As you can see, Axel and Speck are now friends. I can’t really claim any credit; Speck was the one who made all the overtures and slowly got him used to her presence. I apologize for this being a poorly-composed picture; that lump under the blanket is my leg, so if I’d tried to get up to catch the shot from a different angle, they might’ve moved. Alas, Axel has not stopped being aggressive altogether; a few days ago a stray cat came into the atrium and if I hadn’t called him off it would not have been pretty. But one step at a time; at least he leaves the resident cats alone. He is now down to 50 mg of trazodone per day, in a single dose at bedtime; that’s a lot lower than what he was on when he arrived in late November, but it’s still quite high considering he’s on a typical human dose despite having only about a quarter of a typical human body mass. Even so, I’m going to keep weaning him off of it slowly; since I stopped splitting the dose between afternoon and bedtime I’ve noticed he’s a bit more antsy in the afternoons, so just cutting him off would still be a bad idea. His next reduction will be this coming Sunday, down to 25 mg, so we’ll see how that works out and proceed accordingly.
In chick news, I typically keep them inside for three weeks, so they should’ve gone out into the henhouse nursery on Sunday. However, the turkey chick is two weeks younger than the others, and the predicted low on Sunday night was -4o C, so I held off on putting them outside until today (it was only a one-night cold snap). So watch next week for a video of them in the newly-rebuilt nursery, where they’ll spend the next three weeks before I start letting them out in the daytime to mix with the adult hens.
It’s difficult for young people nowadays to understand just how badly our culture has backslid into sexual repression during my lifetime. Here’s an example from the 1978 Broadway musical On the 20th Century in which fairly typical 21st century sexual attitudes are the subject of mainstream mockery. The links above the video were provided by Nun Ya; Reason; T. Greg Doucette; Jesse Walker and Popehat; Nun Ya again; and T. Greg Doucette again (x2), in that order,
I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one. Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful. But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer. So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets. Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements. Thanks so much!
There really isn’t an excuse for repeated attempts at social engineering that aren’t even tied to some kind of grift, pork, or fascist collaboration.
– “In the Dark”
Being able to look out a window and see grass and trees and animals…is so much better for my mental and spiritual health then being subjected to a “view” which consists of nothing but concrete, glass, and automobiles.
– “Diary #664”
“Innocence” is merely a fanciful euphemism for “ignorance”. – “Tweetenstein”
For me, no sorrow is ever experienced in isolation; new tears falling into the pool immediately cause it to overflow, and then it’s impossible to tell how much of my anguish is due to the proximate source of the grief, and how much is old pain which has never been fully resolved. – “Pool of Tears“
Yellowbird wanted to try turkeys again, and they came in Friday so Chekhov brought them over. Unfortunately, by the next day one of them wasn’t doing too well; she seemed uninterested in the food or water even though the other one went right for them. By Saturday evening she was obviously dying, and before 10 PM she was gone; given that like chickens she was living on her yolk until Thursday, my guess is that she had some disorder that kept her from eating as normal. The other one has joined the other chicks, and though she’s smaller right now last year’s experience demonstrated that won’t be for very long. On Sunday I expanded the enclosure, which will give them more room to run around and should help to keep their water from constantly getting fouled; I was lucky enough to catch them in the act in this video, so you can see how the water needs to be cleaned so often at this stage of development. This coming Sunday they’ll be going out into their nursery in the henhouse; this past Sunday I finished mucking out the floor, bringing in fresh hay, rebuilding the nursery (the old chicken wire had corroded badly in our damp climate), and spreading fresh shavings in there so it will be ready for them this weekend. So tune in next week at this same time for a look at the new nursery and its quickly-growing occupants!
In the ’50s and early ’60s, it was typical for TV sponsors to feature the show’s characters in commercials which aired during the show. I’ve been re-watching The Beverly Hillbillies lately, and I was delighted to find this PSA from an episode which first aired in September 1963. The links above the video were provided by IncarcerNation, Nun Ya (x2), Stephen Lemons, Franklin Harris, Violet Blue, and IncarcerNation again, in that order.
