Salami in the Slammer

Thought for the day:  An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in; a pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.  [Bill Vaughn]

Happy New Year, y'all. As Oprah Winfrey said, Cheers to a new year and another chance to get it right.

A fresh start. Don't you like the sound of that? Not that I was bored with the old year, mind you, but isn't it exciting to embark on a new one, and to anticipate what may lie ahead? May this be the year we all get it right.

In the new year, may your right hand be stretched out in friendship, but never in want.

So, did you go out dancing, and wining & dining to welcome the new year? Eat breakfast at a crummy restaurant on the way home?

Did you go to a party... or host one... where a guest demonstrated a skill he mastered in college?

Peach drop- Atlanta

Did you spend the evening shivering with a huge crowd of people... partying, singing, and waiting... and then counting down while some object descended to mark another year's demise?

Me, neither.











Oh, we've done a lot of those things over the years, and hosted some pretty terrific parties, too, but now, we generally go out for an early dinner, and then spend a relaxing evening at home by ourselves. (This year, better yet! We steamed crabs.) Like a couple of old farts, we grumble about some of the so-called music they play on the TV celebrations, and then as the bewitching hour approaches, my hubby pops a bottle of champagne. It may not be earth-shattering, but it suits us.

Of all the New Year's Eves Smarticus and I have spent together, one stands out above all the rest, because it was so unique. You see, it was the one and only time we spent the night at ... the local jailhouse.




HA! Didn't know I was such a bad girl, didja?

Remember the Y2K scare? Even though there was a mad scramble, and a ton of cash spent during the nineties to fix a computer glitch that could've crashed computer systems all over the world, a lot of uncertainty remained as January 1, 2000 approached. And not just about the computer glitch. Emergency management personnel had other concerns, as well.

Enter amateur radio. At the request of government officials, amateur radio operators set up stations in every police station, fire house, hospital, public utility, and numerous other places I can't recall right off hand... just in case.

My hubby and I set up at the police station just inside those doors and to the right. We maintained communications with the other emergency stations around our county and state. We checked in with other operators set up in similar situations in other states... and in other countries.

The police couldn't have been nicer. They had a great spread of food set up to celebrate the holiday, and told us to help ourselves. The mayor stopped by and chatted with us. We had a blast.

We stayed until about 4AM, because by then, everyone was fairly sure all was well. Still, it was pretty cool. And like I said, unique. I'm sure others have spent New Year's Eve in jail before... but with a slightly different connotation. (And they probably didn't get any cookies, either.)

                                 What's the strangest place YOU ever spent New Year's Eve?


Now is the time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving the road to hell with them as usual.  [Mark Twain]

By the way, I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas. We sure did. Here's a handful of pictures...

L to R: Aaron, Kymber, Devyn, and Jaiden

Nothing puts the magic into Christmas better than sharing it with family and friends... especially if children are involved. We had the pleasure of staying with our son and his family. Can you believe the kids actually posed for pictures before opening a single present?

Princess Kymber

The boys each got a Superman towel/robe thingie; Kymber got one of Ariel; and Devyn got Minnie Mouse. She isn't usually one to smile for a picture, but she reeeeeally loved her Minnie Mouse get-up.

With a little help from big brother Jaiden and a LOT of help from mom Tina, Kymber made a batch of itty bitty cupcakes in her new Easy Bake oven.

The three older kids got kid-friendly tablets from their other grandfather. I can't believe how quickly they picked those things up and started playing on them, as though it were intuitive. Aaron is only two years old, and he was navigating on that thing better than I was. ('Course, I realize that ain't saying much...)



Okay, enough. Christmas is over for another year, a whole new year stretches ahead of us, and... life is good.

Oh, by the way, for those of you who remember when the kids got rabbits last year, what can I say? All of a sudden, the little critters have been multiplying like... rabbits! Two babies were born a week before we got there, and four more were born two days before. After the first two were born, Tina took the older rabbits to the vet. All girls except for one very enthusiastic little guy, who got neutered. Too late! I'm telling ya, he was a really busy bunny! A couple days ago, seven more babies. Ah well, time to enlarge the habitat again...

                                Until next time, take care of yourselves. And each other.

Hopping Through the Alphabet

Thought for the day:  You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.  [C.S. Lewis]  A little bit of change is good for the soul.  [me]

Baby bunnies #1 and #2

Yep, change.

