New Name Needed, Apply Within

The flaming mess is slowly cleaning up. You can expect an update of activities tonight or tomorrow, which will include discussion of the following topics:

• The new animals

• The new project
• The new sensation
• Pie

Thanks for caring, thanks for sharing.

Hi everyone. Just been a flaming mess the past few weeks. Slowly coming out of it. Learning to write complete sentences. Too.
Back soon.

Two small white zebra finches have been added to the menagerie here at Cold Comfort Farm. Best of all — they’re mutants! They were specially bred for a high school science project, and have now come to fill my house with Frankenchirps while synthesizing genetically superior poops.
The animal collection also increased last night by one racoon.
Briefly.
More about that tomorrow.

Today’s entry is partially brought to you by my eight-year-old boy:

On Saturdays I like to walk in the woods. I follow a path that I know. I also cut plants for my chickens. They tramp on the plants that I bring them.

Not only is this more entertaining than my own posts, it’s also more grammatically correct.
I don’t have writer’s block. I have something much more insidious and insurmountable: writer’s lack of talent and time. I know this has never stopped John Grisham from his assault upon American letters. But he never had to hold a full-time job while raising four kids and trying to trap a raccoon.
That’s right: I’m trying to trap the medium-sized wild animal that has been pestering our chickenfolk and duckfolk for the past few nights. Like a drunken fraternity brother, he wakes us up at midnight stumbling around the premises, jonesing for that perfect late-night snack that will take the edge off pounding too much of the racoon equivalent of Milwaukee’s Best (please leave your suggestions in the comments as to what the racoon equivalent of Milwaukee’s Best might be).

We’ve borrowed a “humanitarian” trap from a friend to aid in this endeavor. What makes it “humanitarian,” you ask? As soon as the trap springs shut, Jimmy Carter and Madeline Albright will helicopter in to explain in simple trans-species terms that I don’t understand the root causes of why the raccoon wants to eat my birds. They’ll make signs and puppets to demonstrate that the racoon was driven to this behavior by the fact that I didn’t feed it enough, care for it enough — love it enough! Bruce Springsteen will write a song titled “41 Traps” that is punctuated by repeated stacatto bursts of the snare door closing: Crash! Crash! Crash! And if history is any indication, the poor creature will most likely receive an invitation from Kofi Annan to join the United Nations as an observer in the sessions and the work of the General Assembly as the Trans-International & Maine Benevolent Ensnared Raccoon (T.I.M.B.E.R.). Which all means I won’t only be woken by the noise from the trap catching the blasted thing, but also a telephone call a few hours later from a really pissed-off Colin Powell wondering why the hell I helped create one more consulate he needs to shmooze.
If the ASPCA allows it, I will post photos of the criminal once he is apprehended. If the picture features a captive that looks more like a stuffed teddy bear, well, ah, that’s just a mirage due to the salty sea air that wafts over our property.

Big news soon.
That’s all I’ll say.
ex michaelio semper aliquid novi

Dogs can smell fear.
Sharks can smell blood.
Children can smell deadlines.
In all three of these cases, an attack mechanism is triggered. The unsuspecting victim, helpless to resist, is quickly set upon and destroyed.
In other words: once the kids leave me alone, SD will be ready.

SoBig.f occupied a good part of my day today. Thanks, virus makers!
But enough about me. How are you?

Behind on the Snappy Dresser relaunch, behind on the redesign for this here site, behind on my list of priorities at The Big Place I Work.
All because the chickens demand Lebensraum.
The wife convinced me yesterday that what was most needed on the estate grounds was more room for the chickens to run about. So I dragged some power tools out into the driveway, bought some cheap wood at the local lumberyard, and started the job of expanding their outdoor pen over 200%.
This sort of construction allows one to call upon deeply buried knowledge across many disciplines: physics (“How hard to I need to smack this mosquito to kill it?”), trignonometry (“at what angle is the circular saw least likely to cause a major arterial wound?”, biology (“will a mosquito attempt to drink blood spewing from a major arterial wound?”), and so on. I wisely ignored all attempts at an analytic approach, however, and applied more useful collegiate knowledge by quickly opening a beer before starting.
Framing, cutting, drilling — I was like Jimmy Carter on a Habitat for Humanity project, except that I didn’t give away any strategically important canals before I finished. And also, much like everything Carter was involved with, the project is incomplete. I still need to add some fencing to the frames, the gate needs a support crossbar and hinges. And I’m thinking about moving the barbecue next to the pen as an added incentive for good poultry behavior.
So the redesigns will finish tonight, and the birds will enjoy conditions far better than they deserve.

A sign has appeared in my upstairs bathroom. It’s a folded piece of 8.5″ x 11″ copier paper, on which my wife has scrawled the following:

Did you……

• …lift both lids?
• …wipe the seat?
• …remember to flush?
• …wash your hands?

I’m pretty sure this sign is meant for the boys.
But on second thought….I did live in a fraternity, y’know.