GRACE UNCENSORED

warm, warm february

wednesday, the first day of the last winter month, i took lester for a walk because it was warm and wonderful but mostly because he REALLY REALLY INSISTED that he DESPERATELY NEEDED TO GO FOR A WALK.

we went all the way down to the little beach area between amy and jim’s house and their neighbors.  he was a little bit interested in the water, but not so much.  it was much too cold for a swim.

later, we sat down on the dock.  i like it that lester enjoys sitting there because i love sitting on the dock, it’s one of my favorite things, and for him to sit still for a few moments is awesome.

mollie trotted down to join us, and here they’re coexisting nicely.

they’re both watching as winnie sashayed down to join us.  i couldn’t get a good picture of the three of them because winnie just wants me to pet him, so he was too much in my face for a good photo op.

les felt the need to do some more exploring, so he crawled down on the rocks and found yet another little hiding place, probably a raccoon lair.  fortunately he crawled back out so i didn’t have to figure out how to get down there and drag him away.

i finally brought les back into the yard, and winnie walked up.   he’s there right in front of lester, not looking at chester, who crouches in the ferns, ready to POUNCE.

i’ve been happy that the big ferns have stayed green all winter, but i fear for their continuing survival.  lester only snuggles down in them, but i watched chester the other day, leaping in them, crashing down on them.  probably won’t last, is my guess.

i’ve been thinking that we should restrict the amount of dry food the kitties get, instead of letting them graze whenever they want.  winnie needs to go on a serious diet, lester is getting bigger and bigger, and chester will probably head in that direction.  but i’m reluctant to even think about it because of the awful kitty wrath that would be wreaked.

ok then,

mrs. gliding through the winter hughes.

computer, again!

i got my computer back yesterday from best buy and they fixed it.  because it wasn’t under warranty, the guy said that the part they replaced was legally mine, and he held out a baggy with the broken cable.  i declined it.

so it’s a happy day now.

yesterday afternoon kevin saw a big bird flying into a tree, and looked at it through the binoculars.

it was a bald eagle.  i hurried out, trying to get a decent picture through all the branches.

i got closer and closer so of course he finally got annoyed and flew away.  here’s the tip of his wing as he hurries off.

the early evening sun was beautiful.

and it’s going to be in the 50s for three days this week, and as far as i’m concerned, winter is just about over.  we really just have february now, and february is a very short month.

all is good.

ok then,

mrs. sunday morning hughes.

mollie, just being a dog

yesterday we took mollie for a walk through the soccer feld and she always stops to sniff, eat bad things, or contemplate the meaning of life.

yesterday, though, she stayed eating on something for a very long time.  we walked over to see – it was and entired deer leg.  mostly just bone, but the lower portion still had some fur left on it, and hooves.  mollie started ripping into the fur.

“come on, you can bring it home,” said kevin, and mollie proceeded to pick up the leg that was as long as her and happily trot along with it, as the lower leg dangled from the knee joint off to the side.

a very, very happy doggie.

when we got home we led her into the fenced-in yard so she could thoroughly enjoy it.

and oh, she did.  she was probably out there for a couple of hours, gnawing away. here she is carrying it home.

les sat on top of the hot tub, just watching her, and then he bravely went outside to sit quietly and watch as mollie continued to devour the leg.  i think les probably secretly wanted a bite, but he was a little timid about getting to close.  smart move.

in the middle of the night mollie started jingling around so i figured she wanted to go out – maybe she was sick from eating all that venison.  i let her out, and she came in pretty quickly.  i went back to bed and she started loudly chomping and i realized she hadn’t finished her treat and had brought it in to polish off.

i was lying there worrying about the potential for staining on the rub, wondering if i was ever going to get any sleep because of the loud chomping, but mollie finally went to sleep, and so did i.

this morning all that was left were a couple of pieces of bone.

friday was a perfect day for our happy dog.

ok then,

mrs. saturday morning grace.

