carried her up to the house and put her in a cage usually reserved for sick birds. In a day or so I will introduce her to the rest of the flock. She's currently munching down on pellet feed, watermelon and blueberries.

She looks young. I'm guessing she's a fryer - maybe six to eight weeks old. Probably fell off a poultry truck headed for the slaughterhouse. Though I'd like to think that word about my place has spread amongst the area factory chickens and Spenardo del Sur is now a terminus on the underground chicken railroad.

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Water Woes

2009-09-14T13:07:00.003-05:00

My good friend Emil from Alaska has been visiting for the last week. We originally had grand plans to soak up local color with day trips to farmers markets, a local winery, the highest point in Alabama (a paltry 2407 feet), and whatever roadside attractions we happened upon.

Instead, we have been soaking up water leaking from the water heater and making day trips to hardware stores.

While I'm bummed that this happened during Emil's visit, I'm glad he was here when it happened. I know nothing about plumbing. I know how to turn off the water to the house and I can put a pan under a drip. That's about it.

Thanks to Emil, I have running water again. If it wasn't for him, I'd be getting cold water only from the outside spigot until I saved up enough money for a plumber. Oh, say...four months. Believe it or not, I actually have things on my list of things to do that supersede hot & cold running water. Poverty sucks. But a great friend who knows how to fix stuff and will spend half his vacation fixing your stuff is priceless.

So we spent a few days living a rustic lifestyle. Or perhaps it was more like luxury camping. No running water except for the outside spigot. Buckets of water to flush the toilet. Pitchers of water lined up on the counter. Plus, all the flies that got in the house when we drained the hot water heater with a garden hose out the kitchen door. Ah...welcome to country living!

Good work if you can get it

2009-09-03T18:58:00.006-05:00

Picked up a little work recently helping to take care of an elderly neighbor. For a frail old lady of 88 years and 75 pounds, she's a feisty one.

If I turn my back on her for a couple minutes, she'll be out the door to weed the flowerbed or in the kitchen pulling heavy cast iron pans out of the cabinets to cook lunch. I'll ask her if I can do it for her but she'll always reply "No. But you can help if you want."

I used to be able to keep track of her by the sound of her walker scraping across the floor. Now she's got those tennis ball things on the ends of it and it's much quieter so I have to get visual confirmation of her whereabouts more frequently. I keep telling her I'm gonna put a bell around her neck.

I'm basically there to make sure she doesn't fall or hurt herself. It also gives her family members a break from having to watch her all the time. And I work a helluva lot cheaper than a real in-home care provider. I'm being partially paid in literal chickenfeed - I get to keep the old food I clean out of the refrigerator and cabinets. For the record, chickens don't really care for Froot Loops.

I do some light cleaning and take care of the ironing (she does the laundry herself). I let her do pretty much whatever she wants (as if I could stop her) and just drop whatever I'm doing when she decides she wants to weed the flowerbed/get something from the storage building/deep fry some okra.

One time she decided she wanted to sweep the carport. I followed her out, explaining that I'd be happy to sweep it. "No. I need the exercise. But you can come keep me company."

So while this tiny old woman held onto her walker with one hand and a broom with the other, I was smoking a cigarette and driving the motorized scooter around in circles, thinking This can't look good.

Sometimes we sit and talk. She tells me stories of what life here was like here when she was a little girl in a flour sack dress. She tells me how horrible it is to grow old and become a burden to your children. I remind her of all the dirty butts and runny noses she's wiped as well as the three days of labor she endured during the birth of her daughter and tell her They owe you. This makes her smile. "They owe me."

We take our blood pressure together and then compare results. Her last reading was 208 over 90 and yet she gave me shit for my 127 over 84. But I don't mind because this is the closest thing I have to health care.

You read it here first!

2009-08-20T21:59:00.007-05:00

Remember when I told you about the county commissioner who was using community service workers as free slave labor for his own personal business? Well, it finally made the local paper - on the front page, no less.

It wasn’t a big article. Just a few paragraphs saying that “rumors have circulated” and the “matter is being investigated by an outside agency” and that neither the commissioner nor Judge Hardass could be reached for comment.

It will be at least a week before I hear anything else since the paper only comes out on Wednesdays. Hopefully, the dailies in neighboring counties will pick up the story.

Chickenfight Girl & Spenardo get Strip-Searched, Part 2

2009-08-16T12:27:00.007-05:00

So there I was, walking down the hallway towards Officer Ratchet. She’s snapping her latex gloves and grinning at me like some moronic cat with a piehole full of canary. All I can think is How ‘bout acting like a professional, you fucking cow? Is it really necessary to enjoy this so much? But I wisely kept my mouth shut and entered the interrogation room.

