and here i am, blarfing at home, on rickety old phone lines with 24kbps, instead of roadrunner highspeed. good as it gets here on the farm.
i woke up this morning to the sound of tom petty singing christmas carols. don't get me wrong, i love tom petty, but tom petty + christmas = poop. his label MUST have put him up to this. i don’t remember the lyrics, but if tom petty were to write a christmas song, it would have to be something like, “all i want for christmas is a pack of smokes” or “my christmas tree is made of pot (so let’s set it on fire)". good god, a tom petty christmas. someone please save us.
it’s been an interesting weekend. after missing my sheriff test, i came home and got to work on the christmas present for the nieces & nephews—a Power Wheels Jeep Wrangler. i always wanted the Power Wheels Bigfoot Truck and NEVER got it, back in like, ’85. i had to settle for the Knight Rider Big Wheel with three turbo boosts and hand brake, which was pretty damn cool in its own right. however, i distinctly remember an older brother pushing me up the center alley of the barn so hard and fast that i was launched out the barn door and crash landed in a patch of cow shit approximately 8-12” deep. that woulda never happened with a bigfoot power wheel.
i can now cross the power wheel off my childhood fantasy toy list. the idea with this one is to replicate my real life, full size jeep scrambler, and possibly make some performance mods too. It’ll no doubt create a war amongst the kids on christmas morning—yay!
mark came over and hung out in the depot while i worked on the jeep, and we ended up going to pizza hut, where we managed to eat all our cheesy breadsticks and sicilian pizza WITHOUT needing a carry-out box. i don’t think i’ve ever left pizza hut without leftover pizza, so this was a huge accomplishment in my book. then we went to see “bad santa”, which mark has been wanting to see, but as i expected, it was weak. the only redeeming part of the film—the raunchy toilet humor—was weaker and more unoriginal that what we come up with to degrade each other at my job every day (bernie mac: “well, I’ll be dipped in dog shit”). and they killed mac, whose performance was one of the few highlights. what a sorry movie for john ritter to finish his career with. it wasn’t all bad, just not as good as i’ve heard.
we got home around midnight, just before mom & dad rolled in after returning from a senators/devils hockey game up in ottawa. kinda wish i’d known my schedule or i woulda gladly gotten a ticket way back when brother dan was canvassing the crowd. next time, i will go.
it was when we were standing in the kitchen at midnight when dad told me the story of the Great Feeder Calf Caper that has captivated our little hometown for the better part of two weeks. as the story goes, dad sold 20 angus calves to one of the local farmers (let’s call him "Eddiefray Artonbay" to protect his identity)(pig latin translator!) a couple weeks ago. (consider them to be the same age in cow years as 12-15 year old little human punks.) dad told him to keep them in the barn, rather than the pasture, for a week or so until they realized this was their new home, or they’d be busting out & running all over the countryside before you could turn around. being as overconfident as he was, and having a brand new, six string barbed wire fence (strung tight enuff to play “old mcdonald” on, according to dad), Eddiefray turned them out after only a few days. And sure enough, they didn’t have a clue where the hell they were and immediately snapped the wire fence and took off all over the north country, looking for home, and of course, their mommies. all told, he lost 11 of 20, and was nearly in tears when he called up dad for help. so with the combined effort of every farm and farmer for 10 miles around, they managed to wrangle 9 of them, after they were sighted cutting thru the woods, crossing a creek, several roads, front yards, airfields, and a main highway. the last two were found and nailed with a borrowed tranquilizer gun. each capture resulted in updates on the answering machine and gossip all over town. but in the end, all was well, and each calf was safe and sound back in their new home—until next time they get out.
in more animal related news, it appears that, for the winter, the farm will be housing three chickens, two ducks, one goat, and one obese, gluttonous turkey. the birds will be easy enough, but apparently the goat is accustomed to running around town like a stray dog and eating peanuts while bellied up to the bar at the local pub. (true story, folks.) and the turkey and the goat don’t get along—the goat gave the turkey some gruff once, and the turkey kicked the shit out of the goat within an inch of it’s life (another true story), so they must be separated, or at least spend their drinking time in separate bars.
so it should be an interesting winter here on the farm. hopefully i’ll be around for it. it should be easier to come up here now, since i now have real weekends off, thanks to a schedule change. apparently my company thinks that the other senior manager does a better job of running cars thru the shop on sundays than i do, which is ironic because one of the last sundays i worked, we set a company record for the busiest sunday ever. whatever. i’ll take the whole weekend off, thank you.
