Whose woods these are I just don’t care,
As long as he’s not standing there

My husband Hank and I were still giddy at the amazing deal we’d gotten on
the house, but nowadays there are lots of great deals on the market.
And even though this is in a really posh neighborhood – DRiMland  - we
 still ended up having to run out to the hardware store before we’d
finished unpacking half a dozen boxes.
  
“Hi! You must be our new friends on Redstone Lane! I’m Jack! Anything you need from me, kids, you just let me know!”

“Thanks, Jack,” Hank said. “Actually, we were looking at getting some paint and

It's been previously documented (here, for instance: http://junglemonkee.livejournal.com/251077.html) that I LOVE catalogues, but more for what's behind the stuff they're showcasing than for the stuff itself.

We gave up our chickens a couple of months ago because we have huge landscaping plans that involve taking down the old chicken coop.  I thought it would be a relief. The chicken chores do take up a certain amount of time every day, every weekend and I thought that it would be a burden lifted from us.

It turned out that, while it did save us a few precious minutes every day, and a couple of hours on the weekends, there's a lot more to our adjustment.

I grew up in that modern miracle, the all-electric house. Electric furnaces could efficiently pump warm air throughout the house without the worries of gas fumes. Ovens and stoves heated evenly and looked sleek and modern. And, in the modern all-electric house, there was a plug in every room!

Those of you who check the Chicken Feed regularly have no doubt been wondering what happened to the chickens. It's been two weeks now, and they've not been outside.

Well, the fact is that the chickens have gone. The Pirate and I have been thinking about the next step in the Co-Prosperity Sphere's evolution, and we've decided that what we really need is more vegetables and fewer chickens. Makes sense, right? But the problem is that our little acre (and that's almost exactly what we've got here) has only one area that gets enough sun to grow anything - the chicken yard.

There was a time before the advent of modern, hygienic warfare that men went to battle wearing whatever they could strap to themselves to prevent the enemy from breaching their integumentary hulls and carrying whatever they thought might breach their enemies'. How did it work? How were  battles actually fought? How could anyone tell who was fighting, or who won? What I know about battle makes it seem that every ancient military victory was nothing more than propaganda, because if you couldn't tell one side from another, the first guy to yell "I win" must have won.

I was in Whole Foods yesterday, and walked by an endcap full of green boxes labeled "Complete Body Cleanse" (I almost said "I passed an endcap," but some puns are too low even for me). I thought to myself "We're already doing some planning for spring cleaning of the Co-Prosperity Sphere, so why not?

I was in a restaurant yesterday, and I was explaining to the Pirate about how Rufus Wainwright has that kind of voice that's the epitome of the stereotype of gay men - a drawl wherein his lips never meet, he hisses every "s" and he uses too many superlatives. As I was explaining this, a gay couple was seated at a table next to us and I noticed that one of the pair was shooting me dirty looks.

As a Buddhist living in a Western country, I feel caught between two
very different definitions of "happiness." Both traditions insist that
happiness is something worth striving for, a lifelong goal, but the
similarity ends there. Westerners are pummeled with images of the good
time they should be having all the time. Childhood should be an endless
birthday party, college should end with a spouse and large crowd of
lifelong best friends, one should wake up every day so excited to be
alive that they spring out of bed. For Buddhists, "happiness" is