The interrogation room was in the sheriff’s office. The sheriff wasn’t there. He’s rarely ever there. I think I’ve only seen him in passing two or three times. It was the first time I’d ever been in his office. I guess since the sheriff is never there, there’s never any trash to be emptied so I’d have no reason to go in there. The sheriff’s office is attached to the investigators’ office. The investigators chew tobacco and spit it into their trashcans. All the women community service workers hate cleaning the investigators’ office.

The sheriff’s office is just inside the back doors of the courthouse, first door on the left. It’s the busiest entrance/exit to the courthouse due to its proximity to the parking lot and jail. The room had a cluttered desk, two chairs and a big glass case against the wall. The only thing I remember being in the case was a box of cheap beer – Bud Light, I think. Probably confiscated at some traffic stop. The glass case didn’t really look like what I thought of as an “evidence locker.” It looked more like the beer was a trophy on display.

There were two doors. One led to the investigators’ office (which also has its own door that led to the hallway). The other was the door I came through, the one that opened to the public hallway next to the back doors of the courthouse.

The investigator, who I’ll call Johnny Law, was sitting at the desk. I sat in the second chair. Officer Ratchet stood silently a few feet away, next to what I can only assume was the evidence locker.

Johnny Law put a piece of paper in front of me. It was a consent form that needed my signature before Officer Ratchet could see my titties. It listed my right to remain silent, my right to an attorney, blah, blah, blah. Oh yeah, I could’ve refused the search. I probably could’ve also wound up back in jail wearing an orange jumpsuit. No, better to just sign the paper and get it over with. Just accept that you are a powerless pawn in Judge Hardass’ Kingdom of Justice and if they want to humiliate you, they will humiliate you one way or another. I’d rather get humiliated early and be home in time to lock up the chickens. So I signed the form.

Johnny Law asked me a bunch of questions. Name, address, occupation? I don’t really have an occupation. People ask me what I am or what I do and I’m kinda stumped. I am a lot of things and I do a lot of things but none of those things are what people expect – or want – to hear. I blurted out that I was a farmer. Johnny Law started asking me about what I raised on my farm and I could tell my answers did not impress him. I was too small-fry to be a real farmer.

From now on, I think I’m just going to tell people I’m retired. Or maybe that I'm on hiatus - which is just big-city yankee talk for mid-life crisis.

Which offices were you in today?

Did you steal the money?

Do you know who stole the money?

Do you have any money on you right now?

After exhausting his list of questions, Johnny Law exited the room, leaving me and Officer Ratchet alone for a very special episode of Tales From Community Service.

First I emptied my pockets. I pulled out a handful of latex gloves. I always carry a wad around with me when I’m doing community service. I also had a lighter and my cigarette roller case. As Officer Ratchet reached for the cigarette case I warned her to be careful because it contained loose tobacco. I’m pretty sure I rolled my eyes when she clumsily spilled half the tobacco on the desk. Involuntary reflex.

Lastly, I pulled out half a dozen cigarette butts. (I may be a drunk driver but I’m no litterbug.) Since I roll my own smokes, my cigarette butts look like roaches. Nobody here under the age of 70 rolls their own cigarettes. People are fascinated with my cigarette roller. I have given dozens of demonstrations of my cigarette roller to curious CS workers during breaktime. They all want to see how it works. Sometimes it makes me feel like I’m showing a Zippo to cavemen.

Somebody always has to make a comment about how easy it would be to roll joints with my little machine. I usually tell them joints are for shitty weed. Whatever they say next usually lets me know if they partake or not. Not surprising, many community service workers are pot smokers. Perhaps a tad more surprising (but not really) is that so are some of the courthouse workers.

But I digress…

I watched for Officer Ratchet’s reaction as I set the thin, filterless cigarette butts on the desk but I don’t think she even saw them.

She directed me to remove all my clothes. Everytime I took off an article of clothing, I had to hand it to her for inspection. I watched as she he pawed through each piece of clothing with her rubber-clad hands, turning sleeves inside out and checking pockets. I couldn’t decide if it was a good thing or not that I was wearing clean underwear. The power distribution in the room was way out of whack and it would’ve felt like a small victory on my part if Officer Ratchet had to get up close and personal with my dirty underwear.

She was still manhandling my panties when she barked at me to take off my shoes and socks. I silently complied but, in my head, I was thinking Give me a second, Hoss. I’m working on it. I undid the multitude of laces on my combat boots and handed them over. Then I gave her my socks to root through.

Once I was completely butt-ass nekkid and Officer Ratchet had finished looking at my laundry, she ordered me to turn completely around. I resisted the urge to pirouette. This was no time for theatrics. Once it was apparent that I didn’t have a hundred dollar bill on me, she told me to put my clothes back on.

I’d almost finished dressing when the door unexpectedly opened. It was a guy delivering some paperwork from the office across the hall. One minute earlier and he – and anyone who happened to be using the busy courthouse doors just to the right – would’ve gotten a eyeful of me doing a little spin in my birthday suit.