That's my way of saying I was too lazy I've been too darned busy no typical Friday megapost this week. And not for a while. Gonna take a hiatus from them until at least May, when we'll pick back up with the state of New Jersey.

In the meantime, our grandchildren in Alabama got their bunnies. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can get the full poop on this past Monday's post.)

Bunny #3

Bunny #4

Cute, aren't they? Especially the first two; they're not much more than little balls of fur. Looks like the other two are in the kitchen. Naaaah, they're not gonna be at all spoiled, I'm sure.

[Let's hope the number STAYS at four. If not, I'll let ya know.]

Have you guys been noticing this badge on a lot of blogs lately? I know some of you are planning to participate in the challenge, but for those who aren't, I figured I'd give y'all a heads up.

Starting this coming Sunday, the first of April (no fooling!) all of the A-Z participants will be doing a post about something beginning with the letter A. Then, each subsequent day, will be doing a post based on something beginning with the next letter of the alphabet, until we run the full gamut. So that'll be twenty-six days of posting, (no more Sunday posts after the first one) which is considerably more than some of us usually do in a month. (like me) Should be fun, though. There are  more than fourteen hundred participants signed up so far, who will be in a frenzy visiting as many of the other participating blogs each day as they can. (If you're interested in joining the insanity fun, you can register up until the second of April.) So, we should have a lot more comments to keep up with than usual, and a lot more other blogs to read than usual, but I'll do my best to keep up with all of you guys, my usual blogger buddies. Except for in the middle of the month. Gonna be spending time with some dear friends we haven't seen in several years then, so phooey on the computer while we're hanging out with them. 

Some of the A-Z participants have selected a theme for all their posts. Mine is amateur radio. I hope you find the subject interesting enough to stick with me through April's madness, but if not, I'll catch y'all in May.

                                          Until then, take care of yourselves. And each other.

Spring Has Sprung!

Thought for the day:  The other day when I was walking through the woods, I saw a rabbit standing in front of a candle making shadows of people on a tree.  [Stephen Wright]

It's that time of year again. As I type this, it's March 20, the first official day of spring. HA! As if the calendar meant diddly squat to Mother Nature. I can tell you, without doubt, spring unofficially blustered into Georgia weeks ago.

Record high temperatures in the mid-eighties.

And wipe your eyes and blow your noses ...record high pollen counts coming atchoo, too. Yesterday hit a staggering 8164 particles per cubic meter of air, which tops the previous record by more than 2000. Believe me, that's nothing to sneeze at. So to speak.

Yep, it's deja-choo all over again. Atlanta is a beautiful place in the springtime, as long as you don't mind shoveling pollen and chewing every breath you take. Ah well. On a Claritan day, you can see forever. And on the bright side, I'm expecting the crime rate to plummet. Everybody's too busy sneezing to be bothered with criminal activites. And this is just the beginning. The calendar says so.

A couple weekends ago, my husband and I spent the day with our son and his family in Alabama. My daughter-in-law decided she wants to get each of the children a baby rabbit, so my hubby and son spent the day making a huge cage for them.

"Four rabbits?" I asked.

"Uh-huh," my DIL replied. "Three for the big kids, and one for me. When Devyn gets a little older, the fourth one will be hers."

"You planning on putting partitions in that cage?" I asked. "Y'know, to keep four from turning into forty?"

"Oh, no," my sweet naive DIL said. "We'll just get them all the same sex."

It isn't easy to differentiate baby bunny gender, but we'll see how well that turns out. As for me, I'm pollen for a happy outcome.

Okay, no more deja-choo or pollen nonsense, but how about a little deja-vu? Thinking about our grandkids and their soon-to-be pet rabbits reminded me of a post I wrote last April, entitled Lessons From a Killer Rabbit. I decided to toss it atchoo (sorry ... last time, I promise) again for those of you (most of you) who missed it the first time around:


Thought for the day:  The Energizer Bunny was arrested. He was charged with battery,

Got an early wake-up call of the wild this morning.



You're nobody 'til somebody loves you.

 It was a woodpecker,  imitating a miniature jack hammer on the tree outside our bedroom window. His serenade only lasted for about fifteen minutes, but his presence reminded me of another wacky woodpecker who spent the entire summer here some years back. In fact, he was here so much we gave him a name. We called him Clem.

