Friendly neighborhood runnybabbit assassins
Last post I’ll milk out of Uncle B’s day at the village fête. He was most taken with these dudes from the itinerate ferret rescue.
Please not to be laughing, these are serious working weasels. They earn their keep a-rabbitin’. They’re going to come out to Badger House and give Uncle B a hand with his little bunny problem (yes, sadly, Uncle B has little bunnies. But on a happier note, he also has great tits).
The theory is, you put nets across the rabbit holes and send a ferret down one of them, then when bunnies pop out you sack ’em up and…do something unspeakable.
In practice, an inexperienced ferret will occasionally eat a bunny on the spot, curl up in a stinky ball underground and sleep it off. But, in this case, the purpose of the bunnies is to feed the ferrets, so no harm.
They sell bunny in supermarkets there, by the way. And pheasant and other game. There’s a sign on the case warning about the possibility of lead shot in their little bodies. This somewhat harshes my belief that meat is grown in vast tanks in clean modern laboratories.
I’ll end up a vegetarian some day. You watch.
June 12, 2008 — 2:52 pm
Comments: 78
New neighbor
Uncle B just sent me a bunch of pictures he took this morning of this little dude and friends. The field behind the house is full of new lambs and the ewes seem confident B can’t get over the stream, so they let the babies get quite close. Well, he had to use a long lens, but still…laa-bams in the back yard!
I swear I did not Photoshop that gleam in his eye or the smile on his face.
April 8, 2008 — 6:11 pm
Comments: 61
It’s snowing at Badger House today
The lambing has started so the fields behind are sprinkled with laa-bams curled up against their mothers in the snow. Uncle B has a roaring coal fire going in the grate. And here’s me, rolling paint across the crusty nicotine-stained walls of Weasel Towers.
Feh.
Good thing I drink.
April 6, 2008 — 1:11 pm
Comments: 20
Things which disappoint
I struggled to pull a post out of my ass today, but I am in vile humor. Then Uncle B came to the rescue and dug up the perfect metaphor.
Literally. He was planting the hedges, and he excavated this small, heavy, useless chunk of metal. Yes, minions, I’m afraid this thing is what’s left of our machine gun. Can’t think what else it can be.
Perfetto!
Oh, and you know what? You’re not getting a pony for Christmas, either. Or a go-kart.
If you want my thoughts on McCain, go read Ace. Added: by which I mean, he wrote an essay that perfectly encapsulates what I’m thinking, not that I had any brilliant comments in that thread. Sometimes, you forget he’s not just another moron.
February 6, 2008 — 6:19 pm
Comments: 21
Timberrrrrrrrr!
Last step, while there’s an opening for machinery: hacking away the hedge that separates Badger House from the miles of sheep behind. I sort of liked the Secret Garden look it had surrounded on all four sides by high green walls, but the hedge at the back wasn’t appropriate (Leyland Cypress, a North American transplant) and the view is spectacular.
Wind seldom blows from that quarter, but it’s exceptionally bitter when it does. We’ll have to see what sort of windbreak we can get away with.
And so ends Shit Week on a bucolic note.
January 25, 2008 — 7:27 pm
Comments: 19
The Shit Computer
This thing is a…poo…analyzing…device of some kind. Shit Week continues on sweasel.com. I didn’t start the week with the idea of abdicating the blog to Uncle B and his master plan of septic dominance. But, as it happens, his life was full of exciting shit-related construction, and mine was just…shit.
Yes, the Weasel Acres Project is experiencing mission creep, as my real estate person took a look at the newly uncovered hardwood floors and declared, “yes, you’re right…they look like shit. Shall we get an estimate on having them refinished?” Oh, yes let’s. In this, the worst real estate market since the woolly mammoth quit the Great Plains for the happy hunting ground, I want to spend a bit more money making my pathetic property holding look merely awful.
Eh. Shit computer. Take it away, B!
January 24, 2008 — 8:43 pm
Comments: 26
Give the people what they want
Tractor porn, apparently.
See, yeah, I knew there was a lot of free-floating testosterone wafting around this blog. I just didn’t know so much of it belonged to the guys.
January 23, 2008 — 7:37 pm
Comments: 12
What happens when you let sheep supervise your construction operations
He wasn’t supposed to dump our load there. He’s stuck. Blocking the main coast road.
January 22, 2008 — 7:51 pm
Comments: 34
Bring on the wolverines!
January 21, 2008 — 8:18 pm
Comments: 24
Go on, pull the other one…
The last of the Christmas crackers. It’s a sort of Christmas-themed party favor popular among the Brittanians. They come apart with a bang (the crackers, not the limies), and each one contains a toy, a paper crown and a very bad joke. The quality of them is highly variable, depending on price — except the joke, which is always and famously bad.
I think you’re supposed to get one beside your plate at Christmas dinner. But as it’s just us, we tend to pull crackers on all the evenings leading up to Christmas…and sometimes the week leading up to New Year’s Eve, too — depending on how over-zealously Uncle B has supplied us with crackers for the year. Many are the photographs of Our Majesties drunkenly sporting paper crowns at improbable angles. Very regal.
Pretty good crackers this year.
Anyhoo, the last cracker has been pulled, and Ol’ Stoaty is headed back Stateside. I mean, right now. My plane leaves noonish, Central Badger Time and arrives at the final destination nineish, Central Weasel Time. Which, taking into account transportation to and from airports and timezones and all that jazz, means Monday is a 24-hour day of travel. And Tuesday morning, I go in to work.
Still, after all those goopy posts about champagne and misteltoe and chestnuts roasting on an open fire, please enjoy the astringent, palate-cleansing tang of abject misery.
¡Mañana, minions!
January 7, 2008 — 9:04 am
Comments: 41