Change of location...

Hey Chicken Diction fans, I have moved to Wordpress for indiscernible reasons, and soon enough I will have new posts up there to make it even more interesting. To see it, follow this link:

www.chickendiction.wordpress.com

See you there.

matthew

Chickens in the News! #9

Chickens are in! Here is one strutting its stuff on the Sao Paulo fashion show runway.

First ascent.

Flight of the Conchords is my new favorite show ever.

I am so not the first person to post this video from Flight of the Conchords, but I can't help it. They're that good...(oh, if any of my cousins are looking at this with their kids, I have a sneaking suspicion that you will want to provide whatever your level of censorship you desire for the rather creative lyrics.)

A thought for Tuesday...

Cheers to Jonathan for sending this my way...

Outdoor shower...

Just in time for the 100 degree temps the outdoor shower is completed with lots of help from all sorts of people. Chris helped cement posts, my dad showed up to work on the copper plumbing with me, mom, Chris, and Megan stained the slats at various times. My neighbor of course thinks I am crazy but the shower is quite possibly the best thing we have done to the backyard so far... And for those of you who are wondering what in the world I am thinking, well here are the three main reasons we wanted an outdoor shower:

1. Water goes into the ground, and helps to recharge the terribly depleted aquifer. (We only use biodegradable soap outside and hair washing will take place inside.)
2. Water from our outside spigot is often cooler (after the initial blast of superheated water lava) than water that is piped into the house, which when low temps in the summer rarely get below 80 degrees at night, the desire for cold showers nears obsessive.
3. Seriously, there is nothing better than a refreshing shower under the stars or in the morning sun as birds are singing.

Here is some evidence.

Vacancy.

Come on in!

Notice the beautifully stained wood and the wonderfully welded copper piping - thanks to everyone who helped! Also the bench to the right. Don't worry, it's sanded very smooth.

Aerial photography.

Chickens in the News! #7

I have a 30ft catapult filled with chicken droppings - and I'm not afraid to use it

Will Pavia
March 5, 2008
From The Times

The headquarters of Joe Weston-Webb’s portable flooring empire is protected by security fencing, motion-sensor lights and CCTV cameras.

None of these conventional measures has deterred arsonists, however, and in desperation, Mr Weston-Webb has now fortified his defences with less orthodox technology left over from his time as a travelling showman.

A 30ft Roman catapult, loaded with chicken droppings from a nearby farm is primed each evening. And a cannon, which Mr Weston-Webb once used to shoot his wife across the River Avon, will fire a railway sleeper if triggered by an intruder.

Mr Weston-Webb was yesterday erecting a sign outside his business, which stands at the end of a farm track in the lower valley of the River Soar in Nottinghamshire – a place known locally as Soar Bottom. It reads: “Warning: These premises are protected by smart-poo and railway sleeper projectiles.” (Read more...)

Chickens in the News! #6

Consider this your first Public Service Announcement mixed with the News!....

Beware people in chicken mascot suits! One minute they will be protesting alongside PETA in Manila, Philippines against some horrible abuse of the International Declaration of Poultry Rights...


...and the next they will biting the heads of your children! You never know what will come over someone dressed in a giant chicken suit. Don't let this happen to you or someone you love.


This has been a message from your local Chicken Diction broadcasting network. You now may return to your regular scheduled programming.

BIG NEWS.

This is the 100th post on Chicken Diction and that is BIG NEWS. Big like this...

So it calls for some BIG celebration. Like this...

Happy Friday!

Oh Golden Lanes oh!

Life isn't all about chickens, so we celebrated this past rainy Sunday evening as all rainy Sunday evenings should be celebrated: we went BOWLING. And we dressed up. Because if you can't bowl well, at least you can look good. And drink beer.

Tell us what your gonna do Debbie...

Freja selects a ball.

Riley "Stetson" Merline and Chris "Five-O" Lowen.

Changing bowling names is sometimes more fun than actually bowling.

We were just glad Marie made it out from the black hole of James E. Rodgers Law School.

It's hard to look this good.

Megan "I am sporty" Bartel.

Riley demonstrates his style and skills.

