Fulfillment. The name of the game here is fulfillment.
Idaho is just about to end its long, slow slog into spring.
Idaho does this every year. It waits and waits and waits and waits until sometime in May when it suddenly decides to get its act together and make us some buds. And then, POW!
Idaho in spring is absolutely heart-stopping, I can't wait. We're not quite there yet. It's shifting closer. It's so, so close.
(Anyway, could I GET any more obtuse?)
(Probably. You wanna find out?)
Um, here's a bit of excitement for you:
hey huck!
The Appaloosa Horse Museum! Not to get too excited about it or anything, it's just that, as much as I love lentils . . .
("It's just that . . .", "Well . . . ", "Actually . . . ", and, "I'm sorry to tell you this, but . . . ", are apparently my favorite ways to start sentences, according to Huck and his newest ways of starting sentences.)
Well. I am sorry to tell you this, but the Appaloosa Museum is super tiny.
It did smell good inside though.
Did you know Huck's favorite food these days is octopus?
Yes, that's it. Octopus. Shrimp will do, too, if the octopus is all out. He's very brave, ins't he?
Personally I haven't dared eat any seafood since we left the city, because I value my life.
No no no, I'm sure it's not that bad, although someday when Huck is old enough to know what this means, I'd like to ask him whether eating seafood in a landlocked state should be concerning unto him.
But then, what am I even talking about!? This restaurant up there is in Pullman! Which, while only 8 miles from where I sit at this moment in this very landlocked state called Idaho, happens to be in Washington, which, as we all know from the fifth grade, is a coastal state.
Doesn't that sort of make you want to question, like, everything?!?
Okay, I exaggerate. We've had sunshine three times in the last three weeks!! It's not all that bad! Unless you're a chicken and your water's frozen and the heated water thinger isn't working right for some reason. That sucks.
(Might suck even more to be the one who has to replace said water. Knock it off, winter!)
We're just over here plugging along merrily. Professor TheBeebs is well, quite spritely, and in rather good health for his rather advanced age. :) He has one of those stadium style classes this semester with more than 100 students staring at him blankly and he reports he has zero stage fright whatsoever! What a stud!
Huck is thiiiiiis close to reading but don't tell him that. He professes an undying love of McDonald's pancakes and isn't this starting to sound like an annual Christmas letter?
The chickens continue to be naughy bodies, as you'd expect.
Look at those brats.
We've been having in-coop days more often than normal, thanks in large part to Sir Ice Cream the Cocky Rooster Jerk. Once that turkey went into puberty and fully unleashed himself in all his manly dudeliness and things, The Ladies + The Babies started going totally bonkers. All frisky and opinionated. Just the other day I found the pack of them all walking east on the sidewalk in front of our neighbor's house going who even knows where? Chicken field trip! Ice Cream was such a bad influence. So, we sent him to the farm! No but actually we did send him to a farm.
Okay wait. The whole story! I know you want it!!
(Obvious Disclaimage: This gets long, meandering, and pointless pretty quickly. Your risk, etc.)
ONCE UPON A TIME, there was a moronic lady named Natalie.
Natalie brought Ice Cream The Chicken into the Holbrook family one Saturday in September when the Latah County Fair was in town and we sort of accidentally happened to be there in the Poultry barn right at opening. And did you know, those cute baby chicks and ducks they have, YOU CAN BUY THEM? For, like, three bucks. The value of a chicken life! So long as you get there early.
Well. I bought six. Dumb. I told the chicken dude I wanted Araucanas or Americaunas. They lay blue eggs. Sometimes pink or green! Already we had two Rhode Island Reds going on (Linda and Tootsie, who are THE NAUGHTIEST) plus two Buff Orpingtons (Tiny Tim and Tiny Cuddles, who are the sweetest little babies and always do as they're told), so we wanted not-brown eggs this time. You really have to think about balancing the aesthetics of these things, you know, so, that was my request. The chicken guy was all, Sure thing I'll do my best! But, you know, it's hard to know their gender sometimes, let alone their breeds.
So wait now, you are wondering: Did this give me slight pause? I'll admit it, it TOTALLY DID, but I ignored it because that's how I like to live. Fast and loose.