Now, I've been told that male woodpeckers pound out their jazzy rhythms in the early hours of the morning in order to attract a mate. Don't know it that's entirely true or not, but let's say that it is. And if it is, poor old Clem was sorrowfully unlucky in love.

Because he didn't just show up and rat-a-tat for fifteen minutes just before the sun came up. Oh, no. Clem was an industious and rather desperate suitor, and showed up several hours before daybreak, and rat-a-tatted his heart out for one or two hours every morning. On trees. On the gutters. On a fiberglass canoe. If it wasn't moving, our little visitor took a whack at it. If nothing else, he was persistent. But, alas,  I don't think he ever found love. He eventually stopped coming around, but  I fear the crumpled zig-zag beak he must have had held little appeal for the fairer sex.

Back to this morning. After the woodpecker finished his drum solo, the cats took over. If you have cats, I'm sure you're familiar with the routine. There's the piling-on game, the nose-rubbing and purring-in-your-ear game, the patty-cake game, and let us not forget the rousing round of king of the mountain, where you, of course, are the mountain. All designed, of course, to get their staff out of bed and into the kitchen.

I took all of this as an omen that it was time to write another blog about lessons I've learned from our pets. We've already talked a little bit about cats in the past, and about fish, but today, we're going to talk about rabbits.

Let me preface the lessons learned with a lesson of a different kind, a history lesson. About Jimmy Carter and the killer rabbit.

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter went fishing in Plains, Georgia. While out in his row boat, enjoying a peaceful respite from the White House, his serenity was shattered by a rabbit and a pack of dogs. The dogs were doing what dogs do. They were chasing the rabbit. But this rabbit didn't do what one would expect a rabbit to do. This rabbit jumped into the water, hissing and gnashing its teeth, and swam towards the president's boat. Though the president said he didn't have any experience with out-of-control animals, he successfully shooed it away by splashing water at it with a paddle. As you can imagine, if you don't already remember the incident, the media had a field day. "President Attacked by Killer Rabbit" was a common headline around the country. Late night comics took the story and ran with it, and poor President Carter became a laughing stock. If you do a google search now, you can actually find pictures of the rabbit, and of President Carter shooing it away from his boat, but they weren't made available at the time. But I, for one, didn't need to see any pictures to believe the president's story, because I'm pretty sure we ended up with the spawn of that killer rabbit.

My daughter had a pet rabbit. It was a precious little bit of fur with a tiny pink nose when we first brought it home, but here are some of the lessons we learned from owning that rabbit:

• Precious little bits of fur with tiny pink noses grow up to be big fat rabbits. With sharp claws.
• All big fat rabbits do is eat and generate a big fat ton of hoodles.
• Little girls don't like to clean up hoodles.
• I don't like to clean them up, either.
• Rabbits don't like you to put halters and leashes on them.
• Rabbits have very sharp claws.
• Once the halter and leash are attached, rabbits are lousy at taking walks. They hop. Very leisurely. Because they have to eat every green thing in sight. And, of course, drop hoodles.
• Rabbits don't like you to take halters and leashes off of them.
• Did I mention they have very sharp claws?
• If he ever hopped away from home, (no such luck!) we would have been able to find him quite easily. Hansel and Gretel had nothing on him. He could leave a steady two-mile trail of turds.
• Here's the funny part. The mountain of rabbit poop that critter generated was useless as fertilizer.

I don't remember what our daughter called that rabbit. Something cutesie like Fluffy. But after a few weeks of shoveling his poop, I started calling him Hoodles, and that stuck. Oh, and on second thought, maybe he wasn't related to President Carter's rabbit, after all. When we tossed him into the lake, he didn't swim.

Just kidding. We ended up donating him to the Yellow River Game Ranch, where he lived out the rest of his life with a bunch of other rabbits, eating, generating hoodles, and ... um... multiplying.


Until next time, take care of yourselves. And each other. Oh, and I know some people have rabbits that make wonderful pets. My sister-in-law had one. Ours, however,  wasn't the cuddly type. And I might have mentioned? He had very sharp claws.

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No trees were killed in the sending of this message. However, a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.
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I hope you enjoyed the re-run. For some reason, the song Doing What Comes Naturally is running through my head. Maybe because rabbits typically do a LOT of what comes naturally? Maybe we'll get lucky. Maybe our grandchildren's bunnies will be all the same sex. Or maybe doing  it won't be so natural to them at all.

Until next time, take care of yourselves. And each other.