"The Ruby"

We've got 3 sheep here at our place, 2 are idiots and one is a genius. Take into consideration that I'm using the term "genius" very loosely, but adhering strictly to the term "idiots" for the other two... the Psycho Sisters, Dummy and Stupid. But then there's the good sheep, Ruby.



Ruby thinks she's part dog, and it's probably my fault... I've spoiled that old wool winter coat with hooves something fierce. She's bound to me 'bout as bad as my folks are to eating at Ponderosa, she just can't help herself. She loves chewing gum, and I oblige her penchant for it almost daily. Leftover salad? She's up to the fence before you're even halfway there with it.

Now the only reason we've got ANY sheep left is because it's that much grass I don't have to mow... and between me and you... I like pampering Ruby. We didn't figure she'd make it through another winter, she's like a million in sheep years, and we nearly lost her about a month ago. She got down in the mud and was partially paralyzed with the cold. I found her and got her up out of the mud, got her all propped up on a hay pile and poured about 10 gallon of nice warm water over her and 'bout 3 or 4 hours later... there she went walking across the yard. Good as ever. :-)

I put a bird feeder up a couple of years ago on one of the fenceposts beside our yard and couldn't figure out where the hell all the birdseed was going. If we had birds emptying that thing THAT fast, there had to be some mighty fat birds in the trees just waiting to bust a limb off, fall out on someone and hurt 'em.

Then, I found the culprit.



Ruby the genius got it figured out if she just stood there and butted the fencepost, she had her own little version of the Ponderosa "all you can eat" food bar. Everytime she smacked it, 'bout a 1/4 cup of bird seed splashed out and she sucked it up. She's playing innocent in this picture... don't fall for it.


Then this evening, Sally is standing at the sink looking out the window and said, "I think Ruby's stuck." I looked out the window and she had her head at an odd angle through the barbed wire fence. She was just kinda locked up, frozen there. So I grabbed a pair of scissors (to hack wool off that was most likely tangled in the wire), pulled on my boots and a coat and sure enough, she was stuck. I clipped her a little and started pulling on her head and wire trying to get the whole mess untangled. Now she had her head through the fence onto the yard side and everytime I pulled on her head, it inched her lips a little closer to the forbidden fruit of "yard grass" and she took full advantage of it. I'd pull on her, she'd start nibbling as fast and furious as she could. This happened a few times until I was laughing so hard I couldn't hardly untangle the old girl.

I think it was a ploy to get me to help her get yard grass. I dunno... it worked if that's what it was. :-)

Computer cleaning etiquette, etc.

While we were doing all the renovation stuff here at our house this winter, the keyboard to the media center puter that's hooked up to our TV, satellite, surround sound... got left out in the dust and mayhem. Thing is, we just don't use this keyboard much, hardly any, and no one had noticed how nasty the thing was, until today. Sally was offended by the dust and dirt that had settled into it and decided to de-nastify it as only the queen of clean can. When she pulls on the Playtex rubber gloves and has her hair back in a ponytail, that's my sign to just get the hell outta her way 'cause she's in no mood for my foolishness. She's gonna scrub the murder offa everything in her path.

I came in this evening and sat down, she came in the living room with the keyboard and a grin on her face. "Made you something!" she said as she handed me the keyboard...




I think she got it a little "damp" in the process of cleaning it and decided to sit it on the stove, back by the oven vent, to speed up the drying process. Funny thing is, when she handed it to me, water was still running out of it. :-)

If you ain't seen it, you'll probably enjoy taking a peek at our kitchen stove, a 1940's something Magic Chef that I restored. She's a beauty.



If you wanna see the restoration of it, it's here.


Back to your regularly scheduled weather... it's a muddy freakin' mess here.

A Meat By-Product.... Cold Cuts

Today for lunch I had cold cuts. In this part of the world we call it "lunch meat" which is a pretty loose term and can catch anything from baloney (we don't say bologna here) to sliced turkey breast to little weenies (vienna sausages). I was in the grocery store yesterday with Sally and she said I oughta grab some lunch meat so my choice was a package of smoked ham, some beef cotto salami and.... pickle loaf.