Anyway, by the time they were ready for pick-up at the end of the fair weekend, two of my designated six had passed on to chickie heaven (common, apparently), and so we went home with four plus a six dolla refund.
They all fit in one kid's shoebox! Size 7. One of them escaped in the poultry ring when we were collecting them and it was all panic! panic! Hens clucking in their cages in alarm as all these huge adults ran around trying to catch this tiny little fluff ball. But we caught her! It was most likely Mars. Dang you, Mars. Mars is always busting out of places. She's kind of a brat, actually.
ANYWAY.
Huck and I went home with our four chickies--three Araucanas, one Rhode Island Red, as far as we could tell--and off we went to set them up in a homemade brooder in the basement but more on that later because all these chicken how-to requests I keep getting seem like fun and if I don't save all that for later THIS WILL NEVER END.
Ice Cream, Venus, and Mars: the three Araucanas. Huck named them. They were his babies. Hillary Clinton was my baby. She's a mystery, that one. I just feel like Rhode Island Reds deserve the kind of names you'd find in a secretary from the 1970s or something. One of Huck's three Araucanas, the one designated Ice Cream, pretty quickly became distinctly larger than the others + seemed to be growing much faster. Also, Ice Cream had green feet, not yellow, which is a detail that probably only interests me, but it's worth noting anyway.
Ice Cream was also the bravest of the bunch and put up the least fuss at being held. Gender related? Probably not? I feel like I am wading in the wrong end of chicken feminism here and I don't want to say the wrong thing!
Whatever this is getting boring. I'll skip to the end. Something was up but we didn't know what, until last week. I woke up to some crowing. At first I thought it might be Linda. Leave it to Linda to be so obnoxiously vocal that she learned how to crow, but! Then I saw it happen in the flesh! Er, in the feather!
Speaking of feathers, Ice Cream had some real fancy plumage going on all of the sudden, like, gleaming emerald tail feathers that came up out of NOWHERE.
And then Ice Cream hopped on the back of Tootsie and Tootsie squawked in alarm and it was pretty clear from there what we were dealing with.
THERE WAS A ROOSTER AMONG US.
Other interesting things to note about this is how it completely changed the dynamic within the flock, especially with The Babies (not as much as with The Ladies). I'd been replaced as alpha chicken by that stinker and NOBODY was listening to me anymore. So he had to go. (Also he is illegal in this part of town, so, he really had to go.)
Can you believe I'm still talking about this?
Well, I wanted to eat him, it felt like the responsible thing to do. I don't even eat chicken ever is the weird part. But the town butcher only handles non-poultry (goat, lamb, cow, people), so it was on me. I looked up humane ways to slaughter him, reviewed the plucking process online (boiling water? dunked by the feet? uuuuhhhhh), and then ultimately decided I wasn't the one to do that kind of thing,the value of a chicken life is way more than three bucks OR dinner if you ask me). So we found him a caring home down the highway a bit, where the cocks are legal and an Ice Cream like he can be free to roam and harass whichever hen hotties he fancied.
The babies are reeling with all this change, but the team seems happier to stay put on our side of the fence now that the testosterone level has diminished. Hillary Clinton has been a little bit heartbroken. They were going steady, see. They shared a nesting box at night. She still sleeps on her side of the box, all by her lonesome. It's awfully sad.
But at least I no longer have to worry about cracking a fetus into my omelette?
Guys this world is a pretty brutal place when you eat things. Yeesh.
You guys. Mercury isn't in retrograde. I am in retrograde.
as is huck's latest hair cut. again.
The week before Christmas vacation, my laptop took a Sprite Zero swim.
That horrible feeling of second-hand angst right there? That is a sign you are human! Congratulations! Seven hundred dollars, it cost me! But let's not dwell on that!
And then my grandma died.
And then, after my Instagram just stopped working for a week, a pregnancy test two-pack told me I was pregnant! Before very quickly changing its mind the following day and being like, Nah, just kidding.
(Thanks for nothing, Clomid.)
AND THEN MY TOILET WENT OUT OF COMMISSION.
