I just got trolled - in a PARKING LOT.

But first, I will regale you with the absurd suckiness of my day.

I woke up from an awesome dream because Nikki was yelling for the horses to come up for breakfast. No, those horses don't get fed in the morning. They just want to trick you into feeding them. November noticed that I was awake and started yowling at me and digging the covers away. (She can never do this and make me think that she won't scratch my neck out, so I got up and fed her, including her hyperthyroid pill.)

My boss mentioned that she hired me to do yardwork and I always do stalls, at work, and it made me think that if I didn't do yardwork I'd lose my job. (I don't know if she was trying to imply that I would lose my job if I did stalls, but I wanted to be on the safe side; also I'm paranoid.) So I got out into the 80 - 90 degree heat in shorts and yoga shirt to play with the blackberries and the pruning shears in an attempt to free up the tree in the back corner of what they call the "next-door pasture." I got scratched. A lot. My arms and legs itch. I also caught myself on the earlobe with a thorn, and didn't realize until I was at Fred Meyer (half an hour ago) that the thorn was still in my left ear. I could only stay out in the sun for about an hour before heading inside, and received the silent treatment from my coworker (which honestly was kind of a relief -- I'm really not a morning person and she kind of is, in the sense that she makes a lot of noise to wake herself up in the morning, and the fastest way to piss me off in the morning is to make a lot of noise).

I got back from work and my roommates' dog Lucky had totally trashed my room. The garbage was knocked over and scattered everywhere, as was my chick feed and the dry kitten food (which November can't eat anyway). Lucky also ate all of November's wet food (thankfully the bowl didn't break when he knocked it off the table), and I have no idea whether or not she actually got her pill this morning: rather than force the pill down her throat and past a blackened, rotting, exposed canine nerve, I put her halved pill on her food and she just eats it that way. This was also the second-to-last can of food, and would have lasted the entire day. I ended up having to go out and get cat food today instead. (Also butter, which my roommates forgot to get while they were out.)

So I had to go out to Fred Meyer, and as I was trying to park, I was already obviously committed to that particular spot when a motorcycle zoomed into the spot. I nearly hit him/her, it was so close. I backed out and moved to another. This happened three times.

Once in the store, I had everything I needed (3 cans for $0.89, heck yes!) and was in line to check out. I was about to put my stuff on the belt when they closed the lane. Oh well, these things happen. I moved to another lane. I was behind a woman with a huge cart full of groceries and a half-empty belt who for some inconceivable reason had elected to delay putting her items on the belt to be scanned. Again, I was just about to put my stuff on the belt when another lane opened. This is when I found the thorn stuck in my ear.

Of course it was the one that had closed. There were three guys behind me, each of whom had a single camping chair to buy. The first guy got ahead of me when the clerk came to tell us the lane was open, and the second two were apparently not to be out-walked by a girl... even though they ended up behind me in line in the new lane. So, trying and failing to be subtle, they just walked around me. One of them tripped over me and I was so frustrated that I didn't care, even though he hit his nose on his chair and got a bloody nose (it wasn't broken). They looked back at me as if they hadn't noticed I was there and said, "Oh, sorry, did we cut in front of you?" Of course I told them that yes, yes they did cut right in front of me, all three of them. They definitely didn't care, and didn't move.

I finally got everything paid for and was headed back out to the car (my boyfriend loaned me his while he's gone -- he gets back tonight, yay!). However, during my attempt to pull out of the parking spot, I was stopped by an asshole. Of course. I was so far out of the parking spot that I may have been able to make the turn and just go forward, but when that pickup came right up behind me and leaned on his horn for three or four good solid seconds, I didn't want to risk my boyfriend's car and just pulled back into the parking spot because the truck was so close that I literally couldn't go backward any further. So I pull forward and repark, basically. The truck squeals off in what I'm sure was a monumental waste of gas and I start to back out again... and another truck is doing the same thing. This only happened two more times -- eventually the car parked across from me pulled out and I played the pull-through-spot game, in what was definitely a monumental waste of gas, but which allowed me to escape unscathed from the three mysterious trucks that were, literally, circling around the parking lot and taking advantage of pull-throughs to circle around and honk at me. Or something. That was the effect, anyway.

On my way home, what feels like an eternity later, I was stuck behind a BMW Z-3 which was going way too slow. He was doing 35 mph.

That road is 50 mph. People usually do about 60 mph.

ARGH

I'm going to go give the car a very vigorous bath, take a quick shower, and get my boyfriend from the airport. How did I not realize I had a thorn in my ear all day?

