#archifist

I’ve always been bit afraid of the countryside and now I have reasons to back up my irrational feelings!

You are absolutely right. Though to be fair this is hardly really the countryside. When I was a little kid I was constantly losing boots in the horse pasture muck, or playing in the creek behind the house, but it hasn’t happened to me as an adult.

Maybe the best part about all the chicken shenanigans today is that the new flock is currently in winter quarters right next to the highway. (Hence my insistence that this is not really the countryside, per se.) This morning, a bucket truck was working on attaching cables to the telephone poles, so they had to have a man in the bucket, a man holding a stop sign to slow traffic, and a man to operate the bucket. During morning chores, they happened to be right at the overpass next to the coops, so the man with the stop sign was standing perhaps twenty feet from us, on the other side of the road. And later in the morning, when my sister was mucking out the coop and called me to come help her after the chickens escaped, the crew was on their return trip, so he was standing even closer, on the same side of the road as us.

“They must think these are like, Kobe chickens,” my sister said, glancing over her shoulder. “Every time they’ve been near us we’ve been working in here.” Something alarmed one of the roosters and he started cackling, so I cackled back. Sister hissed at me. “Don’t speak chicken when the work guy can hear, he’ll think we’re crazy!”

“Sorry, chickens,” I said, picking one up in my arms and petting it sadly, knowing the stop sign guy was watching me. My sister rolled her eyes at me and went back to slinging chicken shit out the coop door.

archifist reblogged your post and added:

Okay but put your foot back on please

I saw the sign in the photo and before I even scrolled down my first thought was "I'm so sorry"

archifist replied to your photo “Moving along toward a couple of days of museums and such, out of the...”

Also I highly suggest not driving in DC proper-all these one way roads that don't have corresponding one way roads in the opposite direction, people making right turns from the left lane, etc

archifist reblogged your photo and added:

It’s because the DC area has a large itinerant...

Ha ha the driving hasn’t been too horribly bad, though we did cross the potomac, immediately get flown over by a helicopter, then wind up stuck in three lanes merging to a stop sign, where a flock of geese shit upon us. It was kind of amazing. Then we went to the wrong address and had to turn around and drive MORE through MORE of people-are-double-parked-in-the-left-lane, can’t-turn-right-from-the-right-lane-because-of-pedestrians, nobody ever signals, etc.

BUT we dropped the car off to get valet parked at the hotel, and we’re not gonna see that thing for three days. Forget it. 

(We did get to see a lot of neat stuff though, while sitting in traffic, so.

I had been wondering-- around Albany, you see a green VT license plate and figure that person’s going to drive like a maniac, or an MA license plate and figure that asshole’s never going to signal, so I was watching MD and VA and DC license plates whip by (and we got cut off by a NJ one!) and trying to guess who the assholes were. Spoiler alert: everyone.

But, it wasn’t bad; traffic is crazy because of holidays, but less heavy than normal, I think.

I guess my poor sister has to contend with metro Baltimore traffic on her commute, but she’s a big girl. It’s not quite as Legendarily Bad as DC itself, at least. 

In suburban MD they don’t believe in having shoulders on their roads. It’s just, white lineMAILBOX all the way down. I can’t believe anyone has any wing mirrors left. 

I have driven exactly 0 on this trip, which suits me JUST FINE. I drive plenty in my daily life, and we’re in Dude’s car, which is a recent Mazda with beeps and lights and choosing how fast you ought to go and such, and seems precisely calculated to infuriate the FUCK out of me, so I’m happy to be a passenger/backup navigator.

The Google Maps lady has a higher and faster voice than the car’s built-in GPS. I like her better for in-city driving.

Oh my god I haven’t written up onto Tumblr yet how the fucking in-car navigation system routed us through A MALL PARKING LOT in PA rather than taking the highway around a bend. It was unreal and hilarious. Maybe I did. Still.

