TIBDIOB #1: I Killed the Chicken

This is part 1 of a potential series: TIBDIOB, or Things I've Been Doing Instead of Blogging. I'm going somewhat chronologically here. Today's topic actually occurred two weeks before Thanksgiving.

So, I've talked before about my proposed Beautiful Life. For those of you not following along at home, my Beautiful Life would consist of a homestead farm filled with various farm animals, particularly sheep and other fiber animals, but also chickens. The husband and I feel perfectly capable of taking care of laying chickens. Chickens, in general, are far less demanding than dogs, and Beckett seems to be doing okay. We were less sure of our ability to raise meat chickens. After all, Beckett is basically our son, and we wouldn't even think of eating him. Besides, as of yet, we have not found any recipes for Fox Terrier au Vin.

But we are meat-eaters, and we both feel very strongly about our decision to be conscientious carnivores. We only eat meat raised by farmers we know and trust, which basically means that outside of our home, we are functionally vegetarians. We have thought a lot about whether we would eventually be able to go to the next level and raise (and thus, kill) our own meat once we reach our Beautiful Life. So when our local co-op offered a chicken processing class at a member's house, we were pathetically - some might say bizarrely - excited.

The class was about the whole process of raising meat chickens. In September, we met the chicks. In October, we met the chickens. And then, in November, we killed them. I won't go into the details of the whole process. I will say that as I watched our instructor do the first bird, I wasn't completely sure I'd be able to do any of it. The whole thing was set up in his yard. In Illinois at least, if you live in a town where you can raise certain livestock within town limits, you can also butcher the animals, as long as you aren't selling them or doing enough to qualify as an agricultural enterprise. (That's an oversimplification of the rules, so don't go processing any chickens without checking your local ordinances, okay?) He had it set up as a four-step process, with a station for each step, and of course, with step 1 being the drawing of the knife. I ended up doing every step at least once, with varying degrees of success.

It wasn't what I'd call a fun time. It was hard, emotionally and physically. But I felt that if I couldn't handle it, I was going to have to reconsider my stance as a meat-eater. Eating other creatures means enacting violence against them, indirectly at least. When we were buying our meat shrink-wrapped in the grocery store, we didn't think about that too much. I'm not going to go into the politics or ethics or morals behind the decisions that the husband and I have made about food. I'll just say that whether or not we end up raising our own meat birds, we do know now that we would be capable of doing so.

I'm going to close with a warning. Kids, be careful what you read. If you had told me when I picked up Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma or Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Vegetable Miracle that I'd end up holding a freshly killed chicken by the feet, I'd have told you that you were crazy. Don't even try to tell me that books can't change lives. The husband and I have chicken blood on our hands (metaphorically, at this point), and little but books to blame.

The Case of the Mustachioed Fireman

Occasionally in my role as a children's librarian, I have the opportunity to contemplate some of life's deep questions. Recently, I had one of those opportunities. While preparing for a firefighter storytime, this question came to me: why are there so many male firefighters with mustaches in children's literature? I assure you that nearly every children's book featuring human firefighters has at least one guy with a mustache but no beard. (Oddly, most grown-up books featuring firefighters features a shirtless man on the cover.) I could leave it to you to find proof of this, but what am I here for if not to save you from needless internet browsing?

First up, a characteristic example.


Often, the mustachioed fireman gets to drive the firetruck. Occasionally, he also gets to wield the axe with which to chop down your door.


See? Even in real life, the mustachioed fireman is an axe-wielder.

In this example, note the mustachioed fireman's joy at the dragon's inability to properly hold the hose.


Does he even want the house to be saved? Are mustachioed firemen agents of evil? Well, maybe not, because here's a Sesame Street example, and, with the possible exception of Elmo, Sesame Street is no place for agents of evil.


This is what I'm talking about, though. Sesame Street taught the world that two guys can live together in an apartment without corrupting anyone, that angry creatures live in the garbage, and that vibrating giggling monsters make good toys for 3-year-olds. Clearly they're open to outside-the-box thinking, and yet they bought into the mustachioed fireman trope.

One last literary example:


Okay, I might have doctored the last one. But still! They're everywhere. And in fact, lest you think the phenomenon is limited to literature, I bring you:


We had this guy sitting on our Fire Shelf at my last library in the Chicago area. His jacket is closed by velcro, and at said library, the velcro had been destroyed by years of use. Most evenings he could be found sprawled on the floor with his coat hanging open, looking like he just finished a bender. I will state for the record that this is the only evidence I've seen that mustachioed firemen drink too much.

So what should we conclude about the mustachioed fireman? Is it a coincidence? A conspiracy? Maybe it's just real life. I know only one actual firefighter, and he does, in fact, have a mustache. And given that he is my father-in-law, I won't say here that he is involved in any mustache conspiracy. On the other hand, I'm not going to say he's not.

I See You, Internet Browsers!

Until recently, I have not had a stat counter on my blog. A couple of years ago, I designed the husband's professional website (now defunct). At that time, I looked around for one and they all cost money. If I wasn't willing to pay money to see who wanted to look at the husband's art, I certainly wasn't going to pay money to confirm the small size of my readership. But when I accidentally encountered a free stat counter, I downloaded it, and to no one's surprise, I immediately became obsessed with my stats. But it's only because they're totally fascinating.