Now I've seen the types of beef that is destined to become lunch meat, and to be honest it's not the type of meat that you'd welcome into your freezer or barbecue grill, or to marry your daughter, if you saw it languishing in the meat counter at the store. Some of it'll just make you say words like "Gahh!" while you shudder. But... lol I eat it anyway. I figure it's pretty much purified and de-Gahhed by the time it get's packaged up in shrink wrap goodness.

When I was a boy there were 2 country stores that we shopped at some. One was the store at Cherry Box and the other was the Nickellton store. Both had a meat counter and the store keeper sliced off whatever you wanted while you stood there eating cheese he handed out for you to sample. One of the things that my Grandpa always got was liver cheese, and when I was a little, I remember loving this stuff. Me and Grandpa would eat it on saltines with mustard and I thought it was great! 5 or 6 years ago Sal and I were in a store and I spotted some liver cheese in the meat case and had the meat cutter slice some for me.

I can't tell you how eager I was to get home and actually "eat nostalgia". I had all these happy visions of me and grandpa and the country stores and stuff like that. I smelled the liver cheese and it brought back even more memories... I looked at the traditional band of white fat around the outside edge of it... I was almost driven to tears with happiness and remembrances.... and then I bit the sandwich.

OH HOLY CRAP! WHAT THE HELL WAS WRONG WITH ME WHEN I WAS LITTLE?!?! HACK! GAG! BLLEEEECHHHH!!!! I couldn't get that nasty, gooey, pastey crud spit into the garbage can fast enough. I sat there and ate a slice of bread and bit an onion to get that taste out of my mouth. Good grief, they could fight a war with that crap, and win. You'd send soldiers out with 5 pounds of liver cheese each and when they ran into the enemy all they'd have to do is just pull it out and show it to 'em and the bad guys would just lay down their guns and throw up.

Sometimes we need to just leave happy childhood memories alone. Seriously.

Oh... and want to see what liver cheese looks like? I knew you did.

Brace yourselves.



So today I calmly ate my pickle loaf sandwich with some cheese and thanked God that it wasn't liver cheese.

Skunk Hunting

Before I start... lol yesterday's post was pure fiction. 99.9 percent of what I write is truth and fact, that post was not... I was in a funky mood and felt like weaving a big fat one. Those people in the pictures are not my family, nor do I know them. If you had a great aunt Beatrice, chances are real solid that I did not know her. No one in my family was named Cletus, if you've got a Crazy Crotch Cletus in your family, I'm sure he was a fine fellow and practiced proper hygiene and had great table manners. I apologize for leading you down a rabbit hole in your search for limbs on your family tree.

Egads...

Okay, this is a long one and it's 100 percent fact. The people in it are real, it happened and no names have been changed to protect anyone's innocence, because no one is innocent in this house. Ever. A couple of y'all were disappointed that it was left out of this post. Well save that disappointment for your wedding night, 'cause here's the skunk story.

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The night before Sal and I were married is an evening that will live on for all of us here in the Weber household. It all started as a normal enough warm summer night, everyone making preparations for the big day, I was getting ready to leave to go back to my house when Jake came burning in the house with the news that a Possum was hanging out in the backyard. Now there had been a problem with something getting the chickens and eggs, but I was pretty well focused on just about everything else in the whole wide world except errant possums. So I did the old "clang the possum hand off" and I told Jake to take his ball bat and pop said possum on the noggin, thereby making him miss Christmas and saving aforementioned chickens to live for another day. Jake wasn't real hot on this idea, he was thinking more along the lines of getting a gun and blowing the ugly right off the overgrown rat. The up close, personal contact just wasn't getting it for little Jake.

I've never actually had a possum bite me, I had one make a fairly valiant effort once when it lunged at me and bit a stick on the ground beside my foot instead. Seems possums have some pretty poor vision. I yelled just the same so he'd think he'd gotten a mess of me. It's easy to fool 'em that way, not too smart you know. Anyway I digress, just wanting to get the task out of the way, I walked out in the backyard with the ball bat, Jake in tow, and there was the possum headed, as only a possum can head, to a hole in the corner of the barn wall. AH HA! Said I, now I've got him. So around to the big gate door of the barn, Jake still on my heels at least a good half step behind me, now not wanting to miss any single piece of this pie, and into the darkness of the barn. Now Jake in his tiny little youthful years must have sensed something very wrong about this whole situation, and he stayed in the gateway, close enough to be where the action was, but ready to bail if the case called for it.