We previewed how it wants us to go home and it is telling us that the easiest way to get back to Buffalo from DC is to go through the back roads in ski country where they just shattered records for snowfall in a 30-hour period with over 5 feet. (that link is for Erie PA but they got it all the way up the Tug Hill Plateau so...)

turns out, you are a terrible hunter and Whiskey will prevent you from dying THIS TIME but really you should learn to do better.

Last year she left stuff a couple of times, and I never ate it, and told her to eat it, and finally she started eating it herself. This year though, I just don’t want to step over a dead... vole? is that a vole? short tail... so i threw it out into the fresh-plowed field when no one was looking. So she’s gonna think I ate it.

I think she’s actually paying me protection so I’ll keep Beans, who bullies her, from coming around. Beans loves the yurt but only remembers about it when she follows Whiskey out there to beat her up. So I hissed at Beans last time and backed Whiskey up while she drove her off (she’s much smaller and less tough than Beans is), and I think Whiskey’s bringing me protection mousies so I’ll keep it up. Her brother Reno chased her into the yurt last week too, and I hissed at him and actually smacked him with a towel so he’d leave her alone. (Also it was four in the morning so he was not on my good side.)

We had one when I was a kid. Now I use the dryer because I'd rather not have pollen all over my clothes! Make me very allergic. :)

Oh no I never thought of that! I’m exceedingly fortunate not to have any pollen allergies. Also this neighborhood has, like, no trees, so-- just enough trees that it’s not super dusty, but.

For reference, that photo includes my entire back yard, so it’s not like I’m using the space for anything else.

torrilin reblogged and added: I do some. It’d be better if I did it more, but the condo association has zero clotheslines outdoors. And in multi family housing, there’s a lot of stigma about hanging wash outside. Not sure why, but it’s not very sensible financially. Granted, weather wise hanging out wash doesn’t make much sense here 6 months out of the year. But.I added a retractable clothesline to the hall bath when we moved in, so I can dry wooly stuff just fine. I should probably get another one or two, they’re very helpful.

Here’s how indecisive I am: I have a retractable laundry line and haven’t worked out where to put it, even though in the winter I hang up an awful lot of my clothing inside the house. I only have one bathroom, though, so my choices are limited. Outdoors, I literally just have a rope that I tied one end to the phone pole, and the other to a hook attached to the garage that the previous occupants surely used to hang decorative plants from. I keep the line from sagging too much by using one of those iron shepherd’s hook things people also hang decorative plants from, if they’re people who have that sort of lifestyle, which clearly I don’t. 

My sister in Georgia is actually barred by the homeowner’s association from hanging out laundry of any kind! And Dude’s sister, in California, used to complain about how her neighbors hung out clothes and then left them out to get dusty-- but it was clear that a lot of her complaint was them hanging stuff out, period, which she clearly found bizarre. Lady, you live in San Diego, which as far as I could tell was one giant clothes dryer, I’d never seen so much sun!

On the farm, they hang laundry out in all seasons when they can, but yeah, between November and February you’re really not going to even try it, and outside of that, it’s not going to work super well. I hang occasional things out in the winter, but mostly stuff goes on hangers off the backs of all the doors in the house. I just hate using the dryer-- a lot of my clothes simply don’t survive it, or come out shrunken. 

Socks, though, and towels-- yeah, line-drying those kind of sucks, you can kind of use them as hammers afterward, for whatever reason. But sheets-- omg, I love line-dried sheets. They smell amazing. 

archifist reblogged and added:

my mom has one of these. her favorite thing about it is you can hide your underwear in the inner layers.

I was just thinking that, as I hung out my stuff-- the inner lines are so short, and hidden, and clearly designed so you can put your little stuff in there and still have it get decent sun. I’m quite pleased with this thing-- but nobody can see in my backyard, my one awesome neighbor put up a big palisade fence, and the other neighbors are never in their yards. 

greenglittercat replied:

My family had one of these too! the german name translates literally to laundry spider

agapanthus or garlic/chives/allium and thistle, I think

I just read #5, I love these books

i think it must be an april fool’s joke. right? 

You’re married? Perfect! Divorce him and we can be...