What the fuck kind of Barney Fifedom had I gotten trapped in? Fer chrissakes, lock the door to the public hallway! Or at least have somebody posted by the door. And why the fuck didn’t that guy knock? He works for the sheriff’s department and surely had to know what was going on that room. Where the fuck were all the lawmen that were in the hallway just before I went in?

Officer Ratchet laughed it off. “Good thing you didn’t come in her a few seconds ago.” Har-dee-fucking-har. I hurriedly re-laced my combat boots so I could get the hell out there. I was shuttled out into the hallway and out the backdoors where I was told not to come back into the courthouse until I was given the okay.

I rolled a cigarette and spied Really Fat Black Girl across the parking lot. I descended the stairs and went to hear her story.

to be continued…

Spenardo & Chickenfight Girl Get Strip-Searched, Part 1

2009-08-13T22:14:00.011-05:00

So far, I’ve been giving aliases to the locals I write about. That’s to protect the guilty as well as the innocent. The names may be fake but the people I write about are real. Aliases seem like a wise idea because who knows if Judge Hardass ever Googles himself?

I’ve only ever told one local that I keep a blog but she doesn’t have a computer so she’s not gonna read it. I will give her the alias Chickenfight Girl. She was arrested in the big cockfight bust this spring and we met at community service. In fact, on her first day, she and I were the only women there and I was the one to show her the ropes. She didn’t live far from me and, since my license was suspended, she ended up giving me a ride every week to the courthouse.

Even though our service is over (we both finished on the same day), we continue to hang out. She’s the only person I met through community service that I became friends with. Lots of the people I had to work with were nuts. Some were straight-up certifiably batshit insane. I hope I never see them again.

One such crazy person is Thief Girl. That’s not an alias I came up with for this blog. That’s what me and Chickenfight Girl call her. We have nicknames for many of the community service workers, simply because we don’t bother to remember their real names. Thief Girl, Fat Girl, Fat Black Girl, Really Fat Black Girl, Crazy Girl, Pregnant Girl Who Always Wears Really Low-Cut Shirts, Girl Who Looks Like She’s Thirteen, etc…

Thief Girl didn’t always used to be Thief Girl. She used to be The One Who’s Still In High School. I think she originally got community service for fighting. Back in March, on her very last day of CS, she stole a hundred dollar bill out of a purse in one of the courthouse offices. Now she’s doing community service for that.

Chickenfight Girl and I were both at the courthouse the day it happened. There were about 12 women working that day. When there’s that many women, it’s hard to stay busy all day. There’s barely enough work to keep three or four people busy, much less a dozen (though most of the women are lazy as shit and will spend half the day hiding out in the utility closet).

Chickenfight Girl and I would keep ourselves busy by spending hours in an office, supply closet or bathroom - giving it a really good (and slow) cleaning. Most CS women just empty the trash in an office but we would dust shelves, wipe off the tops of filing cabinets, clean windows, etc… Once I even unclogged a breakroom sink that maintenance couldn’t be bothered to fix (they had given the office some bullshit excuse about the plumbing being so old).

On the day Thief Girl stole the money, Chickenfight Girl & I were giving the public bathrooms a good going over - scrubbing walls & stalls that probably hadn’t seen a wet rag in years. I think the only soap that ever touched those walls was the industrial orange goo that dripped from the sinkside containers, leaving sticky skidmarks down the tile. You don’t even want to know what the underside of the mens’ urinals looked like.

After completing the upstairs bathrooms, we wandered off to individual projects. I was the midst of cleaning the jury room when I heard someone in the hall ask Chickenfight Girl where I was. I can’t remember anymore if it was Chickenfight Girl or that someone who appeared at the door, but I was told to drop what I was doing and come downstairs for an important meeting.

I saw the other CS women milling about near the bottom of the stairs, next to the investigators’ office. None of the workers knew what was going on - except Thief Girl - and nobody in a position of authority was talking - except to tell us to bring the folding chairs from the other end of the hallway, sit down and wait.

There we were: A dozen women in orange vests, sitting in a row of folding chairs against the wall – feeling like we’re in a line-up in full view of anyone and everyone who happened to be the courthouse right then. Word filtered down the line that money had been stolen. No one knew how much. One person said $11, another said $100. (I think the actual amount was $111 but I’m not sure because, even when it was all over, nobody bothered to fill us in on what really happened).

Most of the investigators and other law personnel were at one end of the line and I was second from the end at the other, Chickenfight Girl to my right and Really Fat Black Girl to my left. I assume the info we got came from women at the head of the line who overheard the investigators talking.

Apparently, they suspected a CS worker of stealing the money and Judge Hardass was bound and determined that the cash would be found before any of us left the building. We had to wait for a female officer from the jail to come over and search us.

A man stood before us and asked if there was anyone who wanted to confess now and save everybody else a lot of hassle. No one said a word.