Who's a special expensive kitty?

Apparently, November is.

I took her to the vet yesterday ($29 for a check-up? Is that normal?) and her new age estimate is 12 to 13 years old. I was pretty surprised. She's so small in bone structure that I didn't think she was full-grown. Her other fun bits include:

-exposed, blackened nerve in that chipped canine (tooth will have to come out, surgically)

-kitty plaque pushing her gums off of her teeth (surgery will remove it)

-4.5 pounds

-overactive thyroid keeping her weight down

-heart murmur

-undersized kidneys

We're going back to the vet today for blood work ($180). The vet hasn't tested for worms, despite the fact that she was found running loose in the city; instead she's certain that November's weight is because of her hyperactive thyroid. It was described to me as her thyroid keeps her body in a running-a-marathon mode that will damage her kidneys and heart, as well as keeping her from relaxing (this I haven't seen) and burning calories faster than she can keep them in. There's a medication for it, however, that I would be able to just swab on one of her ears daily (roughly $30/month).

We can't get her teeth fixed until she's back up to a stable condition and has gained weight, and the vet thinks that because of that blackened nerve and the hardened plaque, her mouth is in almost constant pain. We had to explain to the vet a couple of times that she'd gained quite a bit of body mass since we'd started taking care of her a couple of weeks ago, too. Nobody in the house believes that this cat is 12 or 13 years old, though none of us have veterinary training either. She's just so small!

The vet did check for any microchips that would say who November really belonged to, but none of their readers found any. Maybe I should set up a "click here to donate to Special Expensive Rescue Kitty With Medical Problems" thing somehow.

Waking up to kittens: who needs an alarm clock?

Not actually as wonderful as it sounds, haha.. though significantly better than many other things to wake up to. Like, for example, dog poop in the hallway or gifts of dead rodents, which have both been statistically much more common than waking up to kittens at this house.

Anyway, November decided at 7:00 this morning that it was high time I started the day. I just got Skype, and my boyfriend's in Hawaii (visiting his folks), so we were up late talking to each other over the internet until about 1:00. Six hours later November decides that the best way to wake me up is to climb over me, meow, and dig the covers away. I woke up enough when she walked all over me that I could take the covers back before she had a chance to miss and dig claws into my throat by accident.

I fell back asleep, and she woke me up again just before my alarm went off about an hour and a half later. This time, she was sneakier about it -- she sneaked along the very edge of the bed, where the blanket was all loose and not liable to pull and alert me, and then slowly pulled the blanket away (digging style again). It was halfway off before I noticed. When I opened my eyes she looked at me and meowed like, "Oh good, you're up. By the way, when's breakfast?"

My cat is smart. That right there was problem-solving. She tried earlier to wake me up by meowing, and I pretended not to notice and to still be asleep; once they know they can wake you up that way, you'll literally never hear the end. Oh, and November is probably part Siamese, based on her meowing. She almost sounds like my mother's cat, Shiro, who we know to be half Siamese. I don't think November's as much as half, though. Her hair is too long and her eyes are too yellow to be very Siamese, but even still, the meowing-to-get-food-at-all-hours-of-the-night thing wasn't exactly something I wanted to encourage by rewarding. Apparently I'll be getting little enough sleep as it is! Maybe I'll take a nap.

Yesterday, she also started to sleep on my bed, as opposed to her usual spots -- under the bed, the floor, the table, occasionally the sofa. Her eyes are also running less than they were before. I was watching a Japanese show yesterday called "Shikaotoko Aoniyoshi" (The Fantastic Deer-Man" -- it's about Japanese mythology and heavily involves Shinto and bad animatronics and CGI. It's excellent) and she reacted to a sound in the show, a shakuhachi, which is also odd for her to do -- she ignores most sounds. Originally I thought she was deaf. She rubbed all over me when I showed her that the noise was coming from my computer.

Ever since Tim bought a new router the other day, we've all been able to stay connected to the internet and everything is so fast now that we can have everybody online at the same time and still be worth it. I can watch my Jdramas at a reasonable speed instead of setting a 10-minute segment to load, going to work, taking a shower, eating lunch, and then being able to watch half of it. This is pretty nice. November isn't impressed by the screen though. She doesn't watch it like Spike sometimes will.

Remember remember my kitty November

See what I did there?

I named the kitten November. There are some photos of her on my phone, but the phone isn't playing nice with the computer right now, so you can't see them. So there!