Rock star bowling.

Dear Golden Lanes, we'll see you again soon.

"The sweet sounds of New Zealand sheep," by Chris Lowen.

My brother is a man of many talents, some seen, and some hidden below layers of skin and bones. Here, while on a recent trip down under, he unmasks his innate talent of impersonations, by mimicking the confused sheep of New Zealand. For those long time readers of Chicken Diction, you will remember his partner in crime and life, Megan and her natural abilities in the area of animal sounds as well. This time it was the lonesome cry of the North American buffalo. If you haven't witnessed her great display of animal mimicry, you should really see both the video of Chris below, and Megan's together, so here is the link. May you all enjoy the wonderful sounds of nature!

Second Annual Tacky Holiday Sweater Party

I hope that you are prepared for the best blog entry EVER. Albeit belated, I can assure you that you have never seen anything quite like this (there might be a reason for that). This is the documentation for the Second Annual Tacky Holiday Sweater Party and it is something never before seen in the world of blogging - until next year of course. So feast your eyes on the brilliance of tacky holiday sweaters...

Welcome to our fiesta!

People were very excited to be in attendance.

Behold, the tackiness!

JT and his girlfriend campaigned all night long to be voted the "Best PTA Mom and Dad" and then left before the awards were handed out, so we all booed, gave their present of a stuffed chihuahua that sings "Feliz Navidad" in a bad Mexican accent to someone else, and promptly forgot all the begging and pleading they did in order to get voted for in the first place. Then JT had the tenacity to email me and ask where their prize was. Whatever JT.

Kristin and Debbie. Debbie came in second for "Most Flair".

Uppy and Dave - how cute.

My brother would have won the prize for "most prominent sweater" if there had been a category for that. He sewed the Santa head onto his sweater and it stuck out a good six inches.

Meet Juan...

Juan "Moose Cock" Castro, that is.

Mari and Jonathan.

Wreath-on-a-sweater and Smiles-a-lot.

Lindsey and Kristin.

Claudine won a well deserved "Most Flair" for her home-made xmas tree hat.

Pam was the write in winner of the non-existent category of "Most Drool".

Joe placed a strong third in the category of "Hardest to look at".

Riley and I went head to head for first place in the coveted "Hardest to look at" category. In the end I pulled out the victory.

Guess why.

Happy tacky holidays!

November rain.

Yesterday morning I woke up to the sound of water dribbling down the ABS pipe along the house that leads to the cistern. This was a new sound, and as a homeowner (especially early in the morning) new sounds are by definition suspicious. I sat up very startled, and was quickly calming myself, satisfied that everything was going where it was supposed to and indeed making all the right noises according to their little water paths - I had just never heard these things before.

So today, I googled images for "chicken" and "rain" and this snapshot of Don, Jim, Bob, Alva, and Bud is one of the photos I got. Not exactly what I was looking for - I have never met those five hefty, mountain men, but I am sure they had a good time eating the chicken if the rain didn't keep the fire at bay.

I am really writing because I could barely contain my excitement that it is actually raining and the water catchment tank is filling up (slowly as there is really only a light drizzle here and there). This morning I could even turn on the spigot to find free, untainted agua pouring out. This is all very exciting as the cistern has now lost its catchment virginity of sorts. I also saw a little toad between the aloe patch and the cover crop I have planted in the summer beds. I always take it as a good sign that random little creatures live in the yard - unless they are feral cats going after the chickens (there's at least one that I regularly am forced to throw rocks at) or hundreds of swallows making off with free chicken feed (I'm thinking a scarecrow?).

And with the rain, the gutters have not fallen off (though there are a few places I will have to seal up), the tank hasn't fallen over, and the plants in the basins look very content with their new found locations. According to all the weather websites and forecasters, there is a 100% chance of rain for the rest of the day and night, into tomorrow. For anyone who knows anything about Tucson, saying that it will rain with such certainty is nearly unheard of, and tantamount to saying something like Dick Cheney is going to have another heart attack, take his shiny, black helmet off, and beg forgiveness just like he did in Star Wars - don't get our hopes up if it isn't absolutely true.