Wait! This part is good. (Debatable.)
Apparently when our bathroom floor was built, like, in the dark ages, soooooomeone wasn't paying attention, because it has been leaking raw sewage since, well, maybe since forever? Since 1890 when the house was built? Generations of sewage. Up into our floors. And then under our feet. Errbody's poop. It's pretty well and disgusting. We noticed it just before Christmas, and by New Years when we were back from Portland the vinyl had bubbled up and the Odd Jobs handyman dude finally came by (in his multicolored, handprint-covered jalopy that I'm pretty sure might be a retrofitted ice cream truck, I sort of want to steal it) to rip up our floor and promptly lose the flange to our toilet, which apparently nobody sells here in Moscow? Because he was just like, "Oh well, I'll just come back tomorrow."
How hard is it really to find a decent flange around these parts? And I would like to spell it "phlange," please. (Ph f sounds are where its AT!)
Brandon Holbrook was all like, "Hey! Maybe she'll get us a hotel room for the night where there's an indoor pool! Silver lining!"
Brandon Holbrook is a super optimist like that.
But no, we got a bucket. Yes, my story ends with a hole in the floor where the toilet used to be, and the clanging sound of a bucket banging to the floor in the middle of our living room while the landlady stood there, looking at me expectantly as though she had just brought me the kindest of gifts out of the goodness of her heart.
It was camouflaged, so that was cool. "HUNTER'S LOO," it read on the top.
"What am I supposed to be doing with THAT!?" I asked as the reverberations of the handle clanged around in the empty toilet bucket.
"Well, in case you have to poop." Something like that.
(Huck used it. He reported it a pleasurable experience.)
The next morning, my iPhone woke up broken. Broke! Broke as a joke! Screen, completely glitched out! Some long-term water damage apparently decided to kick in and bust stuff randomly during the dumbest week ever, which was almost the cherry on the cake. Until! The bleeding started. That was the peak of it.
Oh I knew it was coming, and it wasn't all that terrible. But it was sad. In that dull way this time, where your wrinkled balloon is finally declared certifiably deflated in all the possible ways, but the worst of it is over and most of what you feel is relief.
I cried until my face was wet while Brandon held my hand, and then I sat very still in my bed and I made my final What Comes Next decision. Thanks for nothing, Clomid.
But I was ready for it.
The night before, knowing what was coming, I had laid in my bed with my eyes shut tight, the poop bucket empty in the living room, and I had let myself hope. Big hope. I had let myself hope like crazy that my next test would come out positive. I mean, know what a positive result followed by a negative means, but I still went all the way with it. It was my last cycle on the Clomid. I was going to commit the cardinal sin and just get my hopes UP. You never know! Right?
So it was going to be twins, I just knew it. I had ultrasounds and I picked out their names. I went maternity clothes shopping and I wondered which carseats to buy. I went on bedrest. They were born three weeks early. They got matching haircuts for their first day of school and they got really into horses and friendship bracelets in the middle of their fifth grade year. Lots of freckles, tea parties, and high school dances, all in my imagination, all by myself, between the hours of midnight and 1AM.
It was magical.
And then I went through an entire box of extra super tampons in under two days. IMPRESSIVE! But like I said, I was ready for it.
Though for a minute there I was 26 again and working at the Schweitzer on the hill and wondering "what if this really doesn't happen for me?" until I snapped out of it and remembered, yeah, no. Itdidhappen for me. And it was everything. I did it and I loved it and I don't need anything more. My job now is to move past the part where I need it to happen again and to exist instead in the place where I am grateful and I love it, I love everything about my life, just as though I had chose it for myself to begin with.
And oh, I can do that! I do that aaaaaall the time. Mercury ain't got nothing on me. I might be small. But I am scrappy.
In other news: Gra. Nny. Squares.
And trench coats! See? It's not been all bad, check out this London Fog I scored secondhand for fifteen dollars!
But the point of this is here: When in doubt, try it with your bag on. Trrrrrust me. It clears up, like, EVERYTHING. All of life's problems can be solved with purses on in dressing rooms.
(It also helps with making clothing purchasing decisions.)