Eventually, the female officer from the jail showed up. I will call her Officer Ratchet because she struck me as the kind of person who would root for Nurse Ratchet in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Just my luck, they chose to start at my end of the line. Really Fat Black Girl went in first while the rest of us waited in line. After about ten minutes, Officer Ratchet stepped out of the office back into the hallway. Next!

I started the long walk to Officer Ratchet, past the line of my fellow workers in folding chairs. Officer Ratchet grinned at me, playfully snapping the fingers of her freshly donned latex gloves. At least one of us was having a good time.

to be continued…

Where do chickens go when they die?

2009-08-11T10:16:00.009-05:00

Different chickens wind up in different places. Kinda depends on how they die.

If a chicken dies of unknown causes, perhaps some illness, I won't eat it. That's just common sense. Those birds usually end up in the maggot bucket (where I harvest maggots to feed to the still-living chickens) or incinerated in the firepit. The same fate usually awaits those who die before reaching eating size.

If one of my beloved favorite birds die, I won't eat it either. That's just me being a big soft girly-girl. They get buried in a little pet cemetery I started in the woods. But I have to really love the bird because it's a bitch to dig a hole in that forest floor.

Sometimes something else eats one of my chickens. The woods are full of animals that want to eat my birds - foxes, bobcats, possums, raccoons, hawks... In those cases, I may not find any remains. Perhaps a clump of feathers at the site of the attack. Those chickens wind up being shitted out on the forest floor where they help perpetuate the great circle of life. (Though, when a bird truly disappears without a trace, I prefer to think they ran off to join a traveling circus. I sleep better that way.)

But some chickens do find their way to my plate. Usually excess roosters and badly injured hens. I hate killing chickens but sometimes it must be done. And if you have to do it, it's stupid to throw away the meat.

If I kill a chicken and eat it, nothing goes to waste. Any parts I won't eat are greedily consumed by the cats. After I make stock from the bones, the cats strip them of every last trace of muscle and sinew. When my dog, Della, was still alive, she devoured the clean bones. These days, the bones are tossed into the firepit (and the ashes eventually added to the compost pile).

Any undigested food still in the bird's crop can be fed back to the other chickens. Cleaned skulls and dried feet are sent to Angela so she can turn them into art. She also gets rooster tailfeathers. The rest of the feathers were saved and set aside - until this week.

I finally sorted through and organized all the feathers I'd collected over the last couple years. It took 8 to 10 hours over the course of two days. I ended up with a garbage bag full of soft, downy feathers suitable for making either one big pillow or two smaller ones. All the feathers that didn't make the cut were used to line the hens' nests. My chickens now lay their eggs in the softest, warmest, cushiest nests in all of Dixie.

Not Post #41

2009-08-09T22:53:00.002-05:00

While I fell well short of my goal of 41 posts by my birthday on Friday, I did succeed in getting back into the swing of keeping this blog updated regularly. I'll do my best to keep it that way.

Tomorrow morning is my final court review - the last hoop I have to jump through before my life is once again my own.

Post #30 - Alabama, this is why everybody laughs at you

2009-08-07T08:44:00.011-05:00

From WineSpectator.com:

Bill Legion just loves Alabama. No, he's not the governor or even a native. It's all because Alabama banned his wine Cycles Gladiator, deeming the label "pornographic," and he couldn't be happier. "The publicity from this is so much greater than any wine we'd ship to Alabama," says Legion, president of Hahn Family Wines in Soledad, Calif. The Cycles Gladiator label, a replica of an 1895 French bicycle advertisement, features a fanciful image of a nude woman flying alongside a bike amid a star-filled sky. "It's absurd to think it's pornographic," Legion says, who points out the Alabama Beverage Control Board had approved the label in previous years. The control board even went so far as to ask the winery never to submit the label again, Legion says, "because it's offending people in the office." Banning things is a rich tradition in Alabama. Nearly half the state is dry, no alcohol, nada. It recently outlawed the sale of all sex toys, and interracial marriage was technically illegal until 2000.

Post #29 - Google searches crack me up

2009-08-06T21:21:00.004-05:00

Somebody stumbled upon my blog today from a Google search using the terms "Anchorage," "Gloryhole" and "Caleb."

If any of you in back in Anchorage know a Caleb, tell him somebody in Kenai is thinking of him.

As an added bonus, the second hit in the search reveals that there's a homeless shelter/soup kitchen in Juneau named "The Glory Hole." I think I already knew that but it was great to be reminded.

Well, tomorrow I will be 41. Goodbye & good riddance, 40. You sucked.

Post #28 - And then there was one

2009-08-05T10:37:00.002-05:00

Well, that didn't take long. Went down to Frankencoop to check on the baby chick and found it laying on the floor, in danger of being trampled. I picked it up and was going to bring it back to the house but it died in my hands before I got up the hill.

It's amazing how fast rigor mortis sets in to something that small - less than five minutes.

Post #27 - Sick chick

2009-08-05T08:54:00.003-05:00

Another one of Big Red's chicks is acting sickly this morning. Have no idea what the problem is.