I poked around in the barns darkness, leaving the light off so I wouldn't scare the possum and suddenly out of the corner of my eye, I caught a bit of movement. Slowly I raised the bat, getting ready to let fly, tensed my muscles and... HOLY SMOKES! SON OF A HAIRY TRUCK DRIVER!!! I stopped midswing with an audible screeching sound. (I'd never screeched out loud before), SKUNK! I yelled SKUUUNNNNNKKK! and headed for the gate door. Jake, in the wisdom that children seem to intuitively possess at times, had started running and from out in the middle of the yard I heard his voice. "What is it?" I really thought I'd explained that already. For elbow macaroni and flying catguts Jake, (I've changed a few of the words here) it's a skunk... the possum has become a skunk.

So here we are, a man and a small boy, standing in the backyard in the dark, with a bat, breathing heavily, staring at the barn.

Jake: You alright?

Me: Yeah.

Jake: What happened to your shirt?

I look down at where my sleeve used to be, but now was only arm.

Me: I dunno, it was there a minute ago.

Jake: Do you think the skunk got it?

Me: I don't think they go for the sleeve Jake, I must have caught it on a nail or something when I walked outta the barn.

Jake: You mean when you flew outta the barn!

I excused him, he was only a small boy, his eyes weren't mature enough to really see real clearly yet.

So NOW it's time for the gun. I go back in the house and get a rifle while Jake animatedly tells everyone what's transpired so far. I grab a flashlight and hand it to Jake and tell him he's the light man.

The plan now is to dispatch the skunk with a bullet in the noggin and hope that he doesn't relax too much. I tell Jake that his job is to blind the skunk with the flashlight, while the skunk is stunned by the light, I'll take him out.

Jake will not enter the barn.

His manner with the flashlight is to stand outside the barn, with his arm and flashlight sticking in the barn and wave it around like it's the disco barn or something. Everytime I tell him to hold it still he points it in my eyes and says "What?" Good Lord, I'm blind in a barn with a live skunk and 12 year old comedian outside. Finally he gets the skunk lined up with the light, I take aim and it's all over. No smell. Us 1, Skunk 0.

Then Pepe Le Pew relaxes.

A smell wafts over our little place in the still, damp night air... and hangs there. It hangs there for days, for weeks, for a couple months. We put lime in the barn, we cleaned it up, scooped it out, limed it some more. People driving by asked if someone hit a skunk in road or what the heck happened.

Somewhere along the way of the evening, I killed the possum, that started the whole melee. The next day, the day of the wedding, Jake, being the little mortician that he aspired to be at that point in his life, buried the skunk and possum in the same hole that a few days later he'd use for a chicken also. A resourceful and well thought out grave digging if there ever was one.

Thank heavens neither one of us got sprayed that night... I'm afraid it woulda put a damper on the wedding festivities. It was bad enough as it was with the smell in the yard.

Family Photos

Everyone gets a little curious about their lineage at some point in their life, and well... I did too. Digging around on the wide wide world of the internets, trying to find some trace of my family heritage. Lord have mercy, did I hit the jackpot! Not only history of my family but pictures!

Make sure and click the pictures to make 'em big!

I'll give you a short little tutelage of the kind of folks that I sprang from the loins of.

Here's my great Grandma Beatrice (on my Mother's side) out at the clothesline. She ran her household with an iron fist. In this picture she's just taken little Uncle Rodriguez's favorite toy away from him. "Bucket" They didn't have much, but boy that sure was a fine bucket. Look at Uncle Rod pouting. LOL what a stitch.



And of course as the years went by, things prospered. They moved up to a swell treehouse. Here's a pic of some friends of theirs sitting around just smoking and getting drunk. Ha.. good times, good times... those were the days eh? Watch that first step Uncle Louie, it's a doozy!




