Horse vs. Chicken

Habitat. The word conotates a natural home, a perfect environment, the right place, a sense of belonging. Today, when I went out to feed the pets, I was unnerved to discover clucking coming from the horses' stalls. We own four chickens, and I found two inside.

Hm. 4-2=2. I trotted over to the chicken coop/run to see if the others were already inside.

I discovered a little more than I bargained for. Trapped in the tiny coop was my beautiful horse! He was caught, held inside by my two evil chickens, who would flap their wings every time he attempted to get out.

Eventually, I got the poor dear out, but the event made me laugh: I found the chickens in the horse stall, and the horse in the chicken coop.

I never would have guessed that in the scenario: horse vs. chicken, chicken would come out on top!

Pizza Pranks #1

Establishing goals is all right if you don't let them deprive you of interesting detours. ~Doug Larson

If you establish pizza as your dinner, you establish it as a goal, yes?

Which is alright. If you don't let it deprive you of interesting detours. Any experienced mischief maker will tell you that pranks are (at the very least) interesting detours.

So cometh a series of posts. I call "101 ways to make life miserable, Oops! I mean interesting, for pizza boys." By writing this series, I hope to provide some excitement in dreary routine. I promise to fill your mind with some delightful ideas which can be practised on your local pizza person.

Let's establish that by pizza boy, I mean the-person-who-shows-up-at-the-door-bearing-Italian-bread-circles-topped-with-tomato-sauce-and-other-such-deliciousness, be they man, woman, boy, or girl.

The inspiration for this fantastic scheme was provided when, two days ago, we ordered out for pizza and the world's Most Boring Pizza Dude in the history of the universe delivered the food.
Bracie, Gabby, and I looked long and hard at each other and decided that something had to change. Break the monotony! Salvage these humans from dullness! Provided a spark of hilarity!

You. Be the change. When I post Pizza Pranks, dare to detour! Hurrah! Huzzah! And all that.

Protest gravity!

The forces of nature and the principles of science have been conspiring against me.


It's true. They are malignant, always seeking to bring me down. Why? I don't know. Go ask a hurricance. But, every morning for the past week, they have sought to keep me from waking up at a decent time. I want to get up at seven. It is an apt time, because much earlier, and I won't get up at all. *blushes* Yes, it is too true: I am sadly um, sad, when it comes to getting up. The malicious forces of nature and principles of science know this, and are using it to my disadvantage.

How? It's all a matter of alarm clocks. Through a startling discovery I made in the past couple days, I now know what the lowest point of gravity is on an alarm clock.

In researching the subject, I found this poignant quote: "“Gravity is a myth, the Earth stinks."

First of all, that quote can't be true, because, well, people in Australia aren't falling off the side of the earth. Secondly and more importantly, it is true because my alarm clock doesn't wake me up at 7 in the morning. It wakes me up at the lowest point of gravity. 6.

Yesterday, (at 6 a.m., I might add) I found that the spring which holds the alarm in place on my analog clock is broken. Don't even think of that! It was gravity's fault, not mine! It broke when it fell, and the world fell determines that gravity was involved.
So every morning, the alarm sets itself to six and wakes me up too early, which in turn causes me to fall back asleep, which in turn causes me to wake up at eight, not seven, which in turn causes me to miss my morning run, which in turn causes me to not be tired at ten p.m. when I'm supposed to be going to bed!

In conclusion, alarm clocks are ruining my life. I am now protesting gravity.

(And in case you know me, yes, this is the clock that I got from Z at a white elephant gift exchange two Christmasses ago.)

Sublimate!

My current vocabularily word is SUBLIMATE.

The official definition is:

sublimate (sub' le mait) [limen sublimate (sub' le mait)

To turn aside an instintual, perhaps primitive impulse in favor of a more socially or culturally acceptable activity.


However, I have redefined the word. Here's what it now means:

sublimate:

To suppress the desire to squeeze a brand new tube of toothpaste in the middle. To chose to not eat the first bite out of every apple. Deciding not to hurl the chair you just stubbed your toe on half-way across the room.

In a sense, sublimate means, "Don't anything Ramona Quimby would do."

Sublimating is choosing not to throw the Murder in the Cathedral commentary at the librarian's head because it's the commentary and not the actual play. It means to not bang the keyboard in frustration when the computer deletes the resource page that you've been collecting for the last hour.

Yup. It's been a great Monday.