For the first couple of days she'd either lie on me, lie next to me, or lie on the floor within line of sight. Now she's spending most of her time under the bed, as of yesterday morning. I'm not really sure why.

She isn't grooming herself, and she's kind of bad at the litterbox -- she orients her head in the center of the box, with the result that there are an extremely limited number of ways that she'll hit the litterbox as opposed to the surrounding area (say, my laundry hamper, Jill's other computer, a bag full of cables, et cetera). These two delightful facts combine and make her quite the stinky kitty indeed.

I'm pretty certain now that someone actually was taking care of her before she got out accidentally or got kicked out: I tried to rinse out the poop matting her tail (only a little streak, but still, ew), but as soon as she saw the bathroom sink it was splayed-legs-claws-extended-DO-NOT-WANT. Apparently she knows that bathroom sink = water = bath(?) = unhappiness. I'm going to try to get her more accustomed to water gradually and with conditioning/positive reinforcement, and also convince her to groom herself.

Actually, according to that most great tome of knowledge The Internet, cats dislike water because they think it makes them smell funny. Their saliva, it continues, has an enzyme that destroys odors and makes them smell like "nothing at all."

That's bull. Cats have a very distinct scent, and if our weak human noses can pick it up, then I'm pretty sure a mouse's can too. Or a shark. I bet sharks would smell a cat coming from miles away. Or is it leagues?

One of my roommates, who is responsible for such gems as "Princess Fuzzball Kitten Person," as well as that poor cat's nicknames, "Prinny," "Prinny-boo," and "Prinny Kitty," is trying to nickname November "Millie." Apparently it's from some TV show called Dollhouse. Whatever it's from, it's so not happening (though I guess it's better than "Berry-boo" or something. I don't want to tempt fate by trying to come up with what she'd think up). Every time she tries it, I tell her no very firmly and threaten to kick her. (I haven't actually kicked her.)

A friend told me that I can get November to groom herself by putting water drops on her fur in easy-to-reach places. So far, this has inspired two annoyed paw-shakes and a bunch of ignoring. She doesn't care about single drops of water, apparently, despite the fact that he swears up and down that he taught his cats to groom this way.

She did groom once, but... imagine a 3-year-old trying to use an old metal washing board, and the lack of motor coordination that age tends to entail. It was kind of like that.

Kitten rescue

The friend of a friend found a very emaciated calico kitten on her doorstep while my friend was visiting, and tonight, after much changing of plans, the kitten is being brought up. I'll pick her up tonight and bring her back. We have some kitten food that I'll soak in water, and tomorrow my roommate gets food stamps -- I asked him to pick up some wet kitten food for me.

Hopefully the new kitten gets along decently with the four cats we already have here. Once I have pictures, I'll post them.

Hey folks! (Literally.)

My folks started reading my blog. Hey, Mom and Dad! I guess that brings my reader count up to two. I'm moving up in the world. :3

So they live in Colorado, and have a white cat named Shiro (it means white in Japanese). She's been living with us for.. oh, what, 14 or 15 years now? Anyway, she dislikes intruders into her space (her twin sister Dutton was a smidge more laid back about it, but still not buddy-buddy with the neighbor's "evil" cats), and recently a grey medium-haired cat has been hanging out around the yard. My parents were feeding her a bit and then she had a kitten!

So here's my dilemma. We need to come up with a name for this kitten. He's all black and was born at midnight on 8/2. Based on his mother, I'm assuming he'll also have medium-length hair, and I think he's going to be absolutely lovely. (For several months now, there's been a medium-haired black cat at Petco up for adoption by the Cat Adoption Team -- her name is Rosie and I just can't get a cat. We already have four where I'm staying, and they separate out into two even groups that don't intermingle. She's so beautiful. Aaauugh.)

Some names have popped into my head, including:

-Talon

-Mozart

-Bagheera (the panther from The Jungle Book)

-Scrabble

The problem is that he's too young yet to be able to tell what his personality is like. Once I get a picture I'll probably post it. My landlord suggested Shadow and called herself unoriginal, which is odd because she desperately wants to be a writer, and came up with those longer names for the cats.

Now, to the "chickens" part of this post (because it seems like every post has one):

For those of you thinking about getting into backyard chickens, urban homesteading, urban farming, and the like, a great place to start for chicken stuff is the Backyard Chickens forum. People there are incredibly helpful, and it's very educational just to peruse the threads.

