Today's Chicken Monday features Leroy, my ornery yet gorgeous rooster. (I can hear him crowing outside as I type this—maybe he knows I'm talking about him.)
Yes, I know it's Memorial Day. I would have bought a few small American flags and tried to get the chickens to pose with them...but that seemed disrespectful of the flag, and an invitation to get spurred by a pissed-off rooster. So here are some more pictures from back in April, when Leroy, Big Chicken, and Henrietta got out of the pen one morning to stroll the yard and terrorize Lucky.
Hope everyone's Memorial Day Weekend is getting off to a good start. Nothing big planned here at the Happy Kitten Cottage—with any luck, it'll be a relaxing holiday.
To kick off the festivities, here's a pleasantly bored Ernge sitting in her favorite chair on the front porch.
Here's the 'Joseph's Coat' rose again, in some pictures I took on May 15. Here is the previous post on this gorgeous climbing rose and its early-spring show. With mulching, fertilizer, and plenty of water, 'Joseph's Coat' should put on another show or two as the summer progresses.
Dear Jason's Deli: I love your sandwiches, especially the New Orleans Muffaletta. I'm glad to see you promoting this under-appreciated Nawlins delicacy. But I have to inform you that scintillate is always followed by a noun (its object). Grammar and usage issues aside, the Muffaletta is Mardi Gras on a bun. Sincerely, Kitty B. Goode
Today, I'm off to the north Georgia mountains for a getaway with the Colonel. It's about time for a vacation, with all the poo being flung by a few students' angry FAIL-mails. [sigh] So with this post, I take my sister's well-timed suggestion and use this photo of Hobbes' rear end—rosy pink butthole and all—when writing about hateful, spoiled, and vindictive 19-year-old toddlers.
Henrietta is one hard-working hen. She averages an egg a day, and laid six last week. Since Pearl and Ernestine passed on, she's been the only hen in the small flock...and would probably like to have a few hen buddies to keep Leroy's roosterly urges satisfied.
My apologies for posting nearly the same chicken picture two weeks in a row. I had a photo of a bunch of eggs in the nest, but evidently I deleted it. [sigh] Next week, there will be new chicken pictures—hopefully some exciting ones.
See these snoozing kittehs? They're telling Mama what to do now that final grades have been submitted, and Spring Semester is over. Joy and Smokey are pretty smart!
However, I'm not getting too excited just yet. My students have been pretty sharp the last couple of semesters, but a few had end-of-term brain farts and just didn't turn in their final portfolios, worth 25% of the course grade. And a few had semester-long brain farts that somehow kept them from completing the daily journal assignments, worth 10% of the course grade. (I don't allow students to do ALL their missed entries at the end of the semester, by the way—the whole point of a daily journal is regular practice at writing. A last-minute flurry of half-ass writing doesn't make up for 16 weeks of fooling around.)
Lord knows my e-mail will soon be filled with shocked, angry recriminations. Let the FAIL begin!
Okay, so I don't have cable and don't even own a TV—but I do have internet, and access to last weekend's Saturday Night Live, hosted by popular demand by Betty White, of Golden Girls and Mary Tyler Moore fame (among many other TV, film, stage, and radio credits). Looks to me as if Betty blew those kids right out of the water! Would that all SNL hosts were as funny and versatile as she is. So I thought I'd post a couple skits; we could all use a laugh this time of the semester, couldn't we? (Note that you should probably put on your headphones or turn the volume way down if you're at work.)
Henrietta, now the lone hen here at the HKC, faithfully lays an egg nearly every day--bless her feathery little heart! And yes, I have plans to add a few more hens to the flock. Roosters like having a lot of ladies around, ya know...and I have an organic free-range egg empire to build.
And, come to think of it, it can sometimes be free. Don't get me started, though, on the White Flower Farm and Wayside Gardens and Bluestone Perennials catalogs (among others). These publications should be mailed in plain brown paper wrappers, they're so dangerously close to gardening porn.
Longtime E&P reader Orchidophile asked me in a recent comment, "Do you garden? If so, when do you plan to start potting up seeds?" Yes, I garden—and I am notoriously slack about planting seeds. PLANT FAIL. This year, I think, will be different; seeds are the least expensive way to grow new plants for your garden, and I'm short on cash this time around. So I'm potting up some Creme de Cassis hollyhocks and will post on the process in the next week or so.