aurora borealis, NOT

last night kevin was at a meeting and i was very focused on playing bejeweled on his computer.  because there is something wrong with his computer, not only does it not connect to the internet, it also randomly restarts every once in a while.  this was slightly annoying while trying to do my best at the game, but it did give me a much-needed break. 

i had gotten a couple of texts, but then my aunt sandy texted me from chicago to say GO OUTSIDE AND SEE IF YOU CAN SEE THE AURORA BOREALIS.  she said she couldn’t see it there in chicago (where it snows and is cold way way way too much) because it was too cloudy.

so i dutifully put on kevin’s big coat, a hat and mittens, and took mollie outside. 

it was very dark and cold out there.  hmm, isn’t the aurora borealis a big swirly colorful cloud of color?  nope, didn’t see it.  the stars did look very twinkly, though, instead of static like i believe they usually do, but were they really more twinkly?  i also saw a plane.  i convinced mollie to come back in, and then kevin came home and as he was coming in, lester SHOT OUT the front door because he is a speedy and wily kitty, so then i had to put on my hate and coat and we tromped around looking for him.  kevin found him in our neighbor chris’s back yard; luckily shining a flashlight seemed to stop him for a minute.

this morning i read that people could see the aurora borealis in SWEDEN.  i think they also saw it in northern england. 

i’ve never given much thought to having any kind of bucket list (did the movie invent that word, or was it already in existence?), no list of stuff i want to accomplish before i die, but now i’ve decided i’m going to have one, and seeing the aurora borealis is going to be at the TOP OF MY LIST.

one slight problem is that we’d have to be in sweden in the dead of winter; one article i read about it this morning said that people saw it there in some swedish place where it was THIRTY FIVE BELOW.

oh my.

but it’d be worth it, i’m sure.  we’d have to go to sweden in the dead of winter, though, and stay for who knows how long, although maybe scientists are good at knowing when the next one will be.

hopefully there will be one sooner than in a hundred years.

when i lived in LA, one night we drove to some smallish mountain and sat in chair, bundled up (even though it probably wasn’t any colder than 50), and watched a meteor shower.  it was quite awesome, and i’m sure the aurora borealis would blow that away.

meanwhile, last night i managed to be the TOP SCORER on one of the bejeweled games.  because the game is on kevin’s computer and he used to play it a lot, there are scores for all the games, and ADDICTED KEV is the top five or seven scorers in each and every game.

until now.

ok then,

mrs. full of purpose hughes.

2.6 million

that’s HOW MUCH MITT ROMNEY OWES IN TAXES.

newt gingrich’s wife, callista, is FORTY FIVE YEARS OLD.  he is an ugly 68.

and you know, of course, that he had a SIX YEAR affair with her, and finally divorced his second wife.  before that he was cheating on wife #1 with wife #2, and told one of those wives about wanting a divorce WHEN SHE WAS RECOVERING FROM CANCER.

fabulous fellows, that’s all i have to say.

6.2 million dollars.  just in taxes.

ok then,

mrs. thoughtful tuesday hughes

busy like a bee…

today i had hoped to GET THINGS DONE.  namely, i desperately want to make it easy to navigate through my many england photos and videos, plus i want to continue posting them.

my plan was to have nested pages; you’d click on the “england” link up there on the top, and then when you were on that page, you’d click on each page to see each day of photos and videos.

I CANNOT ACCOMPLISH THIS. 

i tried before and gave up, so this morning i decided to instead have individual blog posts on the page.  all i really need here is some way to break up this page, instead of it being this huge, huge monstrosity that will be insanely long and impossible to keep track of if i finish putting up the photos and videos the way it is.

so i really REALLY REALLY tried to read up on adding a blog post to the page.  AND I ACTUALLY GOT SOMETHING TO WORK.  i finally managed to download this little plugin, and i unzipped it and put it into my file manager and i activated it, and IT WORKED OH MY GOD.