For Oregonians, there's a Chickenstock (yes, they're really called that) on September 25th at Pass Creek, which is some kind of camping park or something like that. There will be local chicken experts there to answer questions and to showcase and trade their poultry, and one person is also bringing what looks (from the photo) to be a delicious, county-fair-award-winning cheesecake. The fun goes from 9:00 am to sunset and is a little less than 3 hours from Portland.

County Fair

The other day we went to the county fair. They had chickens (of course)! My Little Sister's Farm entered some eggs in a contest, but I didn't see anybody from there or from the buffalo farm around. There were some gorgeous draft horses, as well as all breeds of cattle, goats, and sheep. Also rabbits. I didn't know most of what 4-H did, but they also apparently have a lot of non-livestock-related activities, such as table setting, photography, flower arrangement, and sewing. Who knew? (Aside from them.)

They had gorgeous goats (above -- check out that kid! So cute) and very silly sheep. I didn't realize there were so many different breeds of goats and sheep, which is probably naive of me, but I have no real experience with goats or sheep. They had adorable kids, dairy calves and lambs, screaming pigs (seriously swine in groups will continuously make noise), and sheep in various stages of hair growth.

Some were freshly sheared, while their pen-mates were hilariously not, which just shows you how much of what we think of the essence 0f sheepiness (fluffy, short, white goat-shaped things that kind of just graze around and generally look like puffy l

and clouds). The top one is kind of.. naked looking, don't you think? And her friend there has a wonderful puffy coat of lovely wool. (They refused to look at me in the .83 seconds that I attempted to get their attention. 4-H-ers were looking at me in a way that seemed suspicious and slightly disgusted. Yeah, I don't even know if Lake Oswego had a 4-H group.) For more information on 4-H, including what those four H's stand for, you can visit their official website. I think the coolest of the small quadrupeds, however, were the curly-horned sheep whose breed name I have of course completely forgotten despite having tried to memorize it and writing it down on a slip of paper that has since gotten lost (naturally). My roommate/landlord says that they're Navajo sheep, which sounds right.

How badass are these two? Look at those horns, their rugged wool, their jaded, cynical attitudes... Surely these are the Casanovas of the sheep world. I bet they get all the ewes.

Unforunately, despite the fact that the fairgrounds were originally built for 4-H, the owners want to start making money off the grounds (4-H is free). They're tearing down the buildings one at a time in the hopes of driving the 4-H-ers off. The 4-H group apparently doesn't have enough organization to take a stand or move en masse, so changes are good that the group will completely fall apart once that happens. It's a real shame, because the facilities are amazing. The sheep building had shearing stations, the cow building had a pair of milking stations (how cool is that?), and the relatively low-maintenance grounds were still pretty decently kept. The only horses they had there were Clydesdales -- the horse building had already been demolished.

Still, all in all, it was pretty interesting. Robin got a "brick of curly fries," which pretty much looked the way it sounds, and Nikki got a turkey leg. She said it was disappointingly dry, but it'd been sitting out in the heat under a heat lamp for hours, so I don't know what she expected. Sunset that day was nice too.

Oh, and all the photos from this post were taken with my cellphone. It's fancy and has a 3 mega pixel camera. I love it. I do wish, however, that I'd thought to whip it out when we first got there and stopped in the chicken / rabbit building - there were some beautiful birds in there.

RIP Great Expectations flock

I bought a 10x6x6 dog run from Home Depot recently (Craigslist just wasn't working out, and the chicks were ready to go outside all day long) and had that set up. It's been hot, so the chicks were outside. They really enjoyed it! Scratching, and shyly exploring. It took a few minutes for the last one, Willow, to get out of the box and join her sisters. I left the house and when my roommates got back, they let the dogs out.

Well, the dogs managed to open the door to the run and killed my flock of 5. Willow, Hazel, River (my favorite!), Ganymede (my other favorite), and Loki (suspected rooster) are all dead. It was devastating to come home to. Apparently nobody thought that the dogs, who regularly bring home all manner of dead animals from snakes to birds, needed any supervision whatsoever. I mean, I can't expect anybody else to care about my own personal project, but I guess I expected them to care about five living creatures enough to at least put the dogs in the backyard and close the door again. (The only reason the dogs went out front was because the fenced back yard is closed off from inside the house -- one of the cats keeps escaping, and could be eaten by coyotes -- at night.) Maybe I expected too much?

