Would You Like a Cup of Tea?

K. finally got the squirrel he's been hoping for for the past month. It was one of the immensely fat ones that live off our compost and surplus 'donations' that sit on our porch. These squirrels live so well that by this time of year they are immensely fat, the size of gophers with flabby arms and poofy coats. This one got disemboweled in front of the house yesterday and K., faced with the actuallity of the squirrel had some second thoughts. He took them to P., the strictest vegan of all of us. P. said he could find nothing inherentlly unethical about using the dead squirrel as long as K didn't throw it against the wall or load it into a cannon or something disrepectful like that.
So I get home from shopping and here's K. in the apron he won for being the best baker in middle school home economics and the latex gloves he pilfered from the last drug study he was in. He's diligently skinning the poor dead, chubby squirrel with visions of warm slippers dancing in his head and the Cap'n good naturedly berating him. "You not pulling hard enough! Don't be a pussy!"
The Cap'n was feeling very much like an expert having sucessfully tanned his deer hide last week. The hide in question was resting on the other half of the picnic table on which K. was skinning his squirrel.
P. was splitting hunks of wood into kindling on the floor next to the skinning operation, P.T. was praticing his violin at the spectacle of a vegan skinning an animal and I was looking through the potatoes to see if any were still good for dinner. "This house..." P said, "This house is getting more like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre every day."

We sat, four people and a dog, on the living room couch, hundled in front of the space heater while it sleated outside. Eventually we gathered the courage to..umm...gather wood and start a fire in the next room where we promptly shut the pocket doors and vowed not to leave the are with the fireplace for any reason. Of course, the bathroom is on the other side of the house so we did have to leave eventually. S. came back shivering and yelling, "rest of the house sucks!"
At no point in the exercise did it occur to any of us to simply turn on the heat. Well, it did occur to us but we quickly dismissed it as a bourgois solution. Besides, no one wanted the shame of being responsible for breaking the No Heat Before December challenge.

Oh Shame! The internet has revealed, as only the internet can, my poor grasp of the English language. My mispelling of catalogue is unique enough that when I incorrectly google "hatchery catologue" it sends me straight to my own blog. Shame, Shame, Shame.
Anyway, Blue Andalusians or Buff Rocks. My birthday is Febuary 2nd (hint, hint). Although the search for an Angora rabbit dealer continues. Chickens are sooo last year. This year's slingshot organizer even features "How to Raise Chickens in the City" in the back section, a real sign that a trend is hitting big.

The Cap'n caught a deer yesterday; with a gun, not with his car. It (the pieces of it) is sitting in the theater wrapped in plastic bags. Half the house's normal junk is in theater already from our desperate stashing or our crap in preparation for the fancy dinner party on Saturday night.
Okay, "dinner party" is a stretch. It was actually our second annual pie-tasting fundraiser. We baked around 30 different pies, cleaned the house and invited our more respectable friends and parents over for a $5-20 evening of gluttony. Naturally it was chaos. As anti-consumerists we are loath to throw things out for tiny bourgois reasons such as: it doesn't work; it is a copy machine we stole from the dump that doesn't work and; it has never worked and certainly won't now after someone left in on the porch in the rain for three days. So we shoved those things, along with 50 pounds of donated bread into the theater and wondered with people who don't have theaters attached to their houses do in moments like these. Then, mere seconds before the party started, K. remembered that the pie serving implements were in the side-yard after being used to create knife hits three days previous. So embarrassing.
So in the midst of all our assorted crap that we promise to throw away next Big Trash Day is the Cap'n's deer. We told him in no uncertain terms that he was not to brain-tan the hide inside the house because after the Dog Bones Incident ( don't ask) we know better than to let stinky dead things rot on the stove. The Cap'n ends up running through the house looking for one of the many 'zine that militant wanna-be-cavemen have sent to us about roadkill tanning to find.
"Don't listen to that!" K. and I yelled, "those people listen to punk rock music! They are incompetent!" So the Cap'n turned to our homesteading bible and last I saw him was preparing to salt-cure the hide.

My Mom is back to the blogosphere and has created a moving elegy to her black and white TV (1978-2004).