She started out with four baby chicks - the most any of my hens have successfully hatched in one sitting. If this one dies, she'll be down to just one.

Post #26 - Free at last!

2009-08-03T23:20:00.003-05:00

So I showed the supervisor all my receipts and proved that I had done my time. My debt to society is paid in full. He was even nice enough to let me clock out an hour and a half early.

That doesn't mean I'm done talking about community service though. There are still a few stories left to tell.

Big Red ended up hatching four baby chicks this weekend. Sadly, one died on Sunday and a second died today. But the other two seem like happy, healthy little peepers. Keep your fingers crossed that they turn out to be hens. I don't need no more damned roosters.

Post #25 - The end of an era

2009-08-02T22:37:00.005-05:00

Tomorrow I go for my final day of community service. I have gathered all my receipts to prove to them that I have already completed 29 days - not 26 days like their records show.

It infuriates me how unorganized they are. The community service supervisor told me that he double checked with another court worker and her computer showed the same thing. This other court worker was the same woman who told me I could get out of piss testing a month early, leading to my showdown with the power-tripper who runs the piss-test program. She's really batting a thousand.

They've been fucking my shit up since day one. Immediately after facing Judge Hardass back in January, I met with a community service supervisor (he has since quit because he hated working with Judge Hardass) and was assigned to my first day of service. I asked him if my license was now suspended and he said yes. I asked if this meant I could not drive to community service the following week and he said that was exactly what it meant.

About a month later I got a letter from the state saying my license would be suspended effectively in the middle of February. When I mailed them back my license (if I didn't return it, I'd be hit with a $50 fine), I enclosed a letter explaining that the court suspended my license as of January 6th. They wrote back saying the court was wrong and my 90-day suspension didn't start until February 19th. So the court effectively added an extra six weeks to my suspension. I have since heard the same story from others convicted of DUIs in Randolph County.

The same supervisor also didn't say a damn thing to me about court review - the once a month clusterfuck when all community service workers & people whose fines aren't paid off yet need to show up in court. If you've been doing everything you're supposed to, you'll spend about 5 seconds in front of the judge - yet you could spend up to 3 hours waiting for your name to be called.

I only found out about court review from other CS workers. If you don't go to court review, they throw you in jail. You'd think that somebody official would tell you about that. It seems as though they are just trying to trip you up and keep you in the system as long as they can.

If I didn't have this fistful of receipts from the last 29 days, they'd be keeping me in the system for three more weeks.

Post #24 - You're in the country now, boy

2009-08-01T21:43:00.004-05:00

If my current houseguest, Tom, had any doubts that he was deep in the country, they vanished when my neighbors dropped by in a horse-drawn covered wagon to drop off a whole barbecued deer shoulder.

Post #23 - I wanted rain and I got rain.

2009-07-31T20:20:00.012-05:00

It’s been raining on and off for four days now. Supposed to be the same at least through the weekend. The humidity is now so high that it's difficult to keep my hand-rolled cigarettes lit.

A multitude of mushrooms are springing up all over the place. There are even some growing on the back steps just outside the door. A few have sprouted on the small coop the chickens under the porch sleep in. Wish I knew more about mushrooms. Surely one or two varieties must be edible. But I have no idea which ones they would be so I just treat them all as if they're poisonous. But I am tempted to peer over the fence into my neighbor's cow pasture and see if I can spot any of those extra special red mushrooms. Yeah...you know what I'm talking about.

Soon the flies will be here. They always come out after a rain. Lots of bugs come out after rain, but nothing as thick as the flies. Ugh.

The growth in the kudzu is noticeably visible. The grass and weeds have grown too. What’s left of the gardens has perked up a bit but it was too late for a lot of the veggies. Half the kale is dead. The broccoli is still alive but was hit pretty hard by bugs a few weeks back. Keeping my fingers crossed for the two remaining watermelon plants. At least the tomatoes and basil are looking good (assuming you can find them amongst the weeds). I'll be putting a lot of work and faith into my fall crops.

Too bad I didn't plant more sunflowers. Those have done best of all - growing up to eight feet tall with dozens of flowers on each plant. They will make the chickens very happy (if the ants and wild birds don't steal all the seeds first).

Speaking of chickens (aren't I always?): More baby chicks hatched today. Last I checked, three had broken out of their shells with three or four eggs still unhatched. If the chicks can make it through the night without their mother accidentally stomping on them, they'll be okay - at least until they have to face the dangers of the outside world. There should be one more batch of babies before the season is over - Mama Graybie is expecting more chicks in mid-August.

On another happy note, I'm having my house professionally sprayed for ants on Monday. One of the select few people in Alabama that I've told about this blog owns a pest control company and offered to spray for me. He wants to try out a new pesticide and I will be his guinea pig. This is good news indeed!

Post #22 - Didja know?

