Her Side Funnies

I repeatedly mention that my husband is from Denver. It explains his innocence and gullibility and his resistance to accepting my core Redneck values.

Last spring we bought some chicks from the farm store. Buff Orpingtons. Golden Rolls Royce’s of the chicken world. They were cute. They were fuzzy. They quickly morphed into flapping balls of feathers coating the interior of the house with more dust than my liberal housekeeping policy allows.

A chicken house needed to be constructed, which brought the first of many misunderstandings between Ken and myself.

Ken believed that the chickens needed a far more “sturdy” home than I recognized from my childhood. My family’s chicken coop consisted of patchy chicken wire, baling string, a German Shepherd dog, and a door with a tricky latch that allowed cousins to be locked in the chicken coop for games of cowboys, Indians, robbers and jail until their mothers played squawk-n-swat, an unpopular farm game involving yelling and spanking. But, I digress. (more…)

For those interested in the prior Grass Carp entry, click here.  For a complete index of Dani’s comical posts, click here.  *Before and after shots of the pond are shown at the end of this post.

The grass carp have been in the pond now since late August and I, the ever-optimistic one, assumed they would have already cleaned the pond by now and be ready to tackle the laundry, or vacuum my living room, or at least be sweeping the front stoop.  This, to my disappointment, is not the case. (Proof of abundant laundry shown at left.)

In looking out at the pond, I continued to see globs of crusty nasty glop floating atop the pond.  Asking husband Ken about this, he explained to me that while grass carp will clean the pond, they eat the yummy stuff first.  Crusty nasty glop floating on top of the pond, he assured me, is not that yummy.

I concede that point.

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This post follows “Brandy swamp juice at day 29.”  To see that post, click here.

On July 29, 2009, I forged ahead with an experiment, of sorts.  I had never tried to make brandy, but had a lot of fruit falling off the tree and decided to go online and get a recipe.  The recipe I found involved filling a glass gallon jar with fruit, adding three cups of sugar and approximately 26 ounces of cheap vodka.  The instructions said to turn the jar of brandy daily, from right side up to upside down for three months.  And so I have.

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A self-portrait of Dani after attending the Colorado State Fair with her family! Notice the dark circles under my eyes....

We went to the Colorado State Fair last weekend.  It was a great experience, except that Ken’s nostrils decided to mimic a jack hammer all night.  Trying to “do” the state fair on no sleep is insanity.  Ken had to work part of the weekend, so he needed a wireless connection.  No problem, he thought, figuring he would just go to a cyber cafe. 

After phoning half a dozen of those, he realized that cyber cafes are not the business to be in.  All had closed up shop since no one used them.  No problem, he thought, figuring he could easily purchase a gizmo for his laptop to access his cell phone.  That sounded so easy, but that’s not how it went down. 

Instead of enjoying the state fair, we traveled all over Pueblo through parade routes, past police men, into residential neighborhoods trying to find a Best Buy store to purchase the special gizmo.  That would not have been bad, but we got lost in a residential neighborhood and ran across a yard sale…with a drum set.  (Ben, like me, is a drummer and has been leaving saliva puddles whenever he thinks of actually owning a drum – which Ken and I have resisted thus far.)

So, the drumset was only $180 (the cymbals alone cost over $300).  That’s when Ben had a near seizure in the car.  Not one to easily get ruffled, Dad asked Ben if he had $180.  Negative.  Did he have a “plan” for attaining $180?  Negative.  Had he paid off the most recent $500+ repair cost on his clunker of a car?  Negative.  (more…)

Evidence of primordial life? Poison? Or incredible football beverage?

This post follows “Brandy, the new hobby.”  To view that post, click here.

Well, I do believe I’ll be feeding the first batch of brandy to Ken and his football buddies.  To call this batch “unappetizing” would be an understatement.  It is a murky blend of decomposing apricots,   The poor apricots look like aging women in there…losing their perky forms and digressing into blobs of soft pulp.  Yes, AARP is not hiring me as a marketing rep.  And the brandy institute is not interested in my skills, either.

For those of you interested in following the brandy experiment, I guess it is important to know that the fruit supposedly begins to ferment at 28 days.  Hmmm.  28 days sounds familiar.  Oh, yes, that’s coincidentally the same length of time it takes women to develop a “change in character,” too.  You can disregard that last statement as brandy consumption and PMS are rarely related, except in extreme cases.

As I spin the gallon jar around, the bodies of the apricots look like lifeless eyeballs in a high school science teachers lab.  Mind you, this is in direct contrast to the crabapple brandy.  The crabapple brandy looks great!  Clear liquid, still perky bodies at 28 days – very tasty looking indeed.  (That’s the one I’ll try…three days after Ken and his buddies try batch number one. )  If Ken is grabbing his stomach and moaning in pain, I’ll blame it on the nachos, but I may delay drinking my portion…indefinitely. (more…)