"You know, you're going through life pretty okay, with decent faith in the goodness of humanity and then, boom! you learn that someone just mugged, at gunpoint, a toothless Friar and it ruins your whole day."
P. got off early from work yesterday because his boss, Brother R. was too busy canceling credit cards and getting a new drivers license to assign P. any tasks. He then stood in the kitchen doing dishes and discussing with the rest of us what kind of Hell one gets to go to for robbing a man of God who spends his days growing organic vegetables for the WiC program. We suggested that the robber will probably spend eternity hanging with the dude who mugged Rosa Parks a few years ago.
In case you're wondering, Brother R. is pretty unaffected by the robbery. P. questioned him at length worried that the old Friar was in some sort of delayed shock. "It's okay," P. was told, "the last time I had a gun held at my head was in El Salvador."

well, then.

My new job hassles are so much less complicated than any other job related stress I've ever had. I don't have an asshole manager or a stupid uniform or mean yuppies. I just get bitten sometimes.
And really, snippy customers used to hurt my feelings for hours but I have no emotional reaction to getting called a "fucker" and punched in the stomach by a mentally retarded teenager at 7 a.m. It's just much simpler. I know I did nothing to deserve being called a big stupid fucker, that I'm not going to get fired for being a big stupid fucker and that each day I can try a new a different strategy to cause my client to smoothly transition to screaming obscenities in her pajamas to on the school bus with no real consequences if the strategy is an unexpected and dramatic failure. The bruises aren't so bad either and they're like a physical reminder that I had a rough day at the office and deserve a beer.
One of my official discipline tools is a tape recorder. The client's mom and I are supposed to record her so that later, when she's calm, she can hear how mean she was an feel guilty. This does not work. However since most of what is recorded is me trying to keep the client sort of awake. Since she never responds except to scream and punch when touched the conversations on the tape are pretty one-sided. They're generally monologues about how lousy it is to get up at 6 a.m in an unheated house in order to be on time for a job where I get hit. The client's thirteen year old brother finds these tapes hilarious and saves them, replying choice bits for his own amusement, mostly the bits with swearing.

S., the new housemate, and I went to colleges with deep, bitter sports rivalries. I'm sure this is true of lots of people, but those people went to real colleges. S. and I went to obscure summer camp liberal arts colleges in one of the more God-forsaken areas of the country. We are both thrilled to find in the random midwest someone who not only has heard of our alma mater but has hilarious sayings about how much our alma mater sucks.
Things are looking up for the new housemates ever since they bought and lit a "get good luck quickly" candle. It was their second occult candle purchase. The previous one was a hex proofing candle. P. assured me that he didn't actually believe in that kind of thing but his ex-girlfriend was seriously into Wicca and after wrecking his car he became convinced she had hexed him. "She's just the kind of person who would do that." The de-hexing candle worked so well they were convinced to make a second purchase.
P. got his current job soon afterwards. It's "Director of Urban Horticulture" or something. He describes it as " pretty much menial labor that sound interesting when I describe it."

What the fuck is wrong with you people???????

M. and I got shitfaced drunk by noon. K. broke a polling station by acident while the Election Protection were vigorously defending his right to vote. My housemates that stayed pure and didn't vote are having a big "I told you so" laugh at all us sell-outs.

By the way: In Detroit Bush got a whopping 6%, making us the smartest city in America.

I didn't vote today. I thought I didn't have to re-registar this time, but I did. Waaahhh! I got myself all psyched up for voting and even convinced myself that John Kerry was an ok guy. After being rejected by a kind hearted poll worker I went to my mother's house and ate a popsicle.
I crave sleep in that desperate cranky way that makes a person unbearable. I've been helping the client get up in the morning which means getting my own self up at 6:30 a.m. Ug. In the special 10th circle of Hell reserved for scabs, bad tippers and people who don't use turn signals one is forced to rise absurdly early and then get punched in the face by a sleeping, mentally disabled 17 year old. I'm trying not to lose patience with the client since she has a sleep disorder but when I'm tired and I keep getting elbowed for suggesting that maybe she get up and take her pills it puts me in a bad mood. Also the client is a sugar addict and sugar interferes with her medication. Therefore: the week after halloween leaves her much less able to control her aggression and obsessive compulsive issue. "Honey, that's enough sugar on your cereal" I said. She kicked.
On the other hand, early rising gives me a new perspective on the city. The smog is extra shiny around 7 a.m. and I get to catch the chickens in their new front porch roost. They moved to the front porch ever since Squatter Cat has taken to playing "Monster Under the Bed" with the poor dears all night long.
"Good Morning, Ladies," I say, "Taking the early bus down to the temp agency?"
"Squawk!" They reply.