Enough complaining. You know what I need to do? I need to go write a story about a character who attracts misfortune. Right now. Then, if I can make enough horrid things happen to them, then I will feel better.

After all, didn't Jonathon Swift say, "Nothing is bigger or smaller except by comparision."? So by comparison with this story I am going to write, my little troubles will melt away like, um, er, uh, butter?

Here's a song for you all:

Can you hear me?

Hi! I really would like to say more, but I sort of lost my *wheeze* voice. It comes and goes really randomly. At least, that's how it has been these past days.

Tonight, we tried to practice worship, and I couldn't sing a note. Maybe if I drink a cup of tea it will come back.

Slurp. Slurp.

Ahhh! That's better. I really and truly think my voice is back for good. Oh Fiddle. Nevermind.

Anyway, Bracie and I are listening, as we paint our front entryway, to a book on tape, Stormbreaker, the first Alex Rider book. So far, I am really enjoying it. In two days, four of my library books have been... consumed.

You know what? I am going to make some more tea.

Rant.

You know something? Birds; cheeping trilling, twittering, chirping, cawing, and rising dawns never seem very poetic at four in the morning, unless I go to bed early.
Writing this, I know, puts me at risk of seeming very lazy and lugabed, but I firmly take a stance that four is not the hour for rising. Let's hope I never work on a dairy farm. And what is it with poets and Unhuman hours?
Try google-ing "Birds at Dawn poem." My search afforded 1,330,000 results. How about some nice haiku as a comfort to my weary soul?

Birds singing
in the dark
—Rainy dawn


The morning songs of birds awakening
In the misty dawn
Sets my very soul aquaking
Like windblown grass of lawn.
The springtime morns
especially treat me
With the springtime birds of song
The robins come to early greet me
The blue jays also come along.

Bleh. Gag me. It's four in the morning and I feel like strangling the author of that poem. My poetic nature is absolutely "aquaking" right now from birdsong. Let's hope it recovers.

And yet Robert Frost declares that there is something wrong with wanting to silence any song. Ohhhhhh...
HMPH!

-Ophelia, who actually did write this at four.

Ophelia: "silent" sufferer

This a one-handed post, meaning every character you read on this page was typed with my right hand, because I am beset with tendinitis. The condition has drastically affected my speed: it has taken me roughly five minutes to get this far.
Mayhaps you have noticed my wrist wrap in the above photo. I feel compelled to admit that the wrap is more psychological than effective, as it is not highly supportive and I am inclined to over use my injured wrist.
However, is it really fair to say, "injured?" Do you actually injure your tendons with tendinitis, or do you merely abuse their capabilities? Or perhaps you injure your wrist by abusing your tendons capabilities. It injures my mind just thinking about it. If I really wanted to know, I could go ask Daddy...
But anyhow, Dad says I inflicted tendinitis on myself by straining the fingers from typing in weird positions. Isn't that boring? Now if I had tendinitis from holding on to the hand of a person falling off a cliff, or by too quickly pulling a child from under the hooves of a galloping horse, it would have appealed much more to my sensibilities.

I, knowing just how kind and caring my gentle readers are, have realized that you probably want to type me a nice, sympathetic comment. Yet I absolutely do not desire my readers to sustain such an ignoble injury as the one I now suffer from.

Being a highly intelligent blogger, I have come up with a solution that allows you to exercise your kind-caring-comment-writing skills and prevents tendinitis 100%! As follows:

Type all comments on this post with

A. your toes
B. your chin
C. your nose

Bleep!

Ophelia decided that this post did not accurately reflect her heart, so now it's gone forever.

Mr. Leif B. Gonn

Bracie and my job of Alpaca Pasture Maintenance has its ups and downs. As she and I performed our task today, we were painfully reminded of one of the job's disadvantages; that of the leaf blowin' man. Next door and across the street from the pastures lives a man with a passion for ordered lawns and a strong affection for his leaf blower. For now we will call him Leif B. Gonn.
Anyway, it seems as if every time Bracie and I drive in to do our job, he maliciously gets out that noisy contraption, meticulously blowing his leaves into everybody else's yard. If not that, then the mower or rake or what-have-you.
(Note: the following paragraph is fiction.)
Leif's beloved leaf blower kicked the bucket, and being unable to sustain the thought of life without it, Mr.Gonn keeled over and died with the machine. Because I have a heart for the community, to help him out I have written him an original epitaph.
As follows:
Here lies a leaf-blowin man
In life the motor started,
Our ears his blower bombarded,
Now dearly departed,
Champion of mowers,
Greenest grass grower,
best of all leaf Blowers,
Mr. Leif B. Gonn

Grab your torches and pitchforks!