And of course to go along with the new digs (up in Oak Tree Mansion, as Grandpa liked to call it) they scraped together enough jingle to throw up a swell vacation cottage. My mom says she remembers picnicking in there as a little girl. Mmmmm mmm nothing like a good egg salad sandwich in the old vacation cottage down by the lake. Ha ha, look at the sign that Grandpa painted on the door. I don't know what the "lid" is, but you sure don't want flies on your sandwich now do you?





Oh and in the backroom off the southeast corner of the vacation cottage, Grandpa was all cutting edge and stuff... put in a media room! Grandma spent hours trying to get a better picture on that damned radio. Grandpa finally snapped one night and smacked her in the head with his newspaper. Looks like he's 'bout ready to let go here! LOOK OUT GRANDMA!





And then there was my Great Uncle Harold. Harold was all about teaching self defense with the trombone, but no one took him seriously because of those stupid pants he insisted on wearing. Pull 'em up a little higher there Uncle Harold, your armpits must be cold!




Having failed at getting folks enthused with his trombone defense classes he sorta snapped and according to what Aunt Esther wrote down, he build a weapon of mass destruction to destroy the world and everyone on it that laughed at him. He called it "The War Tuba". Unfortunately the only thing he destroyed was the vacation cottage. Don't have to worry 'bout leaving the lid up anymore huh?





The explosion from the whole War Tuba episode left him nearly deaf, so with parts left over from that thing he built himself a hearing aid. The cool thing is that the damned thing actually worked, the old guy could hear a gnat fart at 50 paces. Unfortunately my 3rd cousin Ernie tossed a cherry bomb in there one day and it was "So long Uncle Harold" Those boots are still in the family possession... it was the only thing left. Great boots though! Ernie later became the Governor of Arkansas.




Some of my family were gifted apparently when it came to sports ability. Here's a picture of my cousin Cletus (circled in red). Somehow he garnered the nickname "Crazy Crotch Cletus". Go figure.




And of course old Uncle Bob. LOL He desparately wanted to play basketball, but at 4 foot 3 he didn't have a chance. Here he is handing the ball off to a normal sized player just out of screenshot. Give Uncle Bob a belated round of applause for giving it the old team effort!




Mom said when Grandma didn't have chickens in that crate, the kids used to fight over who got to ride in "the caboose". You just don't see kids having fun like that these days, do you?



And finally cousin Gustaff. Came home from the war and after having a tank run over his head... just wasn't quite right, as Grandpa put it. He spent years building this thing in the backyard out of an old propane tank and some pipe. Then according to family history he just sat in it for the next 30 years screaming "RATTA TAT RATTA TAT RATTA TAT" every time he saw a chihuahua on the sidewalk. No one could figure out why he pinpointed that breed. Uncle Bill said they shaved the cat so it'd look like a chihuahua just to hear Gustaff go at it. Kinda sad, but the good part was they didn't have problems with door to door salesmen.





*sigh*

Note to Self : Make Note

I'm a note scribbler and when I say scribbler I mean the type of calligraphy that a heroin addicted chimpanzee in the throes of withdrawal might manage to write out. My handwriting is amazingly illegible. The worst that you'll see. I don't really know what happened to it over the years, it didn't use to be this bad. It's crummy enough that often times I can't figure out just what the hell was so important that I made a note to myself, obviously writing it while I was riding horseback through a demolition derby.

What brings this to mind is today Sal handed me a stack of notes that she'd collected from a couple of my roosts around the house... and honestly the only ones that I could figure out were a series of 4 that were just scrawled pictures of an aerial view of some land of ours. I even remembered why I scratched those out. Really! After going through that stack I figured I might as well go for broke and clean out my wallet. That's when I came across this...

"Aver pringle for ogersnats. Larry Tumor 17 1/2" x ? "

I looked at this and tried to stir some memory of what the heck this really said and why it was important... until finally I developed my very own larry tumor. I threw it away. Looked like it had been in there for awhile.

I've got notes all over my shop, lots of 'em wrote on my work table top, it's that white melamine stuff, and is handy as a pig in a poke. (I don't know what that means, but it sounds good.) The trouble with using my work table for the worlds largest notepad is my notes get rubbed off, or even worse partially rubbed off leaving a sketch of some piece of furniture or furniture part without any measurements.

