I'll be out late tonight... don't wait up.

At least, it seems that the majority of this year's crop are.

Sexually-explicit notes being passed around... rumors and fights and threats... the hallway right outside my classroom door seems to be the main gathering place for this particular snitty crowd of girls displaying trailer-trash manners and the doofus boys who stand around watching it all go down.

This is BALLYHOO, for Pete's sake... the majority of the students here come from farming and ranching families who go to church on Sundays and Wednesdays... this new crowd has arrived to the dismay and bewilderment of us all. It's not that I don't know how to deal with kids behaving badly... it's just such a foreign thing here.

I took the group photograph of the FFA (Future Farmers of America) today for the yearbook. I'm pretty sure that about half the entire high school is in the FFA. This percentage is probably down quite a bit from past years. The yearbook photo is quite a wide-angle shot...

As for the yearbook, it's coming together well. [knock knock] My goal is to have it completely submitted as soon as graduation ceremonies are over; I don't want it hanging over my head if they schedule my surgery early in June. Technically it doesn't have to be all wrapped-up until mid-June, but I plan to get a jump on it. Maybe it'll mean that my books are done and back to me earlier than scheduled, but I won't be counting on it.

Putting the yearbook together has been an amazing, complicated, wonderful process. I have so many ideas for next year, I can't wait to get it started. I'm also excited to get my new yearbook staff put together and pointed in the right direction.

Happy birthday
to my baby girl
all grown up

Grey Skwerl, of course. Duh.

"We put it on the shelf and it sells. It can be a dozen squirrels a day -- and they all go."

Their favorite? Skwerl Pasties. I'd copy the recipe here, but it's all in that goofy metric stuff and I don't really want to sit here and do all the conversion. You can visit the article and do the math if you're really wanting to try them. Their recipe has potato, rutabaga, bacon, onion, hazelnuts, butter, salt & pepper along with the diced skwerlmeat.

I'd be willing to bet that grinding the meat and putting it into Chinese dumplings would be particularly yummy as well. Besides, I've never been much of a fan of turnips and rutabagas... it's just a flavor I'm not fond of.

Test your reaction time... this one's fun and quick.

Sheep Darts

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes: a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States: 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake: a novel
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
------------------------------------

Meme picked up from Charles over at Dustbury.

In the stairwell of the Choctaw County Courthouse in Hugo, Oklahoma:

I first saw this when I was in the ninth grade at Hugo High School (way back in 1981) and we went on a field trip to the courthouse. Pat Prock, one of the boys in my class, pointed at it and guffawed, so we all looked at it and had a laugh.

Recently my sister reminded me of its existence and wondered if I had a photograph of it to send her; she had told her co-workers and they couldn't believe something like this actually existed. I hunted all over the internet and searched through Flickr, but found no photographic evidence of it. There was a news article containing a brief reference to it, but no picture.

This just screamed for intervention...

Since I was heading back in that general direction for my orthopedic doc appointment, I took a brief detour across the Red River into Oklahoma to grab a picture of this bizarre memorial.

Next week I'll be in the area for two different days, so I'm hoping to go back to Hugo and take some photographs of the circus cemetery.

No, I'm not kidding. Hugo is a wintering ground for a circus, and they actually have their own cemetery.

Watch this space.

And the paperwork is DONE. I had my last visit to the surgeon's office today with all the requisite forms and assorted other crap required by the insurance company. Assuming they'll now approve my corrective surgery within a couple of weeks or so, I hope to be looking at an early June date to go under the knife YET AGAIN. I really hate surgery. I really do. After the last go-round, I swore I was never EVER letting anyone cut on me again... and I guarantee you that if I weren't truly miserable, I wouldn't do this. Recovering from being sliced stem-to-stern is unpleasant, to put it very mildly. Last time I wanted to die. And that was eleven years ago. I was younger and less crotchety back then.

Any-hoo, watch this space for (I hope I hope I hope) the good news of my insurance approval...

Miss Ruby's a teeny little lady around the corner who has impeccable taste in iris cultivars:






When I came to her door yesterday afternoon to ask if I could poke around in her flowerbeds, she was delighted but apologetic. "They were a lot better a week ago before the straight-line winds knocked so many of 'em over," she said ruefully.

When we leave the front door open, Dude likes to lounge right in front of it and remind us of the need for better weatherstripping:

"Look how far I can poke my paw through the gap under the storm door!"


The baby birds (which I have identified as House Finches) are starting to look less and less like babies and more and more like former U. S. House Speaker Jim Wright:





Aren't they adorable? They grow up so fast... [sigh]


Pretty soon they'll be trying their wings... then one day they'll leave the nest forever.

[sniff]

The Made-With-Love Edition!

I'm especially intrigued by the Sorrel Soup... I'm always looking for a decent new-and-different soup that isn't full of chunks of chicken or corn or whatever. Dunno where I'd find sorrel around here, but I'm now going to keep my eyes open for it so I can actually try this recipe.

This bicyclist's first mistake is naming his victim:

But little Rusty [the skwerl] must have heard the call to go toward the light, because just as I rode up, he lunged. Straight through the spinning spokes of my front wheel.

"SCORE!!!"

That's what I would've yelled, of course. But the poor schmuck is actually horrified. He probably hasn't ever killed anything more complex than a cockroach in his life.

