tea berry-blue

SO I BOUGHT A BED.

I bought this one:

It was the most expensive, but in the end, I decided that I am going to have a bed for a billionty years, so I should go with the one I really really liked the most. I loved the steampunky-looking headboard as well, but I kind of wanted a real full whole bed with all the bed parts, because I’ve never had one of those. When I was a kid, I had a headboard, followed by a day bed.

I also went to the Pottery Barn store again and talked to a sales rep about the bed. He told me that they used to have it on the floor and he quite liked it, and he actually answered the questions I had that were concerns. Then I was talking to my mom, and she said that she’d seen that bed when she was in the store and it was really nice. Plus, and this is part of the reason I was keen on the Pottery Barn beds, my parents have two PB beds, one in their apartment and one in their house, and they love them. So I was convinced.

I also bought a few small things for my apartment!

This chair, in the color shown:

I like sunny things and this will go great in my living room, with all the crazy colors that are there.

This table, in the color shown:

This is also for the living room, to keep by the sofa for setting things on.

And finally, this rug, in a runner size, for my hall:

I wanted to buy more, but I decided that I need to let my bank account recover before I purchase any more home furnishings.

I’m pretty excited! I’m having samalander come over the weekend after next, and I’ll have at least a bed by the time she comes! I’m hoping to get my chair too because I’m having some people over while she’s here and sitting spots are a good thing to have, because otherwise people will have to be on my floor. Right now, I have between five and seven people definitely attending which may seem small to some of you but it is the most people I have had to my apartment since 2008. The rug and table can wait.

I went to a Tiki Drinks class at Amor Y Amargo last night, and that was pretty excellent! There was a LOT of booze but also excellent food and a very fun group.

justatailor just texted me because she found THIS EVENT tonight. AND NOW WE ARE GOING.

CHICKENS. I GET TO SEE A LECTURE ENTITLED “IN PRAISE OF CHICKENS.” Oh my god, so awesome. I do love them. If you are in New York and free this evening, it is at 6 o’clock in Midtown and FREE. Free to learn about the chickens!

Also, I am really excited, I didn’t even know this place existed before just now. I mean, obviously I did on a certain level, because the New York Flower Show is famous, but I didn’t realize that they had a location or exhibits or anything like that, and those of you who read my blog posts frequently know that this is a topic of great interest to me. I sort of want to become a member. I’m wondering if I should get a family membership ($100) and share it with my parents. That comes with a subscription to an organic gardening magazine which I am sure they would enjoy.

Hmmmmmm.

I think that is all for now! There are some other things I want to tell you all about, but I will save that for another post.

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

The house in Connecticut is still out of power, and ETA puts power coming back on in 7+ days. Most of the traffic lights in our neck of the woods are still out, and while they’ve cleared some of the roads, others are still blocked– mostly by downed trees, moreso than flooding.

My grandparents had to be evacuated in Delaware due to tornado threats in their town. Several homes in my aunt’s apartment complex were destroyed, although hers is intact, thank goodness, and she spent the night in a high school that was serving as a shelter. My grandparents went to my cousins’ house. One of my other cousins lives in a trailer park where she said that her trailer and three next to hers were all right, but everything after that was destroyed by a tornado. I am just so relieved that everyone in my family made it through safely.

At around 2 am Saturday-into-Sunday, I shut down my computer, ready to go to bed, and the power blinked out. I laughed, certain that my timing had just been impeccable– but two minutes later, the power came back on.

So I started turning off lights, when I heard the most tremendous noise coming from outside. The wind was loud, but it wasn’t the wind. It was the chickens. Crying. Now the chickens were as safe as they could be, in a storm pen inside the stable, with things to climb on if the stable flooded (unlikely, since it’s at the highest point on the property). But they were crying so loudly and so mournfully, it was like nothing I’d ever heard. Screaming chickens. For a second, I considered going outside to see if they were all right– I feared the worst, a problem with the stable or a wild animal that found its way in. But common sense told me that going outside in the height of a hurricane to check on chickens was not the wisest choice I could make, so I went to bed (in the basement, as my bedroom is just beneath two massive old sugar maples).