I've also been so grateful this week for my girlfriends, who got appropriately excited for me when my pregnancy test was being nice and then appropriately ticked off for me when it turned out it to be an asshole instead. Thanks, sisters.
Oh ya gotta have friieeeeeeeeeends!
(Especially friends with daughters who'll sit on your lap after brunch and play with your hair and tell you it's soooooo puffy (highest of compliments for this perfect specimen of a 2-year-old).)
Well! That's all she wrote. And now I got the extreme pleasure of sitting on the floor with Huck while he transforms Chase from a police car into an autobot over. and over. and over.
It's been a quiet, low-key December over here at Camp Holbrook.
I think this is going to go down in my life as the time where all I could do was exist. And not terribly gracefully, either. But I'm getting through it. That's all this is over here. Take the day as it comes and try to remind myself hourly that this isn't forever, my motivation will come back, that this is just me on hormone treatments, and once it ends I'll be back to my real me again, unless of course the hormones end successfully, in which case I'll be back to me, but only me pregnant.
That would be rad.
("This is your brain on Pregnant. Any questions?")
I've been thinking a lot about the concept of limbo. I ain't never been Catholic but I think I might be limbo's champion subscriber just the same. At this point I am a full-on bubble of waiting. W-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-aiting. Every decision that pops up before me has two separate answers, each of which depends on something happening--or not happening--inside my uterus.
Does this make my reproductive system Purgatory?!!?
Come January Something-or-other I'll know definitively what the rest of my year will look like but until then, I'm just a grab bag of maybes right now. I don't know. Maybe? Maybe this, maybe that?
Ooh, and ifs!
Don't you love ifs??
If / then scenarios are totally my jam right now.
Huck the Great and Terrible continues to be both great AND terrible, in somewhat equal measures.
His favorite thing to hear around the house these days is, "I'm your mom, I'm not supposed to be nice."
My favorite is, "The more you say 'yes, mom,' the more *I* can say 'yes, Huck.'"
Another of Huck's favorites is, "Do it now. NOW. Right now. NOW." It ranks right up there with "because," which I like to sing at him a la Wizard of Oz when he's really asking for it (because because because because becaaaaaaaaaaause!). It makes him CRAZY.
You can use that one for free! And for that my friends you are welcome!
This is my question: Does your husband like to have the radio on inside the house AT ALL HOURS?
My husband is super into the radio. I don't even know if he likes to listen to the radio or if he just likes to have the background noise, but it's on. IT IS ALWAYS ON. Most times when it's on, he'll run upstairs for something, get distracted and stay a while, and then frown at me if, while he has been away, I happen to turn it off.
So that is what Brandon is up to lately.
What is wrong with me but having the radio on makes me feel all jangly in my brain! It's really fine during Christmas when the stations all play jingly Christmas songs and stuff (the same ones OVER AND OVER), but once we're back to easy listening and Santana collaborations imma have to get drastic over here. I mean it!
I want to have words with you about the John Tesh show though. Lord help me but I can't help myself. I love it. I am telling you I can feeeeeeel myself getting smarter. Intelligence for LIFE!!
Also. John Tesh > Delilah.
Have we ever talked about Delilah?
Anyway, I have opinions.
We like to make giant excursions out of any time we need to drive down to Lewiston or Clarkston for something. That drive down the grade is just the most beautiful thing when the sun is setting over the Snake River. Most recently our excuse was picking up the Jeep once her repairs were finished. (On our way out Huck said, "Oh man! I was hoping they were gonna paint it green!") We celebrated Suzie Q 2's return to the Holbrook Land of the Living with Fazzari's pizza and a Costco trip.
Fazzari's pizza is a little bit weird, BUT THE HOLIDAY ATMOSPHERE CANNOT BE BEAT.
Get the shotzi--it's got mustard and sauerkraut on it. It's weird. Pass on the taco one.
You know, if ever you find yourself in my neck of the woods. Hah! Hah. #wompwomp
We went to a holiday party with some of Brandon's coworkers and once again, my macaroons. It always surprises me the amount of compliments I get. The recipe came from the back of the bag! You should make them. Here is the recipe:
One package shredded coconut
Four egg whites
1/2 tsp almond extract
6 tbsp flour
2/3 cup sugar
Dash of salt
Mix, plop on a baking sheet, bake at 325 for 15 minutes.