After writing this I can see a trend... I can actually decipher my notes that are just pictures, so I need to just live my life of note taking like a never ending game of Pictionary.

The last time Sal and I visited our Daughter and Son in law, I got up before anyone else and was standing in the kitchen just waiting for coffee to come outta the pot, when I happened to notice that the 34th goldfish that they'd tried to turn into a fun and educational pet for the girls... had apparently swallowed too much water during the night, and drowned. So I left our daughter a note beside the bowl. I think Sally is the one that took the picture after choking near to death on a bite of bagel whilst noticing my handiwork.




See? Now isn't that a clear, concise and legible note?

April Fools is for amatuers.

Sal and had a busy day today and April Fools just sorta slipped past us without much fanfare. We had a funeral to attend this morning that I was a pallbearer at, not a sad one... the old girl was 94 and ready to move on, but still, not April Fools day fodder.

Want to know what TRUE April Fools day fodder is? I got divorced on April Fools day about 10 or 11 years ago. My lawyer, whom had taken thousands of dollars of my hard earned money getting ready for this April Fools day divorce.... refered to me as "Chase" in the courtroom, until my soon to be Ex corrected him while she was on the stand.

See? :-)

One of my very best endeavors into prankdom took place about 15 years ago and I worked at this one single act of prankedness for about 3 weeks. It was beautiful, truly beautiful.

I owned a gunshop for many many years and did a lot of law enforcement business with ammo, equipment, etc. All the things that a cop needs to be a cop. A company came along that made these truly incredible 3 dimensional, life size, self healing targets of bad guys and good guys. They looked exactly like a human being from the thighs up and you could shoot them over and over and the bullet holes sorta sealed back up. Pretty much cutting edge stuff for that time period. They were very expensive and that sorta killed the sales for them, but they sure were cool.

Anyway I had one in the shop for a sales sample and the one I had was a guy of middle eastern heritage, dressed in khaki and holding an Uzi submachine gun. We had him around the shop for quite awhile and he sorta got to be a mascot, dressed him up and crap like that.

I had an everyday pickup account with UPS, and the driver would usually take his break at my shop and have a candy bar and a Pepsi and shoot the breeze for a bit. So one day I got this wonderful idea....

I sat a chair by the door where everyone came in, and sat the terrorist on this chair. I put a Pith helmet on him (you get a lot of weird stuff accumulated in a gun shop over the years) and a big pair of mirrored aviator style sunglasses. Now when you walked in the door, this was the first thing you saw and I swear, for about 2 or 3 days the damned thing even startled me. But the guy that I was breaking in... just to get used to seeing old Bob the Terrorist... was Rich, my UPS driver.

For a solid week Rich would come in and kinda catch his breath when he saw Bob there on that chair in his pith helmet and shades holding that Uzi on him and then.... things got normal. Rich just became accustomed to seeing him there, it was normal. I left Bob the Terrorist there for a full 3 weeks.

Then, I sat up my video camera behind a counter display across the shop.

Then.... When we saw the Rich the UPS man come over the hill to the driveway, I took Bob off the chair... I put on the Pith helmet and the big mirrored sunglasses and an old busted, black gunstock.... and I got on the chair on my knees.... and waited.

Rich came thru the door carrying some stuff and I just leaned in a little bit and touched him with the end of the gunstock and said a very quiet "hey".

I swear on my grandma's grave that that man jumped straight backwards a good 8 feet. Flat footed. UPS packages just thrown. And then the most awful language began to flow from him... words that I didn't even know existed. I can't even remember them they were so awful, something like "YOU FLINGLE FLACKED SUNNY BEACH RASSIN FRASSIN FLINGLE FLACKER SUNNY BEACH!"

It was horrible. Took the paint right off the doorway of the shop with all that talk. :-)

Then Rob, the guy that worked for me, quietly popped the tape out of the camera and stuck it in the vcr/tv thing I had for hunting video stuff, and showed Rich his performance. He actually offered to buy the tape. He got up to $50 bucks and I turned him down 'cause I figured owning that tape was my only ace in the hole to protect me from retribution, and it was.