I woke up at 12:24 pm to discover no power and the storm more or less dissipated– it was still rainy and windy, but there were patches of sun, and it was perfectly reasonable to go outside. We made some scrambled eggs on the grill, ate some blueberry pie that my mother had made the day before, and made a lot of headway on de-cluttering the room that is eventually going to be our bar, let the chickens out, and hunted down the cat, who was hiding in a ball in the loft in my bedroom (my bedroom used to be a hayloft). It was probably the point closest in the whole house to the wind, so possibly not the most intuitive choice for hiding, but whatever she wants to do, you know.

The chickens, by the way, were totally fine, if their feathers were a bit ruffled (literally).

We went to the neighbors’ house, and helped get things ready for their daughter’s wedding next weekend, and had some quick dinnery things along with copious amounts of delicious homemade wine, and used their generator to re-charge our phones and check the mass transit situation. The train line I usually take home had downed trees on it, so it was pretty apparent I was not going to get to work today, even if the roads got cleared (most of the roads out of our neighborhood were blocked by trees). We munched on some quickly-melting gelato, and went home. I called Brendan, who had already come to this conclusion on his own, and told me that out neighborhood here was totally fine– we live about three blocks apart from each other on top of a hill, so it seemed pretty good.

When we got home, though, we discovered that the chickens’ coop had been blown shut by the wind, while they were all outside doing chickeny chicken things (all but one), and they were all huddling in a pile on top of the coop all shivering and cold and awwwww poor chickens. My mama picked them up one by one and put them in their nice warm coop, and they cuddled against her for warmth.

By then, it was getting too dark to see, so out came the battery-operated lanterns.

I read for about two hours until my lanterns all started to fade, and then went to bed at around eleven, and woke up at nine this morning– to a distinct lack of any power.

So my mother and I cleaned out the fridge– but left the freezers shut tight, in the hopes that maybe the power would come back on before the food defrosted completely. And then we made up this delicious lunch:

That is some delicious gnocchi with brown butter and crispy fried sages, and some yummy wienerschnizel. I am quite pleased with the fact that this is what we managed to cook on our outdoor grill (since the stove in the house is electric).

We did some other cleanup chores, then chased the chickens around to get them back in their coop– they hate going in in the middle of a beautiful day! And left to get home.

Well, getting home was a pain in the butt, since there were still a lot of roads on our usual route that were blocked by down trees, and still a lot of traffic lights out in the area. A trip that usually takes an hour took three hours, but after three hours, I was home safe in my apartment that still has power, nothing damaged, and I was able to turn on my air conditioning, and, realizing that I was probably about the filthiest I would be for a month, scrubbed the heck out of my bathtub, which was looking for a cleaning, before taking a Daenerys-Targaryen-hot shower, and scrubbed and descaled and shaved and did a nice face mask and all sorts of lovely things. And then I put on a dress! A dress, after breaking my I Don’t Wear Pants rule twice over the weekend (this is a rule I have, in which I only wear pants when I absolutely must, for things like beekeeping), and it was lovely and wonderful and I felt very grateful that all was well.

My parents are still out of power, and we found out only after we left that it may be a week till the house gets power back, and I don’t know if there’s an ETA for the apartment (also out!). I feel really badly for them; I’m not sure if they can get water without a pump since they’re on the second floor. I told my mother she could come back over here, but she declined.

So I went out to Whiskey Monday, saw some new friends, met some new-new friends, had some lovely drinks, and now I am home and so sleepy in a luscious, languorous way that is the result of hard work that makes it very satisfying.

I hope that all of you are safe and cozy and the things and people you love are intact! And that your chickens did not cry too hard.