Today I surprised myself by winning a baby shower game. I didn't even know that I had it in me. It was one of those affairs involving tasting baby food, an experience which (though a blast) helped open my eyes to a cruel injustice being done to infants all around the world; the injustice of feeding babies baby food!

When did I come to this startling realization? I think it was somewhere in between tasting "Banana-Peach-Rice" and smelling the nauseating "Spinach-Carrot" mixture. The memory is branded on my tongue. I'm still convinced that the "protein" in baby food is just dog food ground up and mixed in.

Why do we force these frightening concoctions down our poor, unsuspecting infants' throats? Ihonestly have no idea. There is no mention of children eating mushed up veggies in Hebrews 14. They eat "milk" or "solid food." I don't believe baby food falls into either of those categories.

So what can we do to right this wrong? I tell you; we are going to rise up and storm Gerber inc. with pitchforks and torches! Then we'll force "butternut squash 'n fresh corn!" down the CEO's throats until they beg for mercy.

Okay, so maybe not. Violence is perhaps not the best way. We'll all dress in flowing white and link arms to form a barrier around the baby food section in shopping markets.

But maybe we should do nothing because what would baby showers be without some baby food to taste? Watching ladies, with eyebrows scrunched in concentration, crowd around seven bottles of baby gunk, sniffing and tasting, is priceless. So, infants of America, you'll just have to grin, bear it, and eat it. (And knowing the inherently messy nature of babies, wear it.)

From the ol' bulletin board.

Last year as I was reading our local paper, I found this report:

On February 4 at 7:45 a.m. on the blahblahblah block of blahblahblah, a male teen, upset that he could not locate his nail clippers, was confronted by his father due to his behavior. The incident escalated to the point where the teen threw the nail clippers at his father, striking him in the face. The teen was forced outside where he kicked the door and broke a potted plant. The teen was booked into the Youth Center for investigation of Assault, 4th degree, Domestic Violence; and Malicious Mischief 3rd degree.

It's been on my bulletin board ever since because I think it is hysterical! Does anyone else think so? Anyone? Anyone?

My Mother, the Hoarse Whisperer

For a whopping 10 days, me pooor mither (pronounced with a heavy brogue) hadn't had her voice. She could only whisper. This was right before Christmas, and one evening as we sat around the tree Mom decided to treat us with a sample of singing without a voice.

Bracie is lip-synchronising for her because like me, mom is camera shy. The only difference between us is that she is mom and can order us not to take her picture. *Sigh*

Daunting

At the present moment, I am blogging to try and forget about the piles and piles of thank you notes that I am supposed to write. Don't get me wrong: I love to write letters, I love writing, and I am very, very thankful. Yet I still hate thank you notes.
Why? Because all they ultimately say is "thank you." "If you don't write a thank you, they'll never know you're thankful," is the thought behind thank you notes I guess. However, when I give a gift, I take it for granted that people are grateful. So, either I'm incredibly assuming, or there is something wrong with the rest of the world that they have to write notes to be thankful.
And that brings me to another problem: What if you aren't grateful? Isn't it lying to write a thank you note? However, we will not go there; this is not a problem for me because I'm never ungrateful. Ahhhh, I am always such an angel.
P.S. If I actually wrote thank you notes to everybody I should, I'd get blisters and carpal tunneling. Wait, can you get carpal tunneling from writing?

The Importance of Subtle Morals

Morals are only tolerable when the are subtle.
Good Example: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Bad Example: Any Aesop's fable.
Do people generally like getting hit over the head with a baseball bat? (Rhetorical question: the answer is no) Obvious, glaring morals produce a very similar sensation to that of getting hit over the head.
Anyway, I didn't start this post to teach about morals. What I wanted to do was show you the absolute worst, most glaringly garish moral ever. I found it in a book called, A Hive of Busy Bees.
It would take forever to type it all out, so here is the summary:
"Little Davy" finishes eating a delicious lunch with his friend. They decide to go fishing, but before they can leave, Little Davy's mom asks him to do the dishes.
"Awww, Mom! I don't wanna do the dishes! You do them," says Davy.
"I just don't feel very well." Mrs. LittleDavy'smom says. She "gently rubs her temple."
Davy hollers, "I don't care!" and races out the door with his friend to go fishing.
After several hours of fun fishing, Little Davy comes home. He sees his mother sleeping in a chair.
"Hey mom, what's fer dinner?" he asks, but receives no answer. "What's for dinner?"
Slightly concerned, he walks over and shakes her. "Mom? MOM!!!" Little Davy realizes that his mother is DEAD, killed by the exertion of housekeeping. In horror, Davy looks over at the counter, and there sit the dinner dishes, spotlessly clean.