there were a few problems, though – i’d have to create a post on the main page and then type in this code so it appeared on my england page.  it worked, but then it also printed a bunch of information about the post, which looked bad.  also, i’d have to do some other feat of magic to get the post NOT to appear on the main page.  plus… i can’t remember one more thing.  PLUS, it INSERTED A THICK DARK BLUE LINE through ALL OF THE SITE.  very very bad.

so i deleted the whole thing and went back to the whole nested pages.

there are plenty of instructions for having one page nested inside another one. BUT THE INSTRUCTIONS DON’T WORK.  every time i try it, and i keep trying overand over again like a psycho, thinking thaty it will magically work right, it puts the new page right up on the top of the main page, plus it’s not tested in any way.

i found a very long site that claims it’s the way to do the nesting, but when i tried the very first thing, which was to download and unzip the file, i couldn’t, because i can’t get the entire folder of stuff onto my file manager.  i tried just using the one file from the folder, the one with the name of the thing i want, but when i tried to activate it here on the site it said PLUGIN CANNOT BE ACTIVATED BECAUSE IT IS VERY BAD AND WILL WIPE OUT YOUR WHOLE SITE AND IT SUCKS.

or something like that. 

grrrr.

i’m giving up yet again, but maybe later today i’ll give it another try.

i have pleaded and begged christine to try to help me with this, but i’m pretty sure she has now moved to outer deepest burma, where she has no internet or phone access of any kind.

ironically, of course, she makes big bucks ACTUALLY DESIGNING HUGE WEBSITES for a company so this would probably only take her about five minutes.  i know for a fact that all the pages of technical stuff don’t make her want to run SCREAMING FROM THE ROOM, like i do.

at least i’m not focusing on the poor cows and pigs today and how i really need to become a vegetarian even though i don’t want to.

ok then,

mrs. ball of frustration monday hughes.

this morning in the paper

there was a picture of a cow, its dirty head sticking out of some huge machine.  the caption read “A cow is weighed and inspected using an ultrasound machine to assess fat content and marbling at a Maple Park, Ill, feedlot.”

the article was all about high cattle prices, and the cute little headline was “drought prods cattle prices to high.”

and that poor cow, with a tag on its ear, is looking at the camera, and i’m pretty sure it was thinking, “why me?”

do i have it in me to become a vegetarian?  because right now that’s what i really want to do. 

aren’t cows people, too?  i mean, yeah, they’re not actually human beings, but aren’t they thinking beings who deserve better than being put in huge machines to be measured for fat content and marbling, not to mention the whole horror of the feedlots and the slaughtering of them?

weighty thoughts this sunday morning.

plus, if i stopped eating meat, that wouldn’t help all the animals who are killed.  but at least i wouldn’t be part of it.

this morning kevin went off to a cowboy shoot and hadn’t fed the birds, so i filled the feeder and the bird feeder house and now there’s a feeding frenzy going on out there.  right now i see at least one cardinal, a bluejay, a couple of wrents and a woodpecker. 

so at least the birds are happy this morning.

part of this whole contemplating the vegetarianism thing started last sunday, when we went to a dinner for the 114th.  every year they have a speaker, and last year it was an interesting woman who was the curator or something at lincoln’s home and she brought along his actual portable writing desk and it was a good talk, not too long, and full of good stuff.

this year, it was some historian guy who rambled.  on and on, random things about lincoln, ending with saying that 1,000 books were published about lincoln last year in china, so that’s good news for the possibility of china becoming free and open.  uh huh.

but during his spech, which did almost last all of eternity, he said something about one of lincoln’s early jobs, something that certainly isn’t mentioned anywhere that i know of.

he said that lincoln had a job loading hogs, “who are intelligent animals,” the man said, onto boats to down river to be slaughtered.  and because the hogs are so bright and independent, they’d wander off if not contained…and they did that by SEWING THE HOGS’ EYELIDS SHUT.

i’m sorry i had to even write that, because it’s such an incredibly horrible thing to think about, and i can’t stop thinking about it.

i told this to a friend (a big ham lover), and he said, well, they don’t do that anymore…but then he said that they do all kinds of other horrible things to them.