Well at least it's raining.

You've got to dream big.

I might just have my life figured out. Well, mostly.

There was a time before I lived in Tucson, when I imagined myself clad mostly in faded jeans, cowboy boots, and a straw hat (but not exclusively), driving a beat-up, dusty pickup truck past saguaros and cholla buds under the wide open desert skies with craggy mountains on every horizon. If the memory of my imagination serves, I was a high school teacher at some middle of nowhere rural outpost town, living in a rustic house where I watched the sunsets, read endlessly and learned to play the harmonica on the porch under the warm night air. But I could be making that last part up.

If I'm honest, this dreamy and imagined existence I once had of my then future self, first exploded onto the plain of my not always so grounded mental playing field, one summer evening in middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania. I was working on a 30 acre organic farm with some of the best people ever to stick their fingers in the clay soil along Lost Creek. Visitors abounded that summer, almost as frequently as we spent the nights along the creek, enraptured by the fire, stories, and laughter. At some point during that wetter than usual growing season, punctuated it seemed by more weeds than crops, a friend of a friend showed up with tales of teaching in a far away land called the Southwest, where there was no rain to speak of and road runners were not only cartoons.

It was a point in my life when I needed no help making plans, only deciding which to follow, but somehow the dusty life appealed to my imagination and stuck around in some nebulous form or another. Evidently it has manifested itself, in many ways without my realization, until only the last few days. Here's how.

Clearly I am residing in Tucson, Arizona, though hardly the dusty, rundown, rural mirage I once envisioned, but still the desert nonetheless. And a whole wide range of other similarities to that aforementioned idea of perfection. But the epiphany that has so recently slapped me in the face, thanks to that "friend of a friend" from the creek on the farm in Pennsylvania saying "hello" completely out of the blue, and the wailing of some good ole' fashioned blue grass musicians, is just this: that whatever half-crazed idea of my life I had during that summer of fresh veggie eating, dirty fingernail scrubbing, and organic produce cultivating, I am now right smack dab in the middle of it. Half-crazed or not.

So I'm not a high school teacher (with no plans to be), and though we dread to even say so, Tucson will one day get swallowed by the beast that is Phoenix if we don't run out of water first (fingers sorta crossed I must say) and is therefore NOT rural in the least, I miss too many of the sunsets, and don't read enough at all. BUT, my truck is the Websters Dictionary 217th Edition Honest to Goodness definition of "beat-up", I've got a straw hat that fits me almost as well as the one back on the farm in Pennsylvania though it is less authentic for sure, somehow I am pulling veggies from my old flood plain dirt in the backyard, and that feeling that goes with the old imagined version of me today, is actually how I feel about life right now - which is downright goooood.

AND, to top it all off, about a week ago as the young boys of the Old Crow Medicine Show made sweet sweet bluegrass music, I danced and hopped around in my brand-new-but-used cowboy boots, realizing that I might just have it all figured out. Well almost. I think.

At least I feel oh-so-good. I mean check out these boots! Though my footwear standby is definitely flip flops, everything is better with a good pair of cowboy boots I have now decided.

Barrio Brew Co. - and chickens of course.

Me and some friends had probably more than enough fun at a new brewery, Barrio Brew Co. this evening and I happened to have a camera along. So here are some photos you may or may not enjoy, that entail our own personal inspiration and imitations of my chickens. You'll probably know which are which, but in case you are easily confused I have added some subtitles to explain the inspiration and imitations...

To the left.

To the right.

Me and Dave - partial.

We were number 78. They're sticklers about numbers.

Uppy after I told her to think of some neuroscience word I currently can't remember. She enjoyed it though.

At some point I told Dave to be serious, but he didn't do that well, so I told him to pretend one of his rats had died. I don't think this is the picture though.

Debbie's failed attempt at seriousness.

Riley thinking he is in GQ magazine. Really.

This is my "fuck the man" pose. This is why revolutions fail - too much cynicism, not enough gruffness.

Uppy doing "chicken".

Dave, definitely doing "chicken".

Look at me. I'm a chicken.

Wait. Debbie is a chicken too.