Male PMS is A Very Real Thing, Friends

October is know for many things. It is National Midwife Appreciation week, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Vaccine Injury Awareness Mont (Hope all three of you have a nice celebration, and a number of other causes. Many or them are legit and some are bunk. Since October is officially "Cause" month I would like to add another into the fuck pile.
I hereby declare October to be Male PMS awareness month. It does not happen very often, perhaps every 6 months or so, but during onset of Male PMS you man might notice these symptoms.
1) You male will suddenly want to go fishing.
2) Your male will begin to consume more beer then usually
3) Nothing you do will make you male happy, you could walk around topless with your Poon hanging out and he would grump and walk away
4)You male will begin to think that you do nothing around the house even though when he attempts you job everything falls apart in a matter of hours.
5)Everything is your fault, even if it is his fault, the way you reacted to it makes it your fault.
The illness suddenly ends in cycle in a matter of weeks and then everything goes back to normal and your hubbs is the loving man you married once again.

So folks, lets all rally together to bring awareness to male PMS this month. There may be some young new wife who has never heard of it and might be believing that she has done something wrong.

Six Word Saturday

Three Little Boys and a Baby...


Are going to all be at my house in a while AND I am taking them to town. I must be the craziest woman on the face of the earth.

And here is a nice picture of a humpback whale, because I can't find the pic I wanted to use :D

Six Word Saturday (My Very First)

To the tune of the Talking Heads Psycho Killer








Chicken Killer...Run Run Run Away!

This dog is wanted in three neighbors yards for the crime of chicken killing. I am keeping her safe, but I don't know why. I guess I love her but she makes it so hard. The only reason she lives is because my kids adore her. Lucky Bitch

How Wal*Mart Gave Me My Groove Back

Let's be honest here. I love living the country life. I love having chickens and using a clothes line and having a yard full of dog shit with no HOA to come after my country ass, but that does not mean that I must live in a trailer.

Apparently, "trailer" is no longer a PC term. When ever I tell people I live in one the first thing they say is something along the lines of "There is nothing wrong with living in a mobile home." So saying that my house could trail behind a truck is trashy, but actually having the word "mobile", meaning movable, in the title is better. Gee thanks for reminding me that my house has a hitch. Snails have mobile homes. Not people

Hubbs and I have been careful to never incur debt. We hate owing people money, but my trailer/mobile home/ Fuckin' big ass camper is falling to bits. We have put tons of money into the place and it is still rotting faster than we can repair. Time to buy a house.

We already have the land, septic, electric and water on site so the plan is to build! Should be easy right???
NO!! You are wrong. It seems that the less debt you owe , the less credit you get. In fact, if you go your entire adult life, paying your bills, saving your cash, never living beyond you means and being the perfect example of conservatism, you are rewarded with a big fat "Fuck You!" when applying for any credit. No no no!





Well, we needed a car in a bad way. We found a loan shark willing to give us a shot but my father- in-law came to the rescue in a big way an co-signed for the hubbs so now he can spend the next year building credit. And we got to go to a real bank, a Loan Tuna, if you will. I , however , got left out in the mud on this level. Shit

You see, I have student loans and hospital bills. This toxic combination apparently gives me a credit score anywhere from 605 (boo) to 640 (Meh) depending on which agency is reporting. They tell me the ideal is 700, but I can't get there unless I get credit.

I have spent the last week applying for every credit card I could see. All said no except a few who said they would exchange $200 credit for $200 cash...DOH? Hey, I'll give you 100 pennies for that dollar. 100 is better than 1! Glad you are following me on this.

Well I got the call yesterday for something I never thought would happen. Wal*