Anyway, I'm going to a chicken swap meet in late September, and will spend up to then perfecting run, coop, and recipes. I was going to take Loki if s/he turned out to be a rooster (my roommate is afraid of roosters, so I can't keep them. Otherwise I'd like to breed them, but oh well) to swap, but without a chicken, I have to come up with something else to trade. I'm making food instead.

Here's what I have planned:

-Swedish pancakes with a Chantilly-style traditional sweet cream and seasonal berries. Chantilly cream is a whipped cream folded in with sugar and vanilla, originally from France. Swedish Chantilly uses almond extract instead of vanilla. Swedish pancakes are very similar to crepes. The berries will probably be raspberry or blueberry. I'm planning to get the berries from the local farmer's market.

-Savory crepes with a Gruyère-mushroom-spinach filling and a mornay sauce. Gruyère is a very mild cheese that goes well with vegetables and savory dishes. I figured that a lot of people would be bringing deserts, so something with vegetables couldn't go wrong. Mornay is a béchamel sauce (a white sauce) that includes both Gruyère and Parmesan cheeses. I'm hoping to get all of the filling ingredients from a local farmer's market.

-Cucumbers with basil-chive-cream cheese topping. Light and refreshing, slices of cucumber will serve as plates for dollops of cream cheese flavored with lemon juice and fresh herbs. A slice of chive on each one will class it up a bit.

Upon hearing about the death of my flock, one member of the forum stepped up and said that he would just give me a pair of pullets, straight up free. I was shocked, and touched, so I decided right then to bake something in exchange. I was talking to him about his food allergies and apparently he has Celiac disease, so he can't have any gluten. My Gram's Swedish pancake recipe uses wheat flour, so I'll be modifying it to use rice flour instead.

Once I have recipes down for each of these things, I'll post them -- except my family's super-secret-original Swedish pancake recipe, passed down for hundreds of years from Sweden, of course! Swedish pancakes are very similar to crepes, so you can use just about any old crepe recipe you like for the base pancakes, then fold or roll your favorite toppings into them.

Coops

I managed to find a coop on Craigslist for about $50 that was someone's 4-H project. It just fit in the back of the big truck (Silver), and I got it home and positioned with help from Robyn and Tim. Tomorrow I'm going to stake out where the fencing on the run goes, maybe go out and get diatomaceous earth to sprinkle into the coop and around the run, and find the left over house paint to paint the coop with. It's a lovely shade of blue. There may be pictures. :3

Chicks!

Yesterday my boyfriend and I drove up to Washington to get five silkie chicks. Yes, they look like chocobos - especially the buff ones!

In order of appearance from left to right, their colors are buff, blue splash, buff (head), white, black/lavender split (butt). They keep climbing on their feeder and kicking shavings into it.

They were supposed to be in a watermelon box, but the guy who was going to give me the box didn't tell his coworker, who was working yesterday, and spent his spare time chopping up a few extra watermelon boxes so they could be recycled. The only one left was soggy. >:

I was pretty frustrated, but had an extra box lying in my room "just in case" -- which was a good thing, all things considered. Well, my room is full of boxes -- it's the storage room -- but I had an empty box saved for them.

The white, the larger buff, and the black/lavender split are suspected roosters. The larger of the two buffs keeps standing up at pecking at me, and the black just won't let me pick him/her up. The blue splash and smaller buffs are the most docile, and slept on me last night while I was reading on the sofa I just moved into the room. (I swapped it out for the old treadmill.)

Puppies are adorable.

Two of our mares sold last night, so today Linda (the owner) took them up to Washington to meet their new humans. Which meant that Nikki and I got to go back and feed horses, change who was in the arena running around (although it's been sunny and hot for the past couple of days, the ground is still pretty wet), and, most importantly, let the puppy out to run around and pee.

Nikki knows the feeding schedule better than I do, so while she was scooping grain and carrying hay, I was running around in the sun with a young Australian Shepherd puppy. We're still teaching him not to jump up on people, but he did "sit" and "go get it" pretty well. I wasn't sure if he wanted me to throw his toy, play tug-of-war with his toy, or just admire it, though. He was pretty happy to sit on my boots and get his head scratched, regardless. Wash is a few months old and adorable! But I don't have any pictures -- I didn't want to bring my big camera to play with the puppy, and I don't have a point and shoot.

Oh yeah -- I definitely got the better end of this deal. Nikki feeds horses while I play with a hyperactive stuck-in-a-crate-all-day puppy. Though why Linda is trying to make an energetic breed into an indoor dog is just beyond me.


