I’m back! Did I miss anything?
My how time flies, etcetera. We hadn’t made any definite plans, and Britain threw us one of its surprisingly mild February weeks, so we mostly hung around home and did boring old people things in the yard last week.
Garden. Must learn to say “garden” instead of “yard.” Brits only use “yard” in the gritty industrial context of junk yards and brick yards and prison yards. A “back yard” to them would probably feature razor wire and abused German shepherds.
Alsatians. They call them alsatians.
Anyhow, we mostly stayed away from the innernuts, in an effort to break the cycle of…seeing everything as a cycle of something that needs breaking. So I’m just now working down the emails and congratulatory messages.
A sincere thank you to everyone who wished us well. We don’t get many drama queen moments in our little lives, and we roll around in them like…alsatians in pigshit.
And now — back to some serious blogging.
Psych! I don’t do serious blogging!
February 23, 2009 — 7:15 pm
Comments: 41
Happy omen
Until recently, the CoE would only consent to marry couples in their local church (or one of their local churches, if the two were from different parishes). So most of the people who lived in Badger House over the last four hundred years would certainly have been married in the ancient church around the corner. That’s why we were so dead-set on doing the same, despite — to put it mildly — not being church-going mustelids.
But services are held in a nearby parish in Winter, on account of our church has no electricity and the lane leading to it is muddy and impassible much of the time. We took a real risk picking February. The 14th was the earliest the vicar would consent to open the building (heh. And you thought one of us was an incurable romantic).
February in England is…iffy. It can be startling warm and sunny. It can be an absolute asshole. Predictions can change by the hour. I’ve been holding my breath for months.
This Saturday was…improbably gorgeous. Sunny, warm, high puffy clouds. Okay, yes, we had to walk to the church from the main road and our vows whuffed out in little puffs of holy vapor, but I got feeling back in my toes again after a couple of drinks and an hour or so in front of the fire.
Everything, from beginning to end, was…absolutely perfect.
Well, holy shit.
I’m taking a week off blogging. I gather I’m supposed to moon people or something. I think there’s honey involved. Thanks so much for the happy thoughts, everyone — y’all have been too kind. And all your good wishes came true, so you can start thinking about lottery numbers next, ‘k?
Oh, the picture? That, my friends, is weasel shit. Stoat plop, to be more precise. You can tell because it’s tiny and it’s wearing an ickle fur coat, courtesy of the more indigestible bits of its victims. The day was so lovely Saturday morning, I decided to walk into town for my hair ‘n’ stuff, and found this token of esteem lying right in my path.
So my family made it after all.
February 16, 2009 — 8:23 pm
Comments: 54
Friday the 13th holds no terrors for Weasel
Now, Saturday the 14th — that’s a different story!
Kindly sacrifice a chicken for me in the morning, my minions.
February 13, 2009 — 9:00 pm
Comments: 59
The fool on the hill
I got nothin’ today, so here’s a snapshot I snagged last week when we went for a nice long drive. I’ve been meaning to post it. That dark thing is the windmill on Hogs Hill near Winchelsea, which was renovated by and is currently the recording studio of Paul McCartney.
Once in a while, McCartney wanders into a pub for a beer. Afterwards, the locals are all, like, “guess who was in for a pint last week?”
“I don’t know, who?”
“Paul McCartney.”
“Oh, aye?”
And then everybody tries to act all casual about it.
It’s really cute.
February 12, 2009 — 8:24 pm
Comments: 41
She sees…dead people?
I must tell you — although I am as psychic as a potato — Badger House doesn’t feel the least little bit haunted to me. Despite its old bones (between 399 and 421 years old, depending on whether you believe our earliest property tax bill or the plaque on the front), it feels nothing but warm and happy. This place has been added to, taken from, patched up, mutilated, renovated and redecorated so many times, all the ghosteses must have packed their bindles and hit Ye Roadde centuries ago.
But Charlotte here is kind of freaking us out.
She’s a spooky girl. She was a feral kitten and she’s been a one-weasel cat ever since, but she did pretty okay the first few days. She explored the house, she cautiously interacted with Uncle B. She was acclimating faster than I expected.
Then she stopped coming downstairs one day. She’d hide in the closet with the water heater if I left it open. I had to move her food up. She slept twenty hours a day, only came down when I carried her and scooted back up the moment I let go. It was a cold week; I put it down to that.
Then she gradually calmed down. She began coming downstairs for a few minutes on her own. Accepting skritchies from Uncle B. She’ll still startle at the least noise, but after weeks and weeks she’s getting back where she was on day three.
But for one thing: she’s fixated on a particular spot on the wall. She’ll be grooming or snoozing or playing with string, and suddenly she’ll jump like she hears something and stare at That Place (this lucky shot catches her the very moment she stopped chewing toe and started the creepy stare). No doubt about it: she’s watching something.
The spot is in the short hall between the livingroom (with the fire) and the dining room (where Granny Weasel is hung). There is a small window. There’s nothing else there. Now.
But all the old geezers in the neighborhood tell us that’s where the front door was for hundreds of years, until the major renovation of 1970-something.
wwwwoooooOOOO0000OOOoooooo!
February 11, 2009 — 8:42 pm
Comments: 26
D’oh!
Welcome to the twenty-four-hour news cycle, President Lucky Magic Sparkly Pony.