I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one. Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful. But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer. So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets. Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements. Thanks so much!
If you’ve never had another living creature under your care, you may never have considered how much time and effort is spent dealing with their poop. Babies need to be changed several times a day, and if you’re in a city dogs need to be walked (out in the country they just let us know when they want to go outside); cat boxes need to be cleaned about twice a week, and henhouses need to be “mucked out” twice a year. That means using a shovel to remove all the “poultry litter”, which is merely a concise term for the revolting mixture of decaying hay or shavings, molted feathers, spilled food, and fecal matter which builds up on the floor over time. I generally do it in March before I get the nursery ready, then again in September or early October as it begins to turn cold. But when I did it last autumn it really wore me out (like any shovel work, it’s rather strenuous), so a couple of weeks ago I decided to start filling just one bucket every day (when I go in to check feed & water and collect eggs) and dumping it on the compost heap; that way the work is spread out so as to be less exhausting and less odious. While the chicks are still in the brooder, their poops are generally so tiny it’s no big deal to clean the shavings every week for the three weeks they’re inside; once in a while a chick gets a turd stuck to her butt-feathers, but it’s typically easily removed with fingernails (if you’re a parent you’ve touched worse, and there is such a thing as “soap” when the task is done). But this time one of the chicks arrived with a hardened mass of feces; I’m told this is called “pasty butt” and it can actually kill them if not removed, because their vent gets clogged. And it’s not easy to remove; it’s so hard and baby chicks are so fragile that one can’t simply pull it off, which means filling a basin with warm water and dipping her butt into it to soften the mess before removal. Once I was done I got to see and hear something one doesn’t encounter every day: a chick fart, as she squatted and emptied her chute with an audible “poot”. It has been a week since then and she seems fine now, so I think we’re past the danger. And I’m sure y’all enjoyed this fascinating discussion of literal chickenshit, so it’s a win all around.
The first prohibitionist laws date to the late 19th century, but it was in the 20th that the concept…penetrated the minds of the general public so thoroughly that most took it for granted that for governments to tell people what they could consume, what they could own, and even what thoughts they could have…was not only normal, but desirable. – “Leaving the 20th Century”
If you find an article interesting, infuriating, or whatever, you can follow the thread of references back through similar articles, often for years, while marveling at the obsessive lengths and depths to which my librarian’s brain will go to impose order on chaos. – “Rabbit Hole”
Copsucking reporters waste considerable space quoting boss pigs oinking about how typical and representative cops aren’t really typical or representative. – “Creepy Coppers (#1418)”
I have never broken a promise to [Grace] in the past and I’m not going to start now merely because she’s not in a position to remind me. – “Diary 766“
It’s chick time again! I used to get my chicks at Tractor Supply, but they do first come, first served and a lot more people are buying chicks in the past few years than there used to be, so now I’m ordering them from the feed store over in the county seat. This year I got four Rhode Island reds; regular readers know I rotate the colors to make it easy to keep track of their ages (because chickens only lay for 2-3 years). Technically, last year should’ve been reds, but at the time I still had two reds and only one white, so I got whites last year (and the last one died a few months ago). Our last red died just recently, so it worked out almost perfectly; next year should be some dark color, though these blacks turned out to be disappointing layers, so I’ll need to do a little research on which dark-colored breeds lay as well as the reds and whites. But one way or the other, chick season always makes me smile every time I go into the bathroom where they live, and sometimes when it’s quiet I can hear their peeping through a closed door and all the way in the living room.
[Computer programs do] not understand “stakes” as humans perceive them. – Tong Zhao
When an especially-prolific musician dies, I often choose one of his lesser-known works as a memorial; this Neil Sedaka composition is quite different from the pop songs he’s known for. The links above the video were provided by Matt Welch, Popehat, IncarcerNation (x2), T. Greg Doucette, and Mark Bennett, in that order.
I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one. Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful. But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer. So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets. Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements. Thanks so much!