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

…waiting to go home from Delaware. The train is about ten minutes late, and the GPS overestimated the length of our trip by about 30 minutes, so all in all I have had about an hour in the station. They just announced the train delay, so I though I’d take a few moments to update, because, wonder of wonders, the Wilmington train station has free wireless for its passengers. Excellent, I say!

Had a lovely weekend with my family. Grandparents are doing well, and I got to see my cousin Jeremy for the first time in about twenty years. He has five kids now! One daughter from his first marriage, three stepchildren, and a new baby! His kids are all adorable and precocious and amazing and they were so much fun. We went to my cousin Shannon’s wedding reception (she got married in the Carribean somewhere, I forget where), and had a delicious cake which is the official state cake of Maryland, that I’d never had before. It was one of the best wedding cakes I’d ever had (traditionally, it’s chocolate, but Shannon had it in strawberry, orange, and banana. I tried strawberry and orange as bananas are my mortal enemy.)

Some sad news, though! Chick Luisi, aka Salty Bob (according to Jess) died this weekend. My dad got up to the house and found her with her neck broken in the hen yard.

At first he didn’t tell us her neck was broken and I felt terrible and horribly guilty that we didn’t do enough to prevent heat stroke, or that maybe the chickens had gotten sick and would all die.

But then he told us about her neck, and while I am still sad that we lost a chick, it sounds like it was the work of one of the bigger chickens, which, I hear happens from time to time. We suspect Chick Luisi was not really a hen but a rooster (she was showing signs of not being female) and this is not uncommon. My dad is still sort of freaking out and thinks a wild animal got into the henyard, so he took a giant Santa Claus that my parents use as Christmas decoration and set it up outside because he is convinced that will scare away the wild animals. My mother is convinced it will just weather damage Santa.

Anyway, very sad to lose a chick. :-( Here is the last picture I took of her last weekend.

Time to pack up for the train! Love you all! <3 <3 More later!

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

Oh my goodness, so the most exciting thing this week!

First off, chickie update! Look at how big! They are this big!

Secondly, and this is, admittedly, not the biggest surprise, but still terribly exciting and magical and wonderful every time it happens, WE HAVE EGGS.

That egg? That egg is ten minutes old. Ten minutes! This is the freshest egg I have ever had in my whole life!

By the end of today, we had nine eggs over the course of seven days, so it looks like both of our big hens are laying.

We had eggs on Saturday morning:

And then this morning, a little after I got up, my dad came down from the hen house with the egg in the picture above. One perfect brown egg! So we cooked it right away and ate it right away and it was pretty much incredible. We split it in three, so I had a third of an egg, and I didn’t eat another thing until two pm because it was so awesome.

EGGS. EGGS EVERY DAY. SO EXCITED.

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

Please come round, something is lost that cannot be found. If you find it, please bring it to me, and I’ll be happy as can be.

Dear St. Anthony, please come round, something is lost that cannot be found. If you find it, please bring it to me, and I’ll be happy as can be.

I’m pretty much a lapsed Catholic at this point, and like my relationship with Judaism, I’m only there for the food. But there are two times I pray.

1) I sing (under my breath, because out loud would be rude) the Ave Maria every time a plane takes off. It’s kind of my favorite prayer (sung), and it’s a nice meditative thing, and I’ve had slight PTSD about plane rides since 9/11.

2) The St. Anthony Prayer! Why? BECAUSE IT FUCKING WORKS. Case in point:

So, I went out with justatailor and her friends. More about that coming up! The doorman at D&Co actually carded us. Now, I normally use my passport for all ID-related things. On account of, you know, not driving. I always keep it in my purse. But I couldn’t find it.

So, I had a slight panic moment but managed to recover and have a lovely evening, reminding myself that I had recently taken a bunch of crap out of my purse, and probably inadvertently removed the passport. I did notice that I had misplaced my work ID as well, but since I needed to use that to get into my office after gorging at Bomboloni for lunch, I am pretty sure I just left it on my desk.

I got home and looked around. Note, I will say it now, the first place I checked was in my backpack that I use to lug my laptop around. I put away a whole bunch of shit that was in piles around my apartment. No luck.