But then his life gets even worse:

As I stood guiltily over the injured animal, two enraged bystanders rushed up. The first, a man, put his face right into mine.

"Didn't you see him?" he screamed.

My response: "Pshyeah!! Wasn't that an amazing hit? Lemme finish him off and we'll call it a mulligan."

His response is a little confused and conflicted, however. He's torn between his horror at having desperately wounded little Rusty plus having reaped the ire of the PETA-types, and his notion that skwerls really are just stupid little rats who occasionally reap the Darwinian consequences of their stupidity.

"We're members of the Animal Rescue League of Sydney," he said.

"You're kidding," I stammered, unable to believe my bad luck. A million squirrels in Washington, and I had to run over the one that was under observation by international animal rights activists.

"We're wildlife rescue technicians," the man continued in a take-charge tone. "We'll need to get this squirrel to an animal rescue center right away."

It gets even better.

"Look, mate," said the man, eagerly displaying a camera. "I've got it all here on video!"

It turned out that the Australians had been not just watching Rusty but filming him. My new friend displayed the footage for the crowd on the camera's swing-out screen.

There was the squirrel eating out of the woman's hand, and then he went off for a drink, and -- "Ewww!" moaned the tourists. Several glared at me.

See, now this doofus is going to be famous on YouTube for something he's embarrassed about... whereas if it'd been ME whodunnit, I'd be sending the link to all my friends and family to show them what a WWI Flying Ace I was.

Some people have ALL the luck.

The baby birds are getting that fuzzy look:


The top of a defunct church building down the street:


And a few splendid irises in a yard around the corner:

I am so... honored... to share a first name with the main character in this brief saga.

A frequent sight in the living room of the Dazzle household -- Dude attacks Bijou from behind with sudden lightning speed, resulting in equally speedy growl and snap from Bijou.

These are some blackbirds on the line across the street. I somehow sense a pun or a witty caption in this photo, but it just isn't coming to me. You're welcome to contribute your suggestions.

My fierce puppydog, Bijou, sits in my lap while I blog. My husband just leaned over to kiss me good-night and she barked at him menacingly. Don't NOBODY mess with The Mom. hehe

Or, in other words, TheChickVoice is putting away her turtlenecks.

This is like Punxsutawney Phil or something, isn't it?

[Scottish brogue]

"What are YOU lookin' at, lassie?"

[/Scottish brogue]

While driving this afternoon I encountered a pasture full of Scottish Highland cows. They seemed quite happy and healthy, but garsh -- I wouldn't have wanted to wear that fur coat on a humid day like today.

I went to bed at about 6PM last night and woke up this morning at about 6AM. Phew! I feel like I've been asleep for a year, but I definitely feel better today. Might actually get something accomplished. Part of that may be ducktaping my eldest to the peak of the roof so I don't have to listen to her abusive yelling. Living with a mentally-ill person is very, very draining.

UPDATE: Her mood hasn't been as foul the rest of the day, so I haven't had to break out the ducktape.

The Giant Dead Cottonwood Tree across the street has had a delightful little Golden-Fronted Woodpecker feasting on it. I can't get the camera to focus at that distance, of course, but I did manage to get some semi-recognizable photos of the lil' guy:



Ain't he cute?

Apparently, he's fairly specialized to the western Texas areas:

Fox has released a photo of Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) from its new project, X-Men: Origins:



Rowr!

Paris, Texas, of course.

I went to an orthopedic surgeon in Paris on my dad's recommendation. Dr. Robert Schneider is a very good bone doc.

He x-rayed and the bones look normal, so whatever happened was, indeed, a soft-tissue injury. He gave me a shot of Depo-Medrol into the shoulder joint and he'll see me again in three weeks. If the shot wears off and it's still bad after that point, he will MRI it and see if I tore the rotator cuff. If that happens to be the case, he'll have to do surgery.

Afterwards, I had a couple of minutes before I needed to head back home, so I took a couple of pictures:


In Texas, even the Eiffel Tower dons a cowboy hat!



The crimson clover is abundant over there in East Texas.

And then, in Evergreen Cemetery, I bring you some photos of the giant 1891 monument to Willet Babcock featuring a statue of Jesus wearing cowboy boots:

I'm going to let it sit for a day or two and come back to it. I'm not thrilled with the internal petals and I think I can improve them, but I'm going to give it a little space first.

UPDATE: I decided I'm done. I've uploaded the image of it to Zazzle and made a blank greeting card with it, should anyone decide they'd like to purchase one. If flowers ain't yer bag, don't worry... they're not really mine, either. I'll soon upload some others.

I made steamed Asian dumplings tonight... they're quite popular around this house and everyone wants me to make them. They're a bit labor-intensive and time-consuming, however, and the ingredients aren't the usual cheapo food we usually make. LOL

But they're holy-cow-good, I can tell you. They make the house smell amazing, too.


Our happy little bamboo steamer from Wal-Mart. It's a good thing.

I love working with watercolors... I think I love it because it's got a mind of its own. With oils and acrylics, the artist is completely in charge. You can cover up something with more paint, you can make the paint obey you implicitly. But with watercolors, you're not entirely in charge. You want something, but you have to take the behavior of water into consideration... you rely on the laws of physics and entropy to do something entirely beyond your actual control. It's like harnessing chaos. That makes me happy.

Caturday

Mr. Handsome Kitteh anxiously awaits skritches...