The ground here on the farm is still too wet to till, which is too bad. Our tomato plants are withering and yellowed, though the peppers are flowering. There is grass growing in the vegetable patch and I'm just a few steps closer to getting actual chickens. So far in the mail I've received a chick feeder, the screw-on bottom for a quart-jar-style waterer, and a 50-watt red heat bulb. I have a box to make into a brooder, and no cats have been in my room for over a week.

Phew!

That barn work sure tires me out! My best friend, who also works there (only she's worked there for a few more years than I have) says that it took her about a month to work up the muscle mass needed to be able to move at all after a day there. Fortunately it doesn't actually start until.. well, really, whenever we want it to. The kicker to that is the fact that it starts to get really blisteringly hot (well, hot for Oregon -- 80 to 90 degrees) around 1:00 in the afternoon. I get to sleep in later than I ever did during the school year - I get up around 9:00 or 9:30, get to the barn by 10:00.

Once it stops raining so much, I'll be able to till the vegetable patch and finish the (collapsed) drainage ditches. However, as it stands, we've had one sunny day in the past two weeks and other than that we've had straight rain or drizzle or showers. It's been overcast every day except yesterday. The only problem with this is the fact that we can't get anything to dry out, and multiple runs at the barn have flooded. One of the stalls even had a puddle coming up through the mats under the shavings and was about the size of one or two couch cushions. It rained all night last night and everything is muddy.

Hopefully it'll dry out some time this week and we can till, fix the driveway, and dig ditches (yeah, we said that last week...).

Chick supplies!

Today... well, yesterday, I guess. Anyway, today was a really easy day at the barn. Tomorrow I finish clearing the arena boards, probably pull weeds if the incessant rain lets up a bit, probably refill water barrels -- at the barn. Then it's back to those drainage ditches -- apparently, unfinished ditches can collapse under the weight of new rain and mud and muck.

Today, I got a bunch of supplies off of Amazon.com for future chicks. Eventually I want to raise silkies (not gonna lie, I like them because they remind me of chocobos), easter eggers (for their colorful eggs - they can lay blue, green, yellow, pink, brown, tinted, and lavender eggs), and Buckeyes (they're a heritage breed). For now, though, it's just going to be silkies. They're extremely docile, apparently, and very soft. I got a feeder, waterer, heat-emitting infrared bulb, and a clamp lamp for a total of about $20. Now all I need is the actual box, bedding, feed, grit, and chicks! Plus, this gives me more motivation to get going on that coop.. which I'm currently lacking, to be honest. It seems like such a far-off-in-the-future kind of thing that to start on it at all is to spook it and then it runs off, unattainable. Instead, my chick raising supplies will arrive around the middle of next week (which happens to be my 21st birthday).

Nikki had the day off so we didn't do much as far as work goes. Actually, we went shopping and then to my father's house to pick up some stuff I'd forgotten and desperately needed (like a hairbrush, and socks).

Greetings and Salutations!

"So just what is an adventitious farm girl, aside from you?" This is the first question I think my imaginary readers would ask. "Adventitious" is a synonym for "accidental," and in botany it means "structures that develop in an unusual place," such as roots growing from leaves; in medicine, it refers to a condition developed after birth, such as diabetes.

You see, I was born in Portland, Oregon. You may have heard of us. If not, that link will take you to the Wikipedia page. My family moved to Eugene for a couple of years, but I don't remember that very much. When I was two years old, we moved to Lake Oswego, Oregon. If you don't bother to read the article, it's a snobby, new-money-rich, self-obsessive little town filled with much the same; most of my classmates and friends called it "the bubble" and couldn't wait to get away to college. My freshman year of university, my roommate happened to have horses. I love horses, and used to ride! What a crazy random happenstance. (Also, her mother loves Joss Whedon.)

A couple of years later, here I find myself, sitting on the couch in the house on her 50-acre farm. She and I just got back from a morning spent at an appaloosa barn, which is where we work. Then it was back home, where she cleaned out the ponies' stalls and I worked on drainage ditches.

Yeah, I said ponies. She has two ponies (Smokey and Starfire), four horses (Bugsy, Rev, Spencer, and Lucy), two dogs (Chip and Lucky), and four cats (Leo, Mia, Princess Fuzzball Kitten Person, and Spike Thunderpaws -- yes, seriously). Most of their land is unused, but I'm working on a vegetable patch near the house and I'm hoping to get chickens this summer. Eventually I'd like to produce a lot of food here.

Those chicken coop plans aren't going to draw themselves!