In the meantime, here's a great slideshow from Fine Gardening magazine on another of my gardening obsessions, titled A Front-Yard Garden in No Time. More garden plants = less grass to mow. That's MY kind of yard!
And my last item for today: here's a quick YouTube video on how to make your own tumbling compost bin, as opposed to spending $500 to mail-order one...
I thought I'd never get this Chicken Monday video posted! My stupid supposed-to-have-been-fixed-with-a-new-modem-last-week internet service still has the spastic jitters.
The chickens managed to let themselves out of the pen last Sunday, and I got this video right before I tied up Lucky and set about finding a way to get three headstrong, adrenaline-junkie birds back to safety. Dry cat food did the trick!
Two weeks ago, Ernest decided to take a peek at the great outdoors. Since then, he seems to have reverted to his feral kitty days; he's scared of everything (including Mama) but insists on staying outside under the front porch. Not that Ernge and Clark really care, though.
In today's excerpt - massive volcano eruptions have caused the temperature of the earth to cool significantly by blocking light from the sun:
"The connection between volcanoes and climate is hardly a new idea. ... Benjamin Franklin, wrote what seems to be the first scientific paper on the topic. In 'Meteorological Imaginations and Conjectures,' published in 1784, Franklin posited that recent volcanic eruptions in Iceland had caused a particularly harsh winter and a cool summer with 'constant fog over all Europe, and [a] great part of North America.' In 1815, the gargantuan eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia produced 'The Year Without a Summer,' a worldwide disaster that killed crops, prompted widespread starvation and food riots, and brought snow to New England as late as June.
"As Nathan Myhrvold [of Intellectual Ventures and formerly of Microsoft] puts it: 'All really big-ass volcanoes have some climate effects.'
"Volcanoes erupt all the time, all over the world, but truly 'big-ass' ones are rare. If they weren't - well, we probably wouldn't be around to worry about global warming. The anthropologist Stanley Ambrose has argued that a supervolcanic explosion at Lake Toba on Sumatra, roughly seventy thousand years ago, blocked the sun so badly that it triggered an ice age that nearly wiped out Homo sapiens. What distinguishes a big-ass volcano isn't just how much stuff it ejaculates, but where the ejaculate goes. The typical volcano sends sulfur dioxide into the troposphere, the atmospheric layer closest to the earth's surface. This is similar to what a coal-burning power plant does with its sulfur emissions. In both cases, the gas stays in the sky only a week or so before falling back to the ground as acid rain, generally within a few hundred miles of its origin.
"But a big volcano shoots sulfur dioxide far higher, into the stratosphere. That's the layer that begins at about seven miles above the earth's surface, or six miles at the poles. Above that threshold altitude, there is a drastic change in a variety of atmospheric phenomena. The sulfur dioxide, rather than quickly returning to the earth's surface, absorbs stratospheric water vapor and forms an aerosol cloud that circulates rapidly, blanketing most of the globe. In the stratosphere, sulfur dioxide can linger for a year or more, and will thereby affect the global climate.
"That's what happened in 1991 when Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines. Pinatubo made Mount St. Helens look like a hiccup; it put more sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere than any volcano since Krakatoa, more than a century earlier. In the period between those two eruptions, the state of science had progressed considerably. A worldwide cadre of scientists was on watch at Pinatubo, equipped with modern technology to capture every measurable piece of data. The atmospheric aftereffects of Pinatubo were undeniable: a decrease in ozone, more diffuse sunlight, and, yes, a sustained drop in global temperature."
Author: Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner Title: Superfreakonomics Publisher: HarperCollins Date: Copyright 2009 by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner Pages: 189-190
Every weekday, Delancey Place sends to my inbox an excerpt from a well-written nonfiction book. The excerpts are well-chosen and feed my curious, learning-hungry brain. And it never hurts to read excellent writing; that's half of how we all learn to write better!
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Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
—Robert Frost
NOTE: The contents of this blog are not approved by my employer, nor do they represent my employer's opinions on any subject. The opinions expressed on this blog are mine and mine alone. All names have been changed.
I teach college English part-time at a mid-sized university while attending graduate school part-time and building a freelance/commercial writing career. It's kicking my butt. In what spare time I have, I write like mad, tend to rescued critters, and learn to sew. Little by little, I'm also renovating my home, the Happy Kitten Cottage (HKC).
