Category: Chillin’

The fever has passed… (Dimetapp flashbacks kick ass)

But I felt strangely drawn to reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez as strongly as I usually feel like watching TV after popping heavy duty cold medicine. I realized that reading 100 Years of Solitude in Spanish is quite manageable after having read it in English before (at university), even not having spoken more than a couple lines of Spanish since high school. But maybe I was just fever-hallucinating, who knows?
A kind of trippy thing happened though. After the fever passed this afternoon I went shopping and bought ingredients for chicken soup, including a whole chicken. I bought it at the supermarket so it was cleaned and gutted, but when I tore off the package wrap and took it out of its styrofoam coffin I saw that the head was still attached and tucked under the body. It was Pinky, come to visit Daddy from the grave!
Believe me, it was quite hard to cut off the neck from the body and then the head from the neck with a pair of kitchen scissors. I kept expecting a Pet Sematary scene with dead eyes suddenly popping open and pale beak pecking at my hand… It was soon all done, however, and the soup is delicious.

RIP Pinky

I was away on a scouting trip for our upcoming International Camp all today and seem to have come down with something nasty, hopefully not the piggy flu.
The worst news today, though, is that a stray dog came into our yard, snapped Pinky’s neck, and carried him off. Nam saw the carrying off part and knows which dog it is. Vengeance will be mine…

Pinky’s still still alive

I really should take a photo because he (He may very well be a she, but who can tell? He acts like a he. Then again, he was smart enough not to go over the fence and get eaten by the doberman next door like his siblings, so maybe he’s a she…) is now about four times bigger than when we got him and it’s getting very cramped in his sleeping box. He started acting like a pet a week or so after he became the last chick standing, coming back to the box every day when it got dark and running around our legs for food… Now he’s Max’s first pet.
He loves to eat crabs. Who knows why, but these little marsh crabs sometimes wander into our yard from the pond across the street. When Pinkie sees one, he picks off all their legs and arms, then pecks out the eyes. If I catch him doing it, I’ll usually smash the crab’s carapace and then Pinkie gets to eat a fine kanimiso. It’s his favorite treat. Today I ran over a fairly large one on the way out of the driveway. I took it to Pinkie and realized that at some point he must have gotten pinched, because he was a lot more cautious than he was the first couple of times I saw him go at it. This crab was already dead and smashed, though. Pinkie started to chow down and I left for work a second time.
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Related: Pinky’s still alive and Five jive colors of haplessness
Also: Here’s a photo of the kind of crab mentioned above that I took a couple years ago, before our house was complete.

1:50 AM

I’m grading writing exams and listening to Houses of the Holy. Definitely my favorite Zepp. I tried grading earlier in the evening but Max would come and take my pen away every time. Eventually I grew tired of getting nothing done and crashed out on the couch. when I woke up it was dark throughout the house and the fan that Nam had thoughtfully pointed at me hadn’t kept the mosquitoes from biting the hell out of my legs. Once I got up for water I remembered the grading I’d been doing and now I sit here, scratching my legs and appreciating a quiet house (save for The Rain Song).
Damn, even the songs I don’t really like on this album are pretty goddamn good.