Would You Like a Cup of Tea?

In my enviromental planning class we've been endlessly discussing the world wide enviromental problem of hypothetical sheep. God, fucking hypothetical sheep ruin everything. The crux of conventional wisdom about hypothetical sheep is that left to our own devices and holding hypothetical land in common, we'll have no judgement at all about how many sheep are too many sheep and pretty we, and our sheep, will be wallowing in eroded mud all day long. The only solutions offered are a) have some powerful government bureacracy regulate how many sheep we can have or b) turn us all into private property owners.
I feel that this is dumb. As a bona-fide wingnut who is trying really hard to be a responsible adult I'm irritated as all get out that really smart responsible adults are convinced that too lousy solutions are all that stand between us and soil erosion. I really don't see why reasonable people can't get together and say, "you know, we have too many sheep. Let's have a bbq."
My planning class is on wednesday; on sunday I went to the barnyard meeting. Ten people in a room, not a single one of them reasonable, discussed exactly how many, totally non-hypothetical, pooping, wool producing, baa-ing, child-trampling sheep we should have. Solution: one more than we currently have.
It's really not that hard.

Oh man. This whole job plus grad school operation sucks my butt. I spent last week blowing my student loan money on coffee drinks and tofurky jerky as I dashed from work to school. Honestly, the only real problem is that my office is out on like 19 mile or some shit and I can't even tell because that far out in the suburbs they stop using perfectly civilized mile road names and started calling everything after beavers and bodies of water. Perverts.
I had a major moment of joy on thursday, where, in my new professional capacity as a youth development worker, I convinced an appalachian stripper, with promises of beer and backrubs, to abandon her breakfast of dumplings fried in raccoon fat, to give a presentation to a group of high school students. Or at least that's how I'm going to spin the story from now on. The girl in question, Erica, is our new houseguest/future housemate and when she's not snuggling with Keith or skinning roadkill or lounging around in a white lace nightgown and pig tails like something out of Tennesse Williams, is making adjustments to her car, a 1982 mercedes diesel that runs on used vegetable oil.
I think grease cars are cool and I definitly think they are way cooler than informational videos on life in rural Africa. So, using my professional contacts inside the high school I was able to get something like thirty or forty kids to come out into the parking lot and crowd around Erica's car while she demonstrated her modified engine system, totally blase about the fact that alot of the modifications were obviously duct-tape based. The high school kids let out a genuine ooooh of interest when she started the car and the smell of french fries wafted out of the tailpipe.
After we finished and were packing up to go the official high school police officers came mosying over. Before I even had a chance to really start thinking,
oh fuck we're gonna get yelled at they said they'd heard this car ran on vegetable oil and would Erica mind doing the whole demonstration over for them.
As a token of appreciationg for being the guest speaker, the high school librarian gave Erica a keychain and a pen.

I check the blog for the past view days and get no comments. Does no one love me, I think to myself. I decided that once I start talking about roadkill the love and affection will come pouring in.

I'd spent the last hour picking u-pick raspberries and getting hi-hi-hello using a pipe carved out of a deerbone by Keith, who is such a litle McGuyver and is totally the one I'm sticking with come a zombie attack. He's also a good sport about taking over driving responsibilities when I'm unwiling; so there we are, Keith, Erica, Sidewalk and I, driving down this dirt road in a far out suburb when we see a dead raccoon lying in the middle of the road where no raccoon had been a mere hour ago when we were picking raspberries.
Keith and Erica carry a plastic bag on them at all times for just these kind of oppurtunies. While I still feel the whole thing is still waaay gross, I have to admit, were I going to eat roadkill raccoon I would eat that roadkill raccoon. It was so fresh rigor mortis hadn't even set in and there wasn't a mark on it; it's neck must have broken is the only thing we can figure.
Just is Erica was about to pick up the tasty morsel by its tail a pick up truck slows down in front of us. I'm about 20% undone with hilarity and about 80% totally mortified. Fortunatly, the roadkill eating thing is a relative secret and this dude made very different assumptions about what the pretty, hippy-looking girl crouched over the dead raccoon was intending.
"I don't think the best vet in the world can do anything for him anymore, Sweetheart." He said.
"Oh" said Erica, "I"m just moving it out of the middle of the road"
Worst. Excuse. Ever. Poor thing, dude must have thought, She's going to go do CPR on that dead animal and cry when it doesn't recover.
They're probably haveing raccoon noodle soup as we speak.

Things are going pretty good for me, right now. So good that I don't even have to think, well, at least I haven't been stranded on a rooftop surrounded by alligators for the past week while George Bush goes biking. I start school on tuesday and the jobs been working out and Keith is home.
Keith and his sweety, Erica were actually supposed to be home earlier but her car died in Muncie, Indiana on friday. After being told by every mechanic in Muncie, Indiana that they were unwilling or unable to work on a car with a modified extra gas tank built out of punk rock and gumption and which is stalled, almost certainly, because of the partially hydrongenated oils that managed to float loose in the engine, they gave up and hitch-hiked. They arrived just in time to take over my assistent chicken killer duties, something which, in theory, had Erica all excited. I like that girl a lot but she's a damn caveman and a bad influence on Keith. She's got him eating all kinds of roadkill, up to and including bbq rattlesnake and I just don't hold with that kind of thing. When I left I could see her starting to have a change of heart; the doomed chicken was one of our attractive and friendly chickens, and I didn't want to be around to watch it die either.

Have I neglected to tell you, internet, that I have a new kitten? He's adorable of course, blonde and blue-eyed and ferocious. I think my favorite thing about new life, especially when that life is attached to a creature that will never grow up to cut funding for flood walls or leave thousands of people to die just because they are poor and black or start a pre-emptive war based on false information, is the total innocent joy. Some many times lately the world has seemed like a sad, scary, doomed place. It does my heart good to spend time with someone for whome just the opposite is true.
And I mean, dude, he's playing with a ball of yarn.