Today's Slice...

Well, we are sitting here with the hatches battened down, still waiting for The Big Storm to arrive. It was promised for afternoon drive time, between 3 and 5PM...it still hasn't showed up but the wind is kicking up now and blowing J's sheet music off the amp, where it amusingly enough struck the guitar strings on the way to the floor...music playing the guitar, for a change!

Tonight as my 5 year old daughter was taking a potty break, I CLEARLY heard her singing "YMCA"...she says they sing it at school, complete with hand motions. It gave me a giggle though.

There are currently 4 very large Barn Spiders lving in the nectarine and cherry trees in the back yard. They make huge, impressive webs each night around 9PM and by dawn they have whisked them away and retreated back to their leaves to sleep. I'd been nursing a sincere fantasy about having the twitling who burgled us last year return in the night and become hopelessly entangled in one or all of them while flailing about emitting high-pitched screams. Just like those B-grade horror movies where the heroine runs around at the end opening closets and finding all of her dead friends. Well judging by a wrecked web and a broken off branch of the orange tree the other morning, it seems to at least have partly come true. I consider the broken branch a small price to pay for such inner contentment and karmic rebalancing, and thanked the tree for doing it's bit to physically harm the little bastard while I trimmed off the dead branch.

My vacumm cleaner has reached terminal old age and has broken in three different places, all at once. I'm stubborn and refuse to just trash it though, so in for repair it's going to go. Now if I could only find a few days when I don't need it.

The chickens are suffering through a bout of Fowl Pox, which sounds a lot worse than it is. It's a virus mostly carried by mosquoitos, and other than causing some blister-like lesions on the facial skin of the birds, doesn't do much harm. It does open the door to secondary problems like respiratory infections though, so we'll have to keep an eye on them. It's kind of like when you are a kid and everyone in the house gets chicken pox. The chickens are very aware of their appearance though, and know that they are less than pretty right now. Truth be told, some of them look like little mutants or radiation overdose victims...

Also on the appliance front, my microwave committed suicide today in a very grand fashion when I asked it to make some popcorn. Loud, weird noises and bright flashes made me turn around and then leap for the plug, yanking it and all of the others in the outlet out of the wall. I found a hole burned right through the side of the thing! Good thing I hadn't walked away, it was seconds from catching fire. Stank some, too.

Weird week so far, and it's only Tuesday...