For example, do you know what brings more people to my blog than anything else? Two words: naughty vegetables. People, why didn't you tell me? Every week I go to the farmer's market and troll for the most entertaining vegetables I can find. Last week, there was a potato that looked like a nipple (not a breast, just a nipple) and a carrot with two legs, one of which was shorter than the other (I dubbed it "Pegleg the Pirate Carrot". Pegleg was delicious in a stew.) The husband and I have a theory that many people actually avoid these delightful quirks of nature. Apparently, the combination of cuisine and hilarity is more than they can bear. I weep for their poor shriveled souls.

Now, I can already hear the cynics among you. You're interrupting me to say, "Hey there, lady. You've been hanging out with four-year-olds for too long. These people aren't looking for your goofy vegetables. They are looking for people using vegetables for naughty purposes." Well, as I've told you many times, I'm a librarian. I am, by nature, a researchy sort of nerd. And I have already seen much of the sleazier side of life on the other side of the information desk. So I took the plunge and Googled "naughty vegetables". I learned two things. 1.) I am the second hit!!! This post may propel me to number 1!! Holy crap, that's amazing! 2.) At least on the first page or two, the hits aren't dirty. Even if you search Google Images, one or two of the images are a bit dicey, but nothing NC-17, at least when I looked.

This means one of two things. Either there is a largely unfulfilled demand for veggie porn, in which case, my visitors are sorely disappointed, or there is a largely unfulfilled demand for hilarious vegetables, in which case, I am at the pulse point of the American sense of humor. You tell me, strangers on the Interweb: which is it?

An open letter to NPR

Dear NPR,

NPR, I'm going to be right up front here: I love you. I love This American Life and Fresh Air. I double-love Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. I even (and I realize that I am very nearly alone among the under-60 set here) love Prairie Home Companion. My local NPR affiliate is absolutely the bomb, with interviews with Simon Winchester and Glen David Gold and Tracy Kidder, and all sorts of people that make my little intellectual heart go all a-flutter. And while I'm not sure that I love All Things Considered in quite the same way as I love the aforementioned shows, I rely on it. Robert Siegel and Melissa Block keep me company on the days when it is my turn to prepare dinner. And that's definitely something.

And so it is with great sadness that I have to write this. You see, NPR, on the weekends, All Things Considered kind of sucks. And I get that. Things don't happen on the weekends as much as they do on the weekdays. Fewer people listen, so you don't want to waste your big stories. But last Sunday, you hit a new low. A Ron Paul-style low.

Ron Paul has, apparently, written a book. It is all about how the Federal Reserve is stupid and should go away. Fair enough. Any crackpot with a computer can get published these days; why not Ron Paul? But NPR? Just because someone writes a book, doesn't mean you have to interview them about it, even if that someone is an elected official. And it certainly doesn't mean you have to ask for their idiotic opinions about anything, let alone healthcare. And yet, you asked him about just that topic. And what do you know?! He has idiotic opinions! He stated that he doesn't think healthcare is a right, that he thinks we as a nation are confusing 'rights' with 'wants' and 'needs'. Substitute "not dying from completely curable and preventable illnesses" for healthcare in that last sentence, and it'll give a better sense of the implication of that sentence, but whatever. That's bad enough, but here's the real kicker: he goes on to compare people who want health insurance despite pre-existing conditions to people who wait until their house is on fire to seek out fire insurance. This statement went unchallenged.

The problem with not challenging that statement is that it's ridiculous and completely ignores the actual concerns of the uninsured, the underinsured, and everyone else who is angry about our nation's complete failure in the world of healthcare. For Ron Paul's hypothetical to be actually analogous to the health insurance situation as it stands, it would need to be about people who try to buy fire insurance only to be told that the fact that they had a car accident once 7 years ago means they're ineligible. Or even more to the point, people who successfully buy fire insurance, have a house fire, and are then told that they won't be paid anything because they forgot to disclose that they own candles, and that while the company is aware that candles were not the cause of the fire, they are still going to retrospectively cancel the policy.

NPR, I have a feeling that your giving a platform to Ron Paul is an effort to counter the suggestion that you have a liberal bias. But here's the thing: you can interview anybody you want, and conservatives are still going to call you liberal. You're not going to change their minds any more than Fox News would win me over by interviewing Dennis Kucinich. If those of us who choose to listen to you wanted to hear far-right/libertarian points of view, most of us could call certain members of our extended families. The fact is that we don't want to, particularly not when making Sunday dinner. And if you absolutely must interview Ron Paul, we would like you to at least pretend to have a spine, and challenge him when he says stupid things!

Health insurance has long been a special concern of mine. I have blogged and blogged and blogged about it. I have read the heartfelt writings of good friends about it. I have researched it. Despite all that, my health insurance still sort of sucks. So when you play stories like that, and it makes my blood pressure rise, you should be careful, NPR. I just might send you my doctor's bill; heaven knows my insurance company won't cover it.