I'm not kidding you, they FLY off the plate. We like to drizzle melted chocolate on top.
But what you've REALLY come here for is an update on my girlies! I know! I know what you're after!
WELL.
We had a situation a bit ago wherein we thought one of our twins* had gotten lost. Or eaten. My money was on eaten.
Here's how this happened.
Well, soooo, these days the girlies get themselves situated in the coop all cozy for bedtime on their own. I just run up after dark to make sure they're all accounted for and to tell them how proud I am to be their mommy.
(Sometimes I impart words of wisdom, like, "BE NICE TO THE BABIES, CUDDLES." or "STAY OFF THE FENCE, LINDA.")
So the other night when I went up the hill I counted one-two-three-four, four Ladies, good girls! Cuddles by the window because she's the boss, Toots and Tiny Tim like to assume the submissive position around me so I give them lots of snuggles, and then I counted the babies, who like to sleep all four all on top of each other in one tiny nesting box which they also happen to like to poop in.
The babies are disgusting.
But seriously, they toilet trained themselves. They poop in two nesting boxes that they've designated as pooping boxes, aaaaaaas well as on my welcome mat.
"One-two-three,"
I'm counting babies, stay with me here, ". . . wait, where's four? Guys! Where's the **other twin baby?"
I hunted for her around the yard in the dark for a while. Nowhere! What happened? Neighbor's cat? Hawk? Definitely she got eaten. I was grateful it wasn't Hillary Clinton, because I love that Hillary Clinton, and then I felt guilty for having a favorite baby, and then I figured I just counted wrong? So I went back in.
Guys I went back in twice for a recount. I lifted babies out of poop and set them down back into poop, I searched all the nooks and crannies and corners and straw lumps, I even asked Linda if she'd seen where she went (not helpful), but no dice. She was gone. I am telling you, she was gone.
The following day I kept them locked in the coop just in case whatever'd nabbed the baby was going to come back for seconds, and then the day after THAT I went back into the coop, and suddenly there were just four babies again? What, did she sneak in through the window!?
Soooooo that's my story.
*The twins are named Venus and Mars, and I can't tell which is which.
**Though it was most likely Mars. Back when Mars had freckles and I could tell her apart from Venus, she was always busting out of the brooder, and I usually had to scoot her out from behind the washing machine using the back of a broom handle. She's our troublemaker. I expect eye-liner and angsty poetry here any day now.
But look at all those pretty eggs! I can't wait until Ice Cream starts laying. She's an Ameraucana and is supposed to churn out blue-green eggs. Maybe even pink!
Oh shoot what else . . .
Well, we've had sun . . .
. . . we've had rain . . .
. . . we've had snow.
Oh! AND I made the world's first perfect pancake ever to come from my house! (It was exciting.)
Submitted Monday, November 2-- wait is it still Monday?? I swear it's been dark since noon. #notreally
Last week we had a windstorm. The worst in something like 200 years. 70mph wind gusts, branches in the windows (not ours, thankfully), cardboard strewn all over the yard (yep, that one's us). It was big and it was sometimes-scary and the power went out for four hours, then it came back on for about three minutes (yayy!), then it went back out for another . . . forever (arghhg). Once the power was finally back on for good things seemed promising, but somehow the power forgot to bring with it the rest of modern life as we know it, so that was inconvenient. My phone wouldn't send or receive text messages at will and Gmail decided to stop delivering my mail to me, like, all together. No emails! For a week! But lots of phone calls from people being like, I'm EMAILING you what's the DEAL! Talking on the phone isn't fun but it turns out it's not THAT bad. Though trying to binge watch Netflix while the wifi isn't sure it remembers how to work . . . I mean, we have important business to attend to, people!
And then the Jeep up and stopped working. Soooooo . . . WHY??
Speaking of Netflix.
Did I mention it got dark at 9AM today?
Picture it: You've got B watching Mad Men on the iPad, me watching The West Wing on the laptop, Huck watching Disney Junior on the TV . . . all in the same room upstairs, all on the same futon, empty string cheese wrappers EVERYWHERE, needlepoint stuff off to one side. Sad translation of the term "Netflix and Chill," am I right?
Well. The West Wing? My new coping strategy for the worst parts of the Clomid (day 9 through ALL OF IT) is thinking about the Buddha (oh, the Clomid rage!) and watching lots of Netflix.
I'm just kidding about the Buddha.
So I finally finished The West Wing today (lots of fast forwarding through Jimmy Smits scenes, sorry dude, I just want Josh and Donna to kiss already). I cried like a blubbering baby (BARTLET FOR AMERICA!) (SAM SEABORN!!), as you do, and now that that's accomplished I am now prepared to engage in the all-important next step in The Great Netflix Experience (which mirrors The Great Reading Harry Potter Experience), which is the Rough Re-Entry Into Real Life experience. And how inadequate does it make me feel that I'm looking around me and I'm like,"This isn't the White House! I don't work at the White House! Nobody is racing around me with witty banter! I have nothing important to do! How did this house get so messy?!!"
And how cute is Josh Lyman? He's kind of a creep but also, mostly pretty cute. #redheads
Then you walk around collecting empty Diet Coke cans and fishing that pillow out from between the couch cushions and clearing all your abandoned socks and blankets and sweatshirts from your Netflix nest of garbage all the while you're like, "I'm pretty sure I have something I should be doing right now . . . what was it?"
It takes you a minute! You know.
Luckily my email finally decided to get its act together this morning. I woke up this morning to 300 not-junk unread emails after going to bed with zero. THREE HUNDRED!?!?
(Soooo, if you emailed me this week . . . I AM SO SORRY!)
Anyway, that's the update from the sticks. Post-storm clean up. Clomid storms, Netflix storms, windstorms, car trouble storms, ramping-up-to-the-holidays-needlepoint-gifts storms. We are in storm repair mode.
(Though I might already be ready for another Netflix binge instead. Let's just say I've been operatically singing "Cloooo-miiiiid" a lot these days. Any series recommendations?)
And now for an assortment of completely off-topic topics for your pleasure. It's probably going to be hideously long because it's been five millennia since I've been up in this joint.
Ahem!
Item one. Clomid boobs. Are not to be trusted.
Item two. So I have these chickens?
Look at them colluding on something all cute like. I'm onto you, ladies!
So we've taken to calling them The Ladies and The Babies. Well, *I've* taken to calling them The Ladies + Babies. Those're my girls. Gosh I love those turkeys. I look forward to letting them out in the morning and surmising their evening activities (today I walked in on five individual circles in the straw, each the perfect size of a chicken butt, like mysterious crop circles--were they trying to send me a message?; the other morning I came in to find all eight of them battling for space on the coop window ledge, poor Cuddles front + center getting smooshed all to heck, her little face pressed against the chicken wire, all of them packed in there tight with one Cuddles eyeball sending me an acute expression of alarm mingled a knowing understanding that that spot in the front means she's boss, and that's worth something, so she'll take it like a champ), and I look forward to ushering them up the hill and tucking them into bed at night.
Somebody always has an attitude about something.
I find it delightful!
Huck only likes The Babies because he has decided he is their mom, but me and Cuddles, man.
Tiny Cuddles. She's kind of like my assistant manager.
She'd be the one to stage a mutiny, I'd bet.
Speaking of the Huckleberry Hero (his chosen alter ego), well, these days we are into buttered noodles. It's buttered noodles all day errday. I like mine with salt and pepper, sometimes thawed peas from the freezer, but really it's just about the butter and the noodles, if you're a Huck. He's a noodle purist. All day. Every. Day.
I used up the last of the carrots from the farmer's market in a SPECTACULAR failure of a supper.
No, I can call it that now because I live in the sticks. Don't even argue with it.
But the good news is, my Getting Off the Brooklyn Eat-Out Wagon has been successful! (We eat a lot of cereal.)
I've been crocheting dish rags for Christmas presents. It's soothing as all get out.
