2001-08-22 - 5:27 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: "Two of Us", The Beatles

So, as if it weren't bad enough that I'm dealing with non-English-speaking workmen who arrive four hours after we were told they'd arrive, and who think I'm just kidding when I ask them to keep the door closed because the AC is on, there was an intruder in my garden again.

This time, though, I didn't care as much about the plant so I am not upset.

(But speaking of upset, did I mention the stomped plants when they were spray-painting where the utility wires are when digging in the area? I probably didn't. I must be getting used to this.)

We were cooking dinner last night amidst the banging and scraping of the people pulling up our floor, and the recipe calls for a couple tablespoons of parsley. I've got parsley, so outside I went.

Parsley has a long plain stalk with a sprout of curly leaves at the end. When I cut my parsley, I cut the bottom of the stalk, close to the ground. So I get outside, and I have two bunches of parsley, and one of them looks like this:

Notice the tall stalks with nothing at the top.

My first thought was, "Somebody's been stealing my parsley!"

I love those irrational thoughts I get. Occasionally I hit my head on obstacles I didn't see and my first thought is, "Why'd they hit me?!", with "they" being whoever's in the room. So, yeah, sure, somebody in the neighborhood must be stealing my parsley. Or the construction workers are stealing a few leaves to sprinkle on their lunch. Yeah.

I look over at the other plant, and there's the culprit:

This was a particularly odd thing for me to see, because I had said to one of my nieces just this past Saturday when looking at monarch caterpillars at the butterfly museum, "I've never seen one of these in my yard, but maybe you have."

It looks amazing. The caterpillar's colors are so vivid and crisp. I brought it inside to show to Poindexter, who just made squishing motions with his palms. He wasn't impressed.

It's a big freakin' caterpillar. Almost as big as my little finger:

I have small fingers (my wedding ring is size 3.5), but still. Mostly I just see gypsy moth caterpillars, and a monarch is very large in comparison.

Since I was just relieved that it wasn't eating the basil, and I still felt guilty about possibly starving the last caterpillar I found in my garden (Poindexter says caterpillars can eat grass, but he could be making that up to ease my guilt), I snipped a few not-good-enough-for-my-consumption pieces of parsley and put it in the park with those.

I went over there this morning and the ungrateful little bastard had wandered off and left the parsley. Fine.

At 9pm that evening, Poindexter and I went outside to sit on the "porch", since the weather's been pretty nice lately. We were admiring my sweet pepper plant, which sits on the porch and is covered with little baby peppers, about the size of acorns. The biggest one is even starting to turn orange! Woo! It's a much happier plant than the one down in the garden. Either the basil's stealing all the nutrients or the plant just hates the dirt there.

We weren't sitting long before Poindexter suggested we go get the mail, which is in a group of mailboxes about half a block away.

On the way there we ran into one neighbor out walking with his husky, and we stood and chatted with him for ten minutes or so. The topic? The incompetent boobs doing work such as delivering furniture and installing floors. Our neighbor actually had a deliveryman cause damage to the furniture and the deliveryman had the gall to try to get him to sign a damage waiver! Unfknblvbl.

Poindexter and I had been speculating for weeks that our next-door neighbor, Marie, was pregnant. I saw her one night in baggy clothes and came back and said to Poindexter, "Y'know, I can't put my finger on why I think this, but I think she's pregnant." We'd see them outside and she'd look pregnant and walk pregnant (with that slight backwards lean, y'know?), but she didn't look that pregnant -- not much of a belly, really -- and she didn't say anything about it. And we don't go around asking people "Are you pregnant?" because, y'know, what if they're not.

So anyway, we got the mail, which turned out to all be mis-delivered mail for our next-door neighbors. We had plans to have dinner with them this weekend, but had yet to nail down the specifics, so we knocked on their door. They invited us in to chat for a while, and Marie finally put our speculation to rest by patting her tummy and referring to the baby. Very exciting. Her husband, Ahmed, made fun of her because she eats so much and scheduled dinner a little early because she needs to eat "early and often".

I like these two immensely. Very nice people. Ahmed is fun because he's a gossip like Poindexter and I are. Poindexter and I sit inside our fishbowl house, all the shades open, and keep track of the goings-on in the neighborhood. Who's that person who's always spending the night at so-and-so's house? Look at that guy learning to ride his new Harley -- he looks like he's going to drop it. That sort of thing. Ahmed seems to be the same way. Poindexter and Ahmed stood on the sidewalk gossiping once about a not-very-friendly neighbor who was selling her house, and chatted about how mean and rude she was, and about how she had thighs that could crack walnuts (this was Poindexter's contribution), and whether she would ever sell the house since she was selling for-sale-by-owner.

So, remember awhile back when I was fussing about what to do in case of the end of civilization? And obsessing about eating the ducks on the lake?

Turns out that I had a book which, among many other things, tells me how to deal with poultry in general, and I had forgotten all about it! It's called "Back to Basics", and it has tons of useful information in it on how to live off the land. It's more for people who like to do this as a hobby, but it's still useful.

Some of you may want to quit reading now. It gets gross.

How to prepare a bird for eating:

To kill the bird, hold legs and wings firmly with one hand while you chop off the head with the other. Then hang the carcass upside down by the feet for 10 minutes to let the blood drain. To loosen the feathers for plucking, scald the carcass briefly in 150 to 190 degree water. Start the butchering by slitting the neck skin open, cutting off the neck, and pulling out the windpipe and gullet. Eviscerate as shown below, and finish by thoroughly washing the carcass.

Evisceration:

1. Insert finger to pry lungs and organs loose.
2. Cut around vent, being careful not to cut into it.
3. Carefully pull out vent and attached intestines
4. Pull out entrails. Do not rupture gall bladder.

Alas, the book presumes I know what a bird's gall bladder looks like in the first place, and it doesn't specify whether the gall bladder is merely yucky or whether it's poisonous, but it's better than nothing if I can't find anything in the library.

Also tells me how to skin a rabbit, which also grosses me out. Maybe I should just eat fish. It seems that with fish there are fewer weird organs to deal with.

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