Day 6: Drooling
Chickens don’t actually drool, I don’t think. They drink by gravity assist, though, which is potentially messy.
They sneeze. In fact, they’re prone to diseases of sneezing.
The experts will tell you they do not fart, on account of their digestive systems don’t work like that. I’m here to tell you that the experts are wrong.
A Saturday post? That’s unpossible!
October 6, 2018 — 8:07 pm
Comments: 6
Day 5: Chicken
Seriously. Day 5 is chicken.
I don’t even.
Have a good weekend, everyone!
October 5, 2018 — 7:00 pm
Comments: 7
It’s Inktober!
Inktober has snuck up on me once again — here’s your annual chance to watch me fail quickly and in realtime! I think I made it three days last year.
I don’t take directions well.
The prompt for Day 1 is “poisonous”. It’s a cinch I can’t use the official prompt list if I want to stick to a chicken theme throughout, though. For example, the prompt for Day 12 is “whale”.
I await your preposterous suggestions.
October 1, 2018 — 9:06 pm
Comments: 21
…and finally…
We were out late tonight, so I shall fob you off with one last picture of our inglenook: the old bread oven.
It’s in the upper right corner of the inglenook. One of these days, I’ll have to put a camera on a pole and get some proper pics of the interior. You can’t quite make it out, but it’s a sort of beehive shape on the inside.
The way it worked, you’d shovel hot coals in to warm it up, then brush them to the sides and put your loaves in middle and shut the door until they baked. I see no evidence of hinges, so the door was probably just a wooden shutter sort of thing.
Note the bottom right bricks have crumbled away, we suspect where the wooden paddle (called a peel) was inserted to move the loaves.
Thus ends a week of sperging about my inglenook. Good weekend, all!
September 28, 2018 — 9:33 pm
Comments: 12
Well, that’s sinister
Remember this attempted extortion email I got in February? No reason why you should, but I thought it was pretty funny at the time. And I’ve gotten six or eight of them since, all in varying degrees of hilarious Google Translate English.
In fact, I’ve started to get them in other languages now, and I’ve had to use Google Translate to work out what they are. Which is pretty meta, come to think of it.
Anyway, the basic premise is that the sender has installed a virus on your computer, used your camera to film you getting it on with a porn site (with a split screen, so you can see the porn, too!) and will send the video to everyone in your contact list if you don’t give them $300 in bitcoin.
This one (see above) is a little different. The English is better (though you can see in the first paragraph that they don’t know how to drive the spam software — they’ve left in two variants of the opening statement), they’re asking for $1,000…and that thing under the black box is my real password.
Well, a real password. It’s the one I use for sites where it doesn’t matter. I’ve used it for years and years on things like technical help forums and the like. No doubt, it was a breach at one of them that caused this leak. Though I thought passwords were stored encrypted. So…leaky browser? I don’t know. Whatever.
Gives you a jolt, though. I can’t imagine how much of a jolt it would be if I’d ever, you know, actually visited a porn site.
September 27, 2018 — 8:48 pm
Comments: 8
Well, that was quick
I promised a picture of the inglenook with the fire lit. I didn’t think it would be so soon. It is cold here. (Pics still don’t really do it justice, but here’s a bigger one in color).
This is the view from where I’m sitting right now, at my computer. I lean over a little, and there it is.
I was playing Skyrim one night when I looked up and realized my house in real life is as cool as my house in Whiterun. Word.
A wiseass might ask what the point of the computer game is then, but that’s a dumb question. England doesn’t legally allow me to shoot people and steal their stuff, duh.
September 25, 2018 — 8:04 pm
Comments: 10
I peench you!
ExpressoBold asked for a better picture of the inglenook. Really, black and white doesn’t do it justice, and it will never look right without a roaring fire. But here’s a cheap ‘n’ nasty cellphone pic that at least better shows the array of torture implements that came with.
Most of these were here when we bought the house. They are a bewildering variety of shapes and unknown functions. After a decade living with them, though, I think they all come down to poking things, pulling things or pinching things.
Plus the bellows. I bought the bellows.
Better pic when the cold weather comes. Which is looking like Monday, FYI.
September 20, 2018 — 9:20 pm
Comments: 12
Turn, turn, turn
The chimney sweep, part of the regular end-of-Summer ritual. Completely necessary, as we depend on fire for most of our heat.
And this year, we had the added joy of an inglenook dripping honey. We have bees in the attic — we’ve had bees in the attic for years and years — but this year they gave us a gift. A gooey, black, soot-coated sticky, pooling gift. We had to ask the sweep if there was anything especially flammable about it (there’s not).
Our guy is modern and up to date. We get a text message when it’s time to get swept. Sadly, though, he doesn’t look a bit like Dick van Dyke.
Let the evening fires commence!
September 18, 2018 — 6:22 pm
Comments: 16
What’s one o’ them?
We followed this very interesting car along a country lane for miles and miles and never caught up. Which makes sense: Uncle B thinks it might have been an early one of these.
I really just wanted to post this because it looks like a scene out of The Avengers.
Big fan when I was a kid. Sadly, I’d look pretty shit in a leather cat suit.
September 17, 2018 — 8:15 pm
Comments: 13
This is what happens when I shut up for a week…
Last week, I declared an Open Thread for a whole week so I could deal with life stuff, and DurnedYankee and BJM very kindly wrote me a short story. I couldn’t read it on my shitty monitor with the tiny type, so I poured it through a desktop publishing program. Here it is as a pdf for your downloading pleasure: thekeyroom.
I think I got the formatting more or less okay, but I literally STILL haven’t read it, and it’s entirely possible I doubled up or left a chunk out or something. Copy-paste editing of a comment thread am hard. Do let me know if you spot any errors and I’ll fix ’em.
I’m going to send it to my Kindle now and go read it in my fancy new librrrreee.
You know you can do that, right? Every Kindle device has its own email address. Send stuff to that email address, and if the Kindle recognizes the format, it’ll appear in your reading list. Go to your Amazon account >> Manage My Content and Devices >> Devices. That’ll show you a list of your registered devices. Click on the … next to a Kindle, and it will tell you its email address (among other things).
Holy shit, I have sixteen Amazon-registered devices! I think I have a problem…
September 12, 2018 — 7:04 pm
Comments: 11