2009-07-29T22:55:00.002-05:00

This year, Randolph County became one of the very few U.S. jurisdictions in recent history to have both cockfighting and dogfighting busts in the same year.

Word on the street (or dirt road as the case may be) is that the Mexicans are still holding cockfights in the county but most of the whites are fighting their birds on a sympathetic Indian reservation in Mississippi.

When the big cockfighting bust went down this spring (a mile from my house), apparently the authorities purposely descended on the Saturday fights when they were likely to catch more white people. The Sunday fights were traditionally "Mexican Day." The story I've repeatedly heard is that Judge Hardass didn't want the hassle of dealing with people who didn't speak English and might have to be deported. I'm guessing, too, that there's less money to be squeezed out of Randolph County's Mexican population.

The cockfight proved to be quite profitable for the court system: 148 arrests. According to those who know, no one got off with less than $500 in fines. Some were fined thousands of dollars. And of course there was plenty of community service to go around - 40 days seems to be the norm. Those that lived more than 100 miles away from the courthouse were given the option of paying off their community service at a rate of $50 a day.

Post #21 - Light at the end of the tunnel

2009-07-28T20:41:00.003-05:00

Today was my 29th day of community service. I was given 30 days so this means I have only one more day to go. Or does it?

The community service supervisor told me today that his computer shows I have only done 26 days, leaving four more to complete. I told him his computer is wrong. This is what happens when you use community service workers to do your data entry (seriously).

Of course, the burden of proof is on me. So now I have to dig for all my receipts of each time I paid five bucks to work community service.

I'll be damned if I give those fuckers one extra minute - much less three days - of slave labor.

Post #20 - The Laptop Blues

2009-07-27T20:55:00.003-05:00

My new power cord showed up today but I'm still having the same problem with the laptop. Methinks the problem lies with the computer and not the cord. Hurrumph!

Post #19 - How dry I am

2009-07-26T22:58:00.006-05:00

It’s not looking like I’m going to make that goal of 41 posts by my birthday on August 7^th. Oh well, it won’t be the first time I didn’t reach a goal I set for myself. But at least I got this blog jump-started again and that was the original intent.

An old friend who’s been spending the year wandering aimlessly around the Lower 48 unexpectedly found himself in Alabama yesterday and is hanging out here at Spenardo del Sur for a little while.

Watched storms pass by all day and not one of them rained on me. I don’t even want the rain for my gardens anymore. Fuck, most everything died anyway after two months with hardly any rain. At this point I just want enough rain so I can safely have a fire to burn my garbage.

I don’t have garbage pickup so I have to burn, compost, recycle as much as I can. But it's been too dry to burn it and it's starting to pile up. Being summer, I can’t just leave it laying around. I’m not worried about it stinking because it’s mostly just paper & plastic, but it only takes the tiniest crumb of food in there to attract those damned ants. So I have to store the trash in the big freezer until I can burn it.

Did I mention the ants that have been invading my kitchen during this hot, dry summer are not regular ants? No, they are the evil sons of bitches known as fire ants. They will sting you. They are evil and they are everywhere. Sometimes I think this big hill I live on top of is nothing but one giant fire ant mound.

I’ve been pretty diligent about keeping the kitchen clean but they will still manage to march straight to the one tiny speck of food left in the sink. The wall behind the stove is dotted with little strips of black electrical tape. Every time the ants find a new way in, I cover it with tape. I even had to cover up one of the electrical outlets.

I’ve poisoned and killed all the ant mounds on that side of the house but it has done nothing to stem the flow of marauders. I suspect they have built a mound underneath the trailer and I will have to poke my head into the dark & spidery crawlspace to take a look for it.

Gimme some rain, dammit!

Hopefully the laptop power cord I ordered shows up tomorrow. Then I can start posting pictures again (and stop using this slowpoke computer from the late 1900s).

Post #18 - Just an observation...

2009-07-24T23:37:00.003-05:00

I've never met so many women with neck tattoos as I've met during my time doing community service. You don't think of rural Alabama as place where women have neck tattoos. And they're not cool tattoos either. These are more on the jailhousey side.

Almost all these neck tattoos are the first names of the women. Why would you get your name tattooed on your neck? Is there actually some logic or tradition behind this? Or is it just what the kids are into these days?

Post #17 - A day in the kitchen

2009-07-23T22:45:00.005-05:00

Today was all about food. Blanched and froze pounds of squash, zucchini and green beans. Sorted and cleaned a mess of cucumbers that I will pickle tomorrow.

I also recently splurged on a big-ass brisket which I cooked up today. I plan on eating lots of reuben sandwiches. Damn, do I love a reuben sandwich! I took a stab at making my own sauerkraut last week (with beets & apples!) and couldn't think of a better way to eat it than in a reuben.