THE END

Can you possibly get any worse? Anyone who ever reads that story will probably be turned off from morals forever. Did the author actually think that story would "encourage" anyone to obediance? Yeeesh. If I remember right, the book has a Bible verse at the end of each story. What a way to give Christians a bad name.

P.S. Though I may be down on "morals" in an Aesop fable kind of sense, this doesn't mean I am at all for immorality. I'm for everything morals stand for, just not cheesy stories.

Milo the Menace

The video below was taken while Mom and Dad were gone for the weekend at a retreat. We children stayed at home with our dear Grandma. Her back was turned.

I got myself into some slight trouble by taking this video. Why? Milo used to have a problem with "roaring," as you may have seen in the above video. However, this problem was corrected by sticking him in the crib about every other time he roared. Realizing that he could not "express" himself by roaring, Milo took to "sniffing" and got rather good at it. Milo's sniffing is not appreciated by his parents, so my encouraging sniffing was consquently not, er, appreciated.

Absolutely Salubrious

Last night I sat up in bed, aroused by a deep desire to gain some specific knowledge. But what knowledge, you may ask yourself is important enough to keep Ophelia from her precious and most valuable sleep? The answer is that I was struck with a longing to know what the word, "Salubrious" means.
It is actually quite strange that I have never given a second thought to words like "avuncular" and "lithogenous" and "anthropomorphism" but I in the middle of the night I sat up in bed wishing to know what salubrious means. Salubrious is probably a word I should know, and I most likely sound foolish by writing that I didn't know the definition. However, if I resolved not to say anything that might make me look foolish, I wouldn't ever say anything.
Anyway, last night I sat in my bunk pondering possible meanings for the word, "salubrious" and musing on the fact that salubrious rhymes with lugubrious. As I said before, I had a deep desire to discover the definition of salubrious, but unfortunately it was not quite deep enough! That is, it was not quite a deep enough desire to persuade me to leave the cozy comfort of my bunk in pursuit of knowledge. Likely enough salubrious meant something dull, for example; "pertaining to great Spanish literature written in the pre-Cervantes era"
If I am lazy, I am not forgetful, so today I looked it up. If you are at all interested in knowing like I was last night, the exact definition of "salubrious" is as follows:

Salubrious:

–adj.
"favorable to or promoting health; healthful: salubrious air."
Example: "He made himself a salubrious sandwich composed of germinated wheat bread, peanut butter, whey protein powder and kale."
Now that I know what this important and often used word (riiiiiight...) means I can count myself an intelligent and educated person. Okay, enough learnin' fer one day; I'm gonna go watch uh muvie.

The Country Bumpkins visit the Big City

The other day my parents decided to take us on an educational field trip to the King County Courthouse & sheriff's office, so we drove down to Seattle. I was pleased with the idea until we walked through the front door. Then, my spirits went down,

down,

down,

like a brick in quicksand. Wait a minute, that's a really lame, if accurate simile. Oh well.
Anyway, so what was the reason behind this sudden nose-dive off my spirits? I saw that in just inside the building was a metal detector! My eyes widened in fright, and I assumed the stance of a hunted deer.
Let me stop right here. Some people collect butterflies, some spoons, some post cards, some pretty china, and many stamps. What I collect triggers alarms when I pass through metal detectors, and it isn't spoons. I (along with several good friends who shall remain nameless) collect pocket knives. They are very practical and collectible.
"Mom," I whispered, worried that my precious knife would get confiscated like the last one (at an airport,) "I think I'll go sit in the car."
My mother did not take to the idea.
"Ophelia," she said, "This is Seattle, and I'm not going to leave you in the car. Besides, this is a family outing and we are going to stick together. Why do you want to stay in the car?" she began to ask, but then it was her turn to walk through the condemning metal arch. I watched Giles and Ava go through. No one remained but Bracie and me. I smiled at her weakly and faced the inevitable; it was my turn. First, I carefully placed my bag on the moving counter so that it would feed through the scanner. Then, I removed my pocket knife from, guess where, my pocket, and placed in on the tray. Bravely, I stepped through the metal detector and came out without setting off the alarm.