Meanwhile, back in Snootyland, Uncle B spotted this headline in today’s online Daily Telegraph. No, it’s not deliberate. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from a lifetime of arguing on the Internet, it is this: if you’re going to indulge in a spelling flame, proofread VERY carefully.
So today, I had my hair done. God, there’s a thing. I’ve had my hair cut before, but I do believe this is the first time I’ve ever had it done. At a spa, no less. It involved candles and plaster Buddhas and massaging things with smelly oils and pinning things with hairpins. Jesus, the hairpins. Oh, it was awful.
It rained and windeded like a bastard all day today. I got home from my do to find flood waters lapping around the front door and just starting to seep into the entryway. The house is considerably lower than the yard, presumably because it’s so old the soil around it has gradually built up, so serious flooding is a constant danger.
I had to slip into my Wellington boots and bail out the doorstep in a howling gale. Five minutes to undo everything the most complex and sophisticated hairpins can accomplish.
That’ll teach me.
February 9, 2009 — 7:35 pm
Comments: 33
Dance? I’d shimmy like a spaz in a revival tent!
Mesablue kindly dropped me this BBC video link, showing a stoat doing the charming Weasel Dance. They don’t dance on account of snow, though. YouTube turns up other examples, and I have seen two different captive stoats do the dance.
The usual romantic explanation for the dance is that it is intended to mesmerize prey. Stoat dances, rabbit goes what the fuck?, stoat bites his neck until he goes dead.
Or it could be the worms up their noses. Skrjabingylus nasicola. Lives in the gut of a snail. Mouse eats snail, weasel eats mouse and the worm — by a process that doesn’t bear thinking of — works its way up into the sinuses of the weasel. Up to 100% of the weasels in some areas are afflicted with Skrjabingylus. Eats holes in their little skulls, no lie (though I think the skulls in the picture are skunk).
Yeah. I’d dance.
Personally, though, I think they dance from the wild exuberance of being a stoat.
February 6, 2009 — 8:41 pm
Comments: 30
Other brands that will never, ever make it in the States
retarDEX.
The one on the left is a mouthwash and the one on the right is a toothpaste. Clinically proven to eliminate bad breath and make weasels spray milk out their little pink noses.
I am so TOTALLY adopting this as my insult-de-jour. You know, like when I catch Uncle B jigging around the bedroom with his underpants on his head, I’ll be like “dude! DUUUUDE! Did you brush with RETARDEX this morning?!”
As opposed to RETARDex, which is clinically proven to eliminate retards.
Sorry for the fuzziness of this. I have to employ great stealth. Lord Sainsbury doesn’t like weasels taking pictures of his retarDEX.
Happy Friday!
January 30, 2009 — 8:15 pm
Comments: 24
Good to go
Our shit farm had its first annual service this morning. Some of my more faithful, losery readers may remember from last year that putting in a new septic system was a condition of sale for Badger House.
Not just a regular old septic tank — oh, no. The hippies who run Britain decree’d we must have a state-of-the-art chrome-plated shit processing factory. It has a pump and a computer and it goes shusss-shusss-shusss- softly while I sit in the garden trying to contemplate the beauty of creation and not so much the poops running along tiny conveyor belts under my feet.
It’s a high-strung, finicky filly, this thing, and it needs regular looking after. Two of the nicest shit-techs you could ever meet turned up this morning and saw to ours. This they did without gloves, cheerfully rescuing newts from the pipes with their bare hands and tossing them onto the grass.
Uncle B, who is inclined a bit toward the Howard Hughsian, had to wash his hands every time he saw them touch the machinery. That was worth the price of admission right there.
What? You didn’t think I could post about something other than myself two days running, did you?
January 29, 2009 — 8:54 pm
Comments: 43
It’s on!
Sarah Palin launched her PAC this week. Whether she’ll really run in 2012, I don’t know, but I think it would be swell if Sarah’s new PAC grievously outraised McCain’s new PAC. Don’t you?
Oh, and for those who think I support Sarah Palin because she’s an ordinary girl just like me, may I say a couple of words?
Fuck you.
If the word “ordinary” stings you like the lash, you’ve got issues. I knew kids like you in art school who made up these awful broken homes because their happy, stable middle class real families seemed too darned ordinary to produce sooper geniuses.
That’s right, Normo McBoringloser — I’m rubber and you’re glue.
Anyhow, business-runnin’, moose-huntin’, rootin’ tootin’ Mayor-Governor-Moms like Sarah are hardly ordinary. Sure, her accent says, “golly, this sure is some tasty Frito pie” but her resumé says, “get out of my way or I’ll kick your fat balls up around your eye sockets, Sonny.”
Here’s the deal: I think I recognize Sarah Palin. I think I’ve run across her kind before. If I’m right, she’s the sort of person who can take on a big, tangled mess and make it right, by way of a sort of native perceptiveness, grim determination and ginding, relentless, inexhaustible good cheer.
Am I right about that? I don’t know.
Are those qualities even good to have in high office? I don’t know that, either. I’m not positive I’ve ever seen it in government before. But it’s bound to be an improvement over the string of useless weirdos we have been running, isn’t it?
Click to enlargen and behue. Sizing help available on request.
January 28, 2009 — 8:26 pm
Comments: 56