I even already had a couple loaves of rye bread in the freezer. I have a killer bread connection that hooks me up with shitloads of bread that has either passed its expiration date or is just about to. Every few weeks I get a wide variety of breads dropped off at my house: white, wheat, multi-grain, French, cinnamon raisin, bagels, English muffins, sub rolls, hamburger & hotdog buns... I pick out the choice loaves for myself and dole the rest out to the chickens.

Cleaned out the refrigerator too. Well, I started anyway. Actually pulling out shelves and drawers. You know, really cleaning. Lots of food had reached that critical "use it or lose it" stage. Made a big bowl of egg salad that gave new life to a mess of aging veggies. A forgotten half can of Miller High Life and a limp zucchini can be transformed into beer-battered, golden brown hunks of deliciousness.

After I cleaned the counter and washed the dishes, I set about making a scrumptious reuben sandwich using hot corned beef straight from the oven. Ooey-gooey Swiss cheese. Tangy homemade sauerkraut. Mmmmmm....

I am so full right now.

Post #16 - Shit. Tweak's a boy.

2009-07-22T22:41:00.007-05:00

Caught Pasha and Tweak "sparring" yesterday morning. I wouldn't really call it a fight. It was more like intense staring competitions followed by some chest bumping, usually resulting in Tweak running away.

With one baby chick still unsexed and more eggs due to hatch late next week, I may end up with even more roosters. The nesting hen, Big Red, had eight eggs but she ate one yesterday. I'm not going to count my chickens before they hatch but I am counting on at least a couple chicken dinners this winter.

Big Red is actually an all-white factory farm refugee. I have trouble telling her apart from half a dozen other white chickens so I daubed a little red food coloring on her back - hence the name. Pasha's mother was called Big Blue for similar reasons but, since the dye faded away, I can no longer tell her apart from the others.

I usually call these indistinguishable birds by generic sweetieisms like "Angel" or "Honey Bunny" or, on rainy days, "My Little Muddy Buddy."

If there are more roosters, I want to name two of them Philosophy and Sophistry. It's an Aristophanes reference that I don't expect anyone to get. All that matters is that I'm amused.

Post #15 - A boy...another rooster

2009-07-20T16:06:00.006-05:00

I was finally able to establish that one of the chickens born this spring is indeed a rooster. Or, it will be a rooster. Officially it's known as a cockrel until it is a year old.

You can't tell the sex of a chicken until they're about six weeks old. I've read that an expert chicken sexer can tell on the day the chicken hatches but, if you don't figure it out that first day, you have to wait six weeks until the secondary sex characteristics appear. The chicken in question is actually eight weeks old. I'm just a little slow. Today I saw a green sheen in his emerging tailfeathers - just like my other two roosters. Dammit, I wanted a hen.

When he was tiny, he had a penchant for riding around on his mother's back. Probably because he saw siblings squashed beneath his factory farm mother's big dinosaur feet and figured her back was the safest place to be. It reminded me of a person riding a giant elephant and I started calling him "Pasha."

There is one other chicken the same age as Pasha that I still haven't figured out if it's a boy or a girl. I call that one "Tweak." A mix of game rooster and factory farm refugee hen, Tweak is white with a few black smudges. Tweak was hatched and raised by Mama Graybie, the bad-ass hawk-hating hen that takes no shit from nobody.

I really hope Tweak turns out to be a hen. If not, he'll most likely be the one who ends up in the skillet.

Post #14 - It wasn't all that bad.

2009-07-19T22:18:00.004-05:00

The parents left this morning. Just a short weekend visit. It was much easier to handle than a long visit. I have a pretty low threshold for lecturing, beratement and interrogation. A weekend is about all I can handle.

The newest baby chick, only 10 days old, has just started investigating the great outdoors. Keep your fingers crossed that it can make it through the next two weeks without being eaten by anything. Those first couple weeks outside are pretty dicey for little chicks - little bite-sized morsels just running around out in the open.

The only other equally dangerous time for them is the first 24 hours. The large factory farm refugee hens have a tendency to accidentally squash their newly hatched babies. The newest baby chick had three siblings who were all squashed by their mother.

Another factory farm refugee is currently sitting on eight eggs. If all goes well, they will hatch in two weeks.

Post #13 - The parents arrived this afternoon

2009-07-17T22:02:00.004-05:00

It only took my Fox News-loving father 3 hours to start bitching about stupid Democrats. We weren't even discussing anything remotely political when he suddenly hijacked the conversation and turned it into a monologue about how dumb liberals are.

Sigh...this is going to be a long weekend.

Post #12 - Tales from Community Service

2009-07-15T22:36:00.011-05:00

Gather 'round, dear readers, for another installment of Tales from Community Service. Today's episode is about corruption. Nobody really seems to know the whole story but this is what I've put together from conversations with community service workers and courthouse employees.

A couple months ago, two young men from a neighboring county were sentenced to community service after running afoul of Randolph County's antiquated and Draconian alcohol laws.