No luck. I called my mom. She looked around on the coffee table where I usually leave my purse at the barn. No luck.

So I walked over to the grocery store and the little Chinese take out place I’ve been eating at since my stove broke (it’s fixed, by the way!) No luck. On the way home, I started chanting the St. Anthony Prayer.

Dear St. Anthony, please come round, something is lost that cannot be found. If you find it, please bring it to me, and I’ll be happy as can be.

Dear St. Anthony, please come round, something is lost that cannot be found. If you find it, please bring it to me, and I’ll be happy as can be.

Dear St. Anthony, please come round, something is lost that cannot be found. If you find it, please bring it to me, and I’ll be happy as can be.

I walked in the door. I looked around a bit more. I reached inside my backpack one. more. time.

And pulled out my passport.

HELL YES, ST. ANTHONY.

So, yeah, things about today!

1) OUR CHICKENS LAID FOUR EGGS SINCE SUNDAY. EEE. We have eggs! They are beautiful and brown and I can’t wait for the weekend when I will get to eat their eggs for the first time! Oh my goodness.

2) Like I said, epic awesome drinks and food with justatailor and crew. I have never been in the presence of so many gin-swilling ladies before, and that was excellent. Plus, all very friendly and open to sharing food and drinks which is the best kind of pepple to go out with. Between the five of us, I got to have some pulled pork slider, a fried crab thing, lobster rolls, and pork belly with polenta that was to die for. And some mighty delicious drinks.

So, good day, slight panic about the passport RESOLVED. I win today, thank you, St. Anthony!

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

So, last week, when I left off, we had left the chicks happily in their new coop. A coop! All for them. My parents had a very busy week, so we didn’t get up here to check on them, and I have to admit I was a little terrified we might open the coop and find six little dead chickie-babies, and I would have been mortified beyond all knowing!

But this was not the case! We opened the coop to THIS!

SO BIG. Look how big! They are seriously more chickeny than chickie now, which is kind of exciting, even though they have a good four months before they’re full grown. CHICKIES.

Now, our chickies have been out of doors very little. Most of their experience with the outside has been in a large plastic tub with a screen over the top, because they have been very tiny and our cat has been very transparent in her plot to attempt to eat them. But now they have a fenced-in coop, surrounded by sturdy chicken wire that is actually being used for its LITERAL purpose! So, for the first time, we opened the door into the henyard to let them out into the world!

The chicks were very suspicious and/or skeptical of this new freedom, and they hovered cautiously at the door to the henhouse for a while. A long while. Long enough that I took a shower and got dressed and came downstairs and they still hadn’t come out.

Two of the chicks, the little redheaded one who is my chickeny avatar because her hair is the same color as mine (we don’t know that they are ladies yet, but we are using female pronouns to encourage them in that direction since ladies can lay eggs and roosters just break zoning laws), and a brown speckled one which the second graders named “Chick Louisey” seemed to be the most likely candidates for “first out of the henhouse.”

In the end, it was Chick Louisey who came out first!

The little redheaded hen came out pretty quickly after, once she knew it was safe. THEY ARE LIKE PENGUINS!

Here’s just what I thought was an exceptionally adorable picture of Chick Louisey sunning herself on the, er, gangplank. Is there a chickeny name for it? I don’t know! Little Redheaded Chick hopped right off and went to work pecking the dirt as chickens are wont to do, but Chick Louisey seemed mostly content to sit where she was. One step out was quite enough, thank you!

Ever since we got the chicks, my dad has been talking about how much he really wanted Rhode Island Reds, which our chicks are not, so, for Father’s Day, my mother and I went to one of the farms up the road and came back with…

Four birds! Two pullets (young hens who have not started laying yet) and two year-old layers! The older hens are Not Amused by the little chickies antics, but I suspect they’ll survive. I do keep expecting one of them to should “GET OFF MY LAWN!”

That is all! Hooray for chickens!

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.