Monthly Archives: November 2008

Turkey transformation

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Add Turkey Slaughter to your calendar for tomorrow?

So prompted GMail in a recent e-mail thread. The occasion: a demonstration Knox and I were attending at a local farm to see how turkeys get killed.

This all started way back in the summer, when friends of ours on Capitol Hill decided that (why not!) they would raise turkeys for Thanksgiving. Knox and I were game. We bought into the co-op, and sporadically visited the turkeys as they grew. Now, with Thanksgiving around the corner, all the co-op members are getting ready for the kill—except we’ve not really done this before.

Knox, however, managed to find a post on Craigslist for a free-range farmer who allowed folks to purchase his birds and kill them on the spot. We attended one such event as mere spectators. Knox’s agenda was learning how to become our turkey butcher (I’ll be blissfully working at the time). My own purpose for going was to test my ethics in facing the source of my animal food.

And so, there we were, watching tukeys get knocked out, killed, and prepped. I’ll spare you the (slightly) gruesome details. I will note one, though: the magic step is the plucking. Take the feathers off the dead bird and it becomes instantly recognizable as a food item.

Tomorrow, Knox became the turkey-killer-in-chief. As for me, I think there ought to be better ways for animals to die. I’ll be edging a bit closer to vegetarianism once again.

This, my friends, is a plucker

Pops

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Pops, the giant rabbit

There is a new addition to the Gardnovsky Gardens, and its name is Pops. Knox came back from a mysterious errand in Tacoma on Saturday with a rabbit. A giant, obese rabbit. We later found out (thanks to What Breed is my Bunny?, of course) that it is a fawn-colored Flemish giant.

Apparently, his biography looks something like this: he got his name because the kid he belonged to thought he was the color of Corn Pops. He shared his cage with a cat. The kid lost interest, the cat was given away, the rabbit was lonely. He’s been living outside, unfazed by his barking canine neighbors. The previous owner, a veterinary assistant, decided he was neglected. One Craigslist posting later, Pops came to join Galli at the Gardnovsky Resort and Spa.

Pops is awfully cute, but certainly needs to go in a diet: his jowls are all too conspicuous when he relaxes, all splayed out. We keep him in a rabbit hutch outside, which hutch will be graced with an HGTV-style addition before our own house will. We’ve been bringing him indoors every so often to look at him and pet him, and he seems to enjoy that just fine. He and the cat have been sniffing each other out (and I mean that literally; Galli is intrigued by Pop’s butt). Galli remains suspicious, staring at Pops in her focused huntress mode. Pops is laid back, knowing he has the advantage of size.

So far, our major complaint is that when he comes inside, Pops likes to poop (perfectly formed soft pellets) and pee (brownish syrup). We need to get him housebroken and using a litter box. He’s got a scat kink going, too: he’ll wallow in, sniff, and eat his own pellets, and he seems to quite enjoy stretching out in his own urine. Sigh. As much as I enjoy him, I’ve instituted a new house rule: you bring it home, you take care of its excrement.

Man and Bunny

Blog, uncluttered

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If you’re reading my site, you’re most likely using an RSS aggregator. If you’re not, get thee to Google Reader, stat.

Google Reader has a cool feature that lets you share with others items in the feeds that you read (and you can event comment as you share!). It also has a bookmarklet to let you similarly share any page on the web. Within Google Reader, you can easily see you friends’ shared items.

In the event you don’t use Google Reader, you can still access my shared items by subscribing to my automatically-generated Shared Items blog. (The most recently shared items also show up in a gadget in my blog sidebar.)

Why care about my shared items? With shared items, I don’t have to debate whether an interesting site merits a whole entry in my blog or a mass mailing to all of my Internet friends/acquaintances/stale contacts. I can point you to articles that, for some reason or another, I found interesting: maybe I agree with them, maybe I don’t; maybe they opened my eyes, maybe they left me incredulous. At any rate, placing these items in a separate repository allows my own blog to focus on original content about my life and my thoughts—much in keeping with the Slow Blogging article I recently shared.

It cleans things up for me as a blogger, and for you as my audience. Check it out!

Driving, dancing, and remodeling

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This weekend had us making a loooong drive to Spokane and back for a family function. The driving was tedious, but Washington State is georgeous: from the Puget Sound to Snoqualmie Pass to the Columbia River basin and on to (almost) the Idaho border, a sequence of ecosystems following each other in sometimes abrupt succession.

We got to witness first-hand a group of awfully nice, Republican-leaning, small-town folks of all ages (read: people with a socially conservative, non-peripatetic bent) dancing, nay, really getting into, the Village People’s YMCA. Knox and I shared a chuckle as we wondered whether they were aware of the subtext or were simply unconcerned….

Another highlight of the weekend was staying up way too late to watch HGTV. As new homeowners with burgeoning house pride, we were spellbound by one show after another featuring half-hour makeovers in which preternaturally cheerful design types take homes from drab to fab. The secrets to the makeovers, I suspect, are having a whole team of workers at the ready to supervise the work, and having a TV program provide the budget… The secret hook in the network’s programming is that the last segment of one show flows directly into the first segment of the next without a commercial break: once you see how one remodel turned out you are immediately presented with another seemingly hopeless case that you simply must see through resolution.