Moot Witness

The baby girls are so huge now. We acquired 18 chicks of 4 different breeds this year, with the intent to raise them up and give half of them to a coworker of the boy. They were the proverbial peeping (and pooping!) fuzzballs when we got them....a couple days old at most. It's been nearly six weeks and now they are like little pre-teen girls. You can see what they are going to look like as adults, they are eating us out of house and home and they flock and squabble like a Jonas Brothers audience. This weekend, 9 of them are going to their new home. It's been a little hard to decide who we're keeping, though I think I've earned the privlege for caring for them entirely during the Sabbatical. ( It's been amazing to watch this year's little girls grow....so fast. We've raised them up from infancy once before...two springs ago. Here's Dolores (an Ameraucana) at a couple days old...peep peep peep... And here she is yesterday, at 2 years old...bok bok bok... S...

It's wedding season. The boy has been somewhat well-known in ukulele circles for over 10 years. He's the first to say that he's not a hot-shot player...but quite capable enough to form a sturdy setting for the jewel that is his voice. Back in the mid-90s, before there was a ukulele scene, before message boards, before youtube, before you heard ukulele in every damn commercial on TV for everything from car insurance to wireless telephone to Hamburger Helper to paper towels to 3 different makes of cars (seriously, listen when you next turn on the TV....during the commercials...uke uke uke), he sung and played rhythm guitar in a rockabilly/Western Swing trio. Early on, and after he took up and fell in love with ukulele (and much to their occasional chagrin!) he'd convince them to back off on the musical fireworks and let him do some ballads on the uke. People loved it. It's the voice that kills. One reviewer back then called his "a voice unspoiled by rock n' r...

What would life be without the simple pleasure of beer? It's fascinating to see it marketed in 1954 (McCall's magazine) without the remotest whiff of T & A, slacker schlubs and/or "attractive" young douchebags in a bar/club. Merely amiable, relaxing time spent with loved ones... And I still am trying to construct a flowchart in my mind as to how PBR got from bridge-playing suburban housefraus to smoky blue-collar VFW posts to crass rockabilly scenester dudes to finally, 21st century slaves to irony. . I'm sure tasting like ass didn't help. Cheers!

Scenes from today.... Quality time with sweet Foxy... Afterwards, all by my lonesome and despite scenes from "The Blair Witch Project" running through my head, I parked my car on the side of the road and tromped on foot through a hayfield and into the forest looking for the lost phone. I was actually hopeful and confident at first...then disappointed. Mainly not for not finding it, but because I'd left my camera in the car and thus missed the chance to document the most charming, strange, white, dangly-belled mushrooms popping up in the unseen forest. It was a priveledge to see something so exquisite that will likely grow, die and disappear without any other human laying eyes on it. How infinite- the small things that play out completely independent of any of us oh-so-important human beings! And after that, the boy and I walked to the nearby A&W for the weekly Cruise Night/Car Show. I so love getting photos of design details. Nothing nowadays holds a candle. My favori...

So, I'm supersentimental. When it always feels like the Past is slipping away, moment by moment, sunset by sunset, death by death, it seems reflexive to desperately hold onto mementos. Don't get me wrong...I'm not remotely a hoarder. But...I do have trouble getting rid of meaningful objects. And it's in the attributing of "meaningful" that I sometimes go overboard. Recently, I gave something very meaningful away. And though it stung me with regret just a tiny bit, all in all....it was the right thing. After my grandmother Juju's death, and even while she was still alive, I amassed what I think is the definitive, boiled-down representation of that side of the family. Letters, photos, birth and marriage certs., the family Bible, personal items...most of it fit in a huge old Samsonite, conveniently. One of my favorite things was Granny's dress. Granny was Juju's mother...my great-grandmother...a hardscrabble Illinois farm wife who raised several child...

Anyone looking for pleasantry should move along on this one. I'm only sticking it here so I have it where I want it, as a vivid reminder of Rock Bottom- in stark, stark contrast to the great new upswing I get to start in a week. Shouldn't we all remain as aware as possible of our low points in order to appreciate what we have now? So, apologies. Cheerfulness and frivolity will return after these messages! From my secret anonoblog I was keeping at the time to document the horrors of my time working in animal welfare and to try to deal with the extreme, daily sorrow: December 18, 2008. "I wish there was a way I could saw open my own skull, just like that of the poor little Pom we necropsied yesterday who'd been blunt-traumatized to death by some girl's douchebag boyfriend. It's a great read, that police report. Some Facebook espionage has indicated that he and the dog's owner are still hot'n'heavy and he's placating her with some new, likely ultim...

In the past 24 hours, I have: 1.) Taken a lovely, otherwise mostly uneventful trail ride aboard a new and increasingly trustworthy horse friend, during which my cell phone apparently fell out of my hoodie pocket. It was a cheap, super-basic prepaid phone...but still. The boy was NOT happy with me. Thoughts of going to look for it were quickly quashed by common sense. How could I ever find it again with my eyes 10 feet above the ground on a horse? And to have a practical lower vantage point, how could I ever get past the muck and brush not on a horse? Fail. It's gone. Part of me wants to call it and just enjoy the idea of a crappy ringtone going off in the mud in middle of the woods, heard by no one but the birds and deer. 2.) Marveled repeatedly at the turbo-powered growth of the baby girls. They are only 5 weeks old. But, dang. They sure go from peeping fuzzballs to fully-feathered, still peeping mini-chickens SO fast! And they also move so fast...they get harder and harder to ph...