One morning, a county commissioner requested a few community service workers to do some lawn mowing and other yard work. Nothing all that extraordinary - until you consider that this work was apparently performed at his house and the houses of clients of the yard service business he owns. Work that he charged those clients for. Work that community service workers provided for free. Were forced to provide for free. Hell, each one of them actually had to pay money because community service requires a $5 a day "user fee" on top of eight hours of slave labor.

The two young men from a neighboring county had been on that yard work crew. One of them told his father the story when he got home. Oh, did I mention that his father is a judge?

Apparently Judge Dad called Judge Hardass and some hell must've broke loose because the story was the popular courthouse scuttlebutt for two weeks. I haven't heard anything about it recently. They've managed to keep a lid on it so far and no word of it made it into the local paper.

I once had to wash a county commissioner's car. At least it was a county car so I guess it could be considered county business. Still, it's not really what I'd call "serving my community."

Post #11 - BUGS!

2009-07-13T23:03:00.002-05:00

About two inches of rain fell yesterday and last night - more rain than this place has seen in around 6 weeks. Now the land is overrun with insects. Holy shit, they are everywhere!

Most noticeable are the June bugs. They were loudly buzzing all over the place today. They fly right into you as you walk around. You could hear them pinging off the tin roof of the porch.

Right now, the window screen in front of me is covered with dozens of little brown beetles that are attracted to the light.

The most impressive bug I saw today has yet to be identified. I've never seen one like it before. It was three inches long, not including the antennae. It was about the size of my index finger. It kinda looked like a shrimp with really long legs. I'm still trying to figure out what the hell it was. None of my usual bug identification websites are of any help.

I'd post a picture of it but my laptop is currently out of commission. The power cord died and I have to get a new one. Until then, I'm back to using the ancient turn of the century machine that runs Windows 98. So no photos for a few days but at least I still have internet access.

Post #10 - As if there wasn't enough already on my plate

2009-07-12T22:23:00.006-05:00

I have a hundred projects going on right now.

It seems like I've been painting the bathroom forever. It's mostly done but I still have a bunch of trim and hard-to-reach areas to finish.

I'd pulled a couple boxes of my grandmother's old papers out of the closet and started sorting through them. The livingroom is littered with piles of bank statements, phone bills, letters, greeting cards, receipts and other 20th century ephemera. Everything I choose not to keep goes in the shredder and then onto the floor of the chicken coop. (All those colorful greeting cards and envelopes have given Frankencoop a very festive feel.)

The gardens are in disarray. Non-stop rains in May kept me from planting as much as much as I wanted. Non-stop sun and 100-degree days in June killed about half of what I had managed to planted. Blueberries dried up on the vine. Peaches shriveled and dropped from the trees. Even the wild blackberries have turned to dust. Locals are saying the deer are eating more than usual from their gardens. One neighbor lost an entire 1/4-mile row of peas the night before they were to be picked. So far the deer have left me alone. They probably can't see my veggies because of all the weeds.

Mowing kudzu is an ongoing chore. The kudzu is the only thing that doesn't seem to be affected by the drought. The goat shed is in dire need of repairs. Frankencoop needs a lot of work too.

The dry weather has also made the ants organize search parties into the kitchen. No matter how clean I keep it, they keep patrolling until they find some crumb on the counter or a dirty fork in the sink I didn't wash right away. Somedays, I mop the floor twice. I follow their parades to locate the tiny hole they're coming from so I can plug it up. But they just find another tiny hole. Last night, they started coming through a wall socket. They're like an unstoppable zombie horde. I'm worried my kitchen will be completely covered in electrical tape before the summer is over.

I'm having to store my garbage in the freezer. It's been too dry to burn it but, if I leave it out, the ants will get into it. Fortunately, it rained today so I can burn the garbage tomorrow. Hopefully the rain will also get the ants to let up a little.

Anyway, all this crap (and more) is going on. Everything is a mess but that's okay because I'm basically a hermit so nobody has to see it. Or so I thought...

My parents called last night to tell me they're coming for the weekend - THIS weekend. My father has decided to go to his high school reunion on Saturday - the first one he's ever attended. They will arrive Friday.

So now I have to drop everything and whip this place back into parent-friendly shape. They are going to flip when they find out they can't watch TV. I lost all the network channels in the DTV switch. I only get half a dozen PBS stations and couple Jesus channels now.

Post #9 - Horseback riding

2009-07-10T23:34:00.003-05:00

Went for a sunset horseback ride this evening. It was the first time I've ridden in over 15 years. The last time I was on a horse, I galloped down the the beach in Santa Barbara on one of the prince of Malaysia's polo ponies. (For the record, the prince was nowhere around and probably would not have approved.)

But we're not in Santa Barbara anymore, Toto. Tonight, I traveled over the river and through the woods on the back of a gigantic Belgian draft horse. (It's one of the same horses pictured in a recent post.)

After three hours of straddling that humongous beast, I don't think I'll be able to walk right all weekend.