on a happier note…lester has just come into the room, and whatever he does, it’ll be cute.

ok then,

mrs. somber sunday morning hughes.

vegetarian.

lester takes a walk!

 and he enjoyed himself thoroughly.  it was late monday afternoon, a beatiful, sunny, warm january day. 

mollie went with us, of course, and the first thing she did is run after the geese in the yard, who flew into the water.

les wanted to go right down to the dock to watch the geese and ducks.

as lester watches, mollie is there in the background snuffling around.

les got way out there on the dock.

chillaxin on the dock.

he kept turning away from me, so i called him, and he came right over.

but then he decided to climb down onto the rocks.

he’s still watching the geese who moved over to the bay.

i wasn’t about to climb down on the rocks because of the certainty of falling, and at this point lester is pretty well wrapped around that little bush.

he had to STOP EVERYTHING so he could investigate something down in the rocks.

somehow he managed to get back to the dock, where he relaxed from his rocky adventure.

he liked to play with the leash.

and then he had to STOP EVERYTHING again to do a quick cleanup.

meanwhile, poor little chester had gone out into the fenced yard and meowed sadly down at us.  i will never even try to put him on the leash, sinc he really doesn’t even like to be picked up.  it would be disasterous.  you can just barely see chester, to the left of mollie, who had decided she’d had enough of the whole walk thing.

lester, meanwhile, had to get right over to his favorite tree to chew on some grass.

he loves stalking around in the weeds.

he sniffed in his favorite hole but i guess the critters living inside hadn’t been around recently, so he didn’t even climb inside.

the noble kitty, happy with his life.

it’s funny; last year i assumed that that would be the only year i’d have to take him for walks, but clearly, this will go on forever.  we definitely can’t trust him to roam free, and he loves his walks a lot. 

ok then,

mrs. saturday afternoon hughes.

24-7 kitties, plus some deer

way back on the 14th was the first time this winter we’ve seen a gaggle of deer at the feeder.  they’ve been in abundance whenever we’ve been on walks through the university soccer fields, though.  yesterday mollie chased a couple, which is always entertaining.

last sunday chester romped out in the snow.  well, first he slunk along, headed for the fence in pursuit of birds.

he didn’t seem to mind the snow too much, but he stayed out for quite a while.

i have approximately a million pictures of lester when i took him for a walk last monday, after all the snow had melted and it was a beautiful 60 degrees.  that’s the only problem with the camera battery not conking out; i just kept taking pictures cause he was just SO CUTE.

i will post them later.

meanwhile, it looks and feels like winter today, but on the other hand, it’s already the END OF JANUARY, and before you know it, SPRING WILL SPRING!

ok then,

mrs. saturday morning hughes.

because my sister is very generous,

i am able to use her computer til mine is fixed!  yay, amy!

just one little photo here of the darling kitties.

last night before going to bed, i realized that lester wasn’t around – he’s usually sleeping on the couch, invading mollie’s space.  but no lester upstairs, no lester in the basement; where had he gone?  i checked the upstairs and the basement again, and was puzzled.  i called out the back door, because he can get out the doggie door.  it was really cold and windy and i figured he probably wouldn’t be out there.

after a while i opened the door to the hot tub room and called him, and heard a very plaintive and panicky MEOW!  clearly, he wasn’t in the enclosed back yard. 

i ran to the door from the screened porch and turned on the floodlights outside.  there he was, frantic to get inside, and looking back over his shoulder out into the blackness. 

and of course the door was frozen shut so i had to struggle with it as the poor little kitty kept meowing.

finally i got it open and he ran inside.  but how did he get out?  he must have figured a new way to escape the fence, but he wasn’t able to get back in, and then there was something out there in the dark that scared him…

everybody is sleeping peacefully now.  whew.

i am about to go out in the world even though the wind is whipping and it’s probably about 10 below, plus it’s supposed to snow.  yuck.

ok then,

mrs. friday hughes.