A few years ago, in “The Sparkle of a Star“, I wrote: “When I last watched [Bewitched], in my late teens or very early twenties, I naturally identified most with Samantha. But on this rewatch, I found myself identifying with her mother, Endora…” But Bewitched isn’t the only show about witches I’ve loved, and Endora not the only no-longer-young woman character I find myself increasingly identifying with as I myself progress into cronehood. Obviously, this isn’t surprising, but I do find it amusing.
I ran into another example of it recently when I decided to revisit Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Witch series. My own period of reading YA fiction was short, and largely confined to when I was 8 to 9; by 10 I was mostly reading light adult fantasy and sci-fi, mixed with some of the juveniles written by more typically adult authors like Robert Heinlein (Red Planet, Podkayne of Mars, etc) or those borrowed from the library by my younger siblings whose covers caught my eye (which is how I discovered one of my favorite books, Magic in the Alley by Mary Calhoun. And by 12 there weren’t many even in that category. So though I was of the right age to read Witch’s Sister when it was published in 1975, it never popped up in the Scholastic Books flyer we got at school, nor did I spot it in the library back then. In fact, I only discovered it in a rather roundabout manner, through my habit of scanning the new TV Guide magazine each week in search of anything I might enjoy (since in the days before home video, that was the only way to discover treasures). One week, in the spring of 1980 IIRC, I noticed a listing in the Saturday morning show Big Blue Marble (which I didn’t watch even before I gave up on Saturday morning fare) for a 6-part TV movie called Witch’s Sister. Naturally the title caught my attention, so I watched it and was immediately hooked; besides being an interesting story, I identified with both 10-year-old Lynn Morley (because I had a hyperactive imagination at her age also) and her 16-year-old sister Judith (because I was Goth before there was such a thing, and like her enjoyed spooking my younger siblings).
It only aired once or twice (I only saw it once) and I despaired of ever seeing it again, but during a short period when I had free premium cable in 1988 it turned up on Showtime as a unified TV movie. I of course taped it, and on a rewatch during my time as a librarian I noticed in the credits that it was based on a book; we had it in the library so I read and enjoyed it and its two sequels, which had been published in 1977 and 1978. Sometime later I transferred the movie to DVD and discovered several more sequels (published in the early ’90s) and bought them on Amazon, but never got around to reading them until recently. The reason was simple: after starting this blog in 2010 I had very little time for pleasure reading, and that only changed a year ago with Grace’s death. So for the past year, I’ve been scanning my shelves for books I own but had not yet read, and a couple of weeks ago realized I had never read those later books in the series. Since it had been over 30 years since I read the first three I started with them, and discovered to my amusement that while I still remembered feeling like Lynn as a tween and Judith as a teen, I now found myself more than a little sympathetic with Mrs. Tuggle, the elderly Englishwoman who was Lynn’s nemesis in the books! Though in the later books she was definitely a wicked witch, in the first (and IMHO the best) of the series that was portrayed with far less certainty (and in the movie which inspired my love for the stories, she was almost certainly not a real witch). So as I read, I started thinking about how I’d feel if a couple of nosy 10-year-old girls started making strange accusations, sneaking into my house to steal my things, and terrorizing my cat. And now I’m a bit wary of watching Bell, Book and Candle again.
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As you can see, Axel and Speck are now friends. I can’t really claim any credit; Speck was the one who made all the overtures and slowly got him used to her presence. I apologize for this being a poorly-composed picture; that lump under the blanket is my leg, so if I’d tried to get up to catch the shot from a different angle, they might’ve moved. Alas, Axel has not stopped being aggressive altogether; a few days ago a stray cat came into the atrium and if I hadn’t called him off it would not have been pretty. But one step at a time; at least he leaves the resident cats alone. He is now down to 50 mg of trazodone per day, in a single dose at bedtime; that’s a lot lower than what he was on when he arrived in late November, but it’s still quite high considering he’s on a typical human dose despite having only about a quarter of a typical human body mass. Even so, I’m going to keep weaning him off of it slowly; since I stopped splitting the dose between afternoon and bedtime I’ve noticed he’s a bit more antsy in the afternoons, so just cutting him off would still be a bad idea. His next reduction will be this coming Sunday, down to 25 mg, so we’ll see how that works out and proceed accordingly.