Just after I came through, my bag was sent into the depths of one of those, uh, bag scanners. I knew that my knife in the tray would set off the alarm, but as I waited, I heard the machine omit not one beep, but four! My spirits sank even lower.

Once again, let me stop. I like to wear dresses on nice occasions, but the problem with a dress is that there isn't a place on them to conceal a knife. So, being the ingenious problem solver that I am, I usually stuff a knife in my bag. This would be fine, except that I am horrible of keeping track of things, so I don't always take the knives out.

Anyway, so I stood there, my confidence sinking to rock bottom, and me wishing that I would melt. I knew what would happen. The scanner operator looked at me like I was a raving tearing lunatic.

"Did you know, young lady, that you have four knives in this bag?"

What was I supposed to say? If I protested and claimed that I didn't, I would have sounded guilty. If I had said yes, I'd probably be written down as some serial killer. So, I responded with a weak, "Sort of. Not really," which probably made me sound like both at the same time.

Luckily, I was allowed to keep my precious knives. You do have to give me credit because one of the "knives" wasn't actually a knife; it was a switch-comb that merely resembled a knife. I did feel better about bringing four actually knives and one switch comb into a court house because Bracie brought one too.

Mom looked on at poor me and laughed, exclaiming enthusiastically that we should take pictures. However, Dad was not pleased, and so unfortunately we have no accompaining photos. Maybe next time.

Aaaaah!

Okay, so the general consensus (according to the people who commented) was that my blog template was boring and BLAH. So I, caring deeply about my gentle readers opinions, changed it, even though I didn't want to. I'm such a martyr!

Now, I really, really don't like this new one. I think it's way to bright, but not original enough. The Reluctant Dragon blog layout ought to scream, "Quirky!" and "Unusual!" and "Super awesome!" Not like the last one did, but it was better! I guess I'm just rejecting any hint of change and throwing a fit. Sort of like Pat of Silver Bush, for the minority out there that has actually read that book.
So, I want YOU! (Picture me here pointing a strangely foreshortened arm and extended pointer finger at you while I'm wearing striped pants and a top hat that defies the laws of perspective.)
... To tell me whether I should go back to the old, safe background or stick with this ugly one or get a very scrapbookish looking one.
Please? Pleeease? It doesn't have to be an essay, hey, if you want to, just write "ew" in the comment section if you don't like this new template.
So, comment! (And thanks to all of you who commented last time.)

Blank.

Today, I opened up my blogging account and clicked on "create post." Then... I, I, I sat there and I didn't know what to write! My mind was blanker than a sea monkey. I frantically racked my brain for suggestions, "Uh, How sorry I am that I haven't posted? No, I'm not that sorry. How annoyed I am that I can't load a video? No, if I write about that I'll bore my readers."

So now, I'm writing about how I can't think of anything to blog about. Which is, if I really think about it, momentous. I can almost always think of something. Perhaps I have run dry. Horrors! Or maybe I just too tired from staying up until midnight for the last three nights.

I apologize for not posting lately. You see, I really have been busy because we have had out of town guests with daughters my age, which means late nights.

Every time I try to post, I try to post a video. I wait for a long time for the video to load, and then a little window pops up that says "We're sorry, contact us and include the following information blah, blah, blah." Somehow, since this has been happeing for the last month, I highly doubt that they are actually sorry.

I just posted about everything that I decided I wouldn't. However, I'm not very sorry. I wonder what this says about my character?

-Ophelia

Errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh! Website Malfunction

For the last 4 days, I have been trying to load a super awesome movie, so YOU, gentle readers, could enjoy it, but, alas, I cannot because for some reason the website won't allow me to upload the video. And this on top of my being unable to post a poll. I am deeply offended. I think I'll go complain to the authorities.
But on the other hand, I suppose I should be very nice to the people who run the website because they probably work like a lake full of busy beavers. So I can have a blog. For free.
Besides, it would probably be a case of the oldies song, "I fight authority/authority alway wins/" But I'm not really fighting; I'm complaining, so I guess I just typed that out so that I could have an excuse to sing that song, even though those are the only two lines of that song that I know. (Wait, are there any other lines in that song?) That song is so much fun to sing merely because I have absolutely no desire to fight authority.
Well, bye for now. I think all go dance around my bedroom singing, "I fight authority/authority always wins/I fight authority/authority always wins.../