From Naughty Vegetables to Dirty Tricks

I already shared about the scandalous vegetables to be found at the CollegeTown farmer's market. Today, I bring you a quick post to show you the further shocking things to be found when you commit to local eating: dead presidents.


That's right, folks. Richard Nixon, jowls and all, is alive and well and living in CollegeTown. Or at least he was until I baked him into a delicious eggplant parmesan.

Buggin' out

If you're a long-time follower of this blog, you may remember the time we had the termites. It was a dark time, and up to that point, it was pretty much my most traumatic bug encounter. And, really, it still is. There's nothing quite as traumatizing as the combination of thousands of winged insects in your house with the thought of potentially thousands of dollars spent getting rid of them. (They were in a very limited area, so it ended up not being that expensive and was covered by the condo association, but we didn't know that when we were staring at them in horror.) Just because they're not traumatizing, though, doesn't mean I'm happy about our newest roomies here in CollegeTown: ants.

We actually first got the ants at the beginning of summer. At first it was just seeing several of them in various places in the house. We had heard, though, that ants were more plentiful than usual this year, and we just figured it was a coincidence. Then they got into our honey. And honestly, people, even at that point, we were upset, but we didn't want to kill them. What can I say; we're cheap-ass hippies. Ain't no way we're spending money on toxic chemicals. Anyway, ants don't spread disease or do any property damage. A friend suggested putting the honey jar in a bowl of water (a sort of honey moat), it seemed to work, so live and let live, right? Except. They were everywhere. Everywhere! Not in our food, mind you - we protected all the food and they couldn't get to it. But everywhere else. And it started to wear on us.

So I turned to my friend the Interweb, who suggested that we make a bait out of honey, water, and Borax. It wasn't supposed to work overnight (they have to take it back to the nest, which was in our walls, which is so gross), but it really didn't seem like it was working at all. Quite the contrary; it seemed like we were running an ant soup kitchen. But then, finally, after a couple of weeks, it did. They were gone. It was great.

Then, literally the same day that I thought to myself that perhaps we could take the honey out of its moat, there were more. These ants are smaller, and this was after a break of a few weeks, so we think it's a new colony. As I said, we started from a position of being willing to co-exist with the ants. Now, if I could put something in the bait to make the ants explode when they ate it, I totally would. And with each and every little explosion I would chuckle the maniacal chuckle of someone who has been pushed to the end of her rope.

Summer Summaries, Part 2: Summer Reading

Originally, I planned to write this entry about the library's Summer Reading Program. For those of you not in the know, that is a thing where children keep track of their reading in exchange for prizes. In the past, I have worked at libraries where the whole staff was expected to lose all sense of sanity and dignity in an effort to promote summer reading. At my current library, summer reading is still a Big Deal, but I am the only one planning and implementing it. While I've been insanely busy at times, I haven't been able to force anyone to dress up in silly costumes or engage the children in elaborate games of chance. So, my sanity and everyone's dignity are intact, which is cool, but yet again my awesome job has denied me a good story. (Good stories are one of the very few perks of soul-killingly bad work environments.) Instead, I'm going to tell you about my own personal summer reading. Is that a good story? Maybe not, but it's potentially more interesting than "...and then I made a Reading Log with some really neat clip art!"

It all started when, at some point in the past year, I seem to have decided that I wasn't quite nerdy enough. I don't know exactly how or why this happened. It wasn't a conscious decision. Clearly, being a former academic decathlete who completes logic puzzles for fun and is a librarian is more than enough nerdiness for most people, but I am not most people. I needed a project. A nerdtastic project.

So at the end of last year, the husband and I decided to read biographies of all the presidents. Which is a super way to increase one's nerd quotient, really, except that I accidentally upped it exponentially by getting excited about reading about some of the other people of the era as well. As it turns out, I read a George Washington bio and a Benjamin Franklin bio. Then while I was reading a summary of the events of 1776, I pulled out a replica of a map drawn by General Howe, and my nerd meter exploded. It was too much for me, and while I haven't given up on the concept, neither have I quite committed to taking home a book about president #2.

Then I figured out the problem. Yes, reading presidential biographies is nerdy, but it's not English major nerdy. I was too far out of my comfort zone. And that is why I started a quest to read all of the National Book Award winners. I started with The Man with the Golden Arm, which was the first winner in 1950. (I am a little bit ashamed to admit that I genuinely thought that book was about baseball. For the record, it is so not about baseball.) Then, in an act of craziness that I am still not entirely okay with, I skipped to the 2006 winner, The Echo Maker. I had been planning to read it before I started the project, and the Husband convinced me it would be dumb to wait the two years it will take me to get to this decade. But I have Book Chronology OCD from way back; believe me when I say that I did not discover The Truth About Stacey before learning about Kristy's Great Idea.

This project isn't a super-strict thing. I'm reading other things along the way. Already, though, I can feel my Nerd Power growing. Don't feel too threatened though; 1951's winner is The Complete Short Stories of William Faulkner. It's over 900 pages. Given that it's Faulkner, those 900 pages may contain 20 sentences total.

I may be writing about a new nerd project soon.