Lil' Things

I haven't updated in a few days, so I'm just going to play quick catch up.

Let's see, Friday Hubby and I spent the day in Springfield at an awards luncheon so I could personally receive my first place award for a breaking news story from the Illinois Press Association. I was so worried I would actually have to go up and say something I thought I was going to pee myself, or die with my face buried in the chicken cordon bleu and steamed veggies. I'm NOT a public speaker, I turn to a quivering pile of goo in front of even small crowds. Fortunately, all I had to do was go up and accept the award then do a grip-and-grin photo later. Lunch was good, the company was better and it was a nice way to spend a paid day off while getting paid for mileage AND getting a couple hundred dollar bonus on the next check! Sheesh, maybe I should work towards these awards more often! Ha! If I did this for the awards only, I'd be a very, very unhappy camper. It's a job you have to do because you love the work, not because you want to get rich or even become famous.

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Wild is developing a serious social life. She has gone out or been somewhere with her friends every weekend for the past month. She was complaining yesterday about how mean we are that we never let her do anything with her friends. All bitching and moaning ceased when the variety of previous weeks' activities were brought to her attention. I have conceded and told her she could invite her "boyfriend," SkaterDude, to the house for dinner Wednesday night. She's been begging to go to the park to hang with him, alone, or have him come over. I'd much rather SkaterDude be at our house, under our watchful parent eyes, then be alone somewhere with Wild. We'll see how this goes. Maybe I'll make liver and onions or something equally horrible to see if he'll gag it down in the name of good manners. *wrings hands evilly*

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I finally finished Stephen King's "Bag of Bones" last night on the drive home. What a fantastic book. I've read just about every book of King's, and I'd have to say this one was his absolute best. It's a bit different than his past efforts, and well worth the read. I'm now reading "Little Friend." Interesting so far, but I'm seriously disliking the abridged version. It just feels jumpy and slightly jarring, like there is something obviously missing. Oh, I also finished "A Thrall's Tale." It ended rather anti-climatically, and I really didn't feel anything when I put it down for the last time. Typically a good book will make me sit and think about it for awhile after I've read the last chapter, or, at the very least, wish for a few more chapters. This one elicited none of the usual response. I was actually rather happy to finally finish it so I could start an easy-reading tawdry romance. A girl needs one of those in her life every now and then.

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I ordered 20 trees, shrubs and flowering bushes yesterday for fall planting. They should be here in November. I bought a couple of lilac bushes, a couple of azaelas, a couple variety of pines, sugar maples, birches, ash, forsythia, red maple and silver maple. Plus some others whose species have slipped my mind. I planted some daffodils over the weekend but still need to get the tulips, irises, lilies and gladiolas in before the ground freezes. I'd like to get part of my vegetable garden plot dug up too so I can plant a few cool weather crops, like spinach (I KNOW mine won't contaminated with e. coli!), radishes, turnips, Swiss chard and a variety of salad greens. All this and still working on the getting the fence cleared enough so I can remove 10 acres of barbed wire and replace fence posts before I start stringing electrobraid. The sooner I get that all done, the sooner I can start looking for a couple of horses to fill my empty pastures.

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Hubby finally finished building the chicken coop...now our little feathered friends have a safe place to live, away from all the chicken-hungry critters who want to eat them in the dead of the night. It's going to need enlarged in the spring though, as I plan to order 25 more chickens, a mix of different exotics, around March. The Aruacana finally started laying eggs. Wild discovered a nest full of drab green eggs hidden beneath the steps to side door of the house. There were about 10 eggs in there, so she's been laying for more than a week, at least. Unfortunately, I had to throw them all away because I didn't know how long they had been there and I didn't really want to risk cracking a rotten egg into a bowl of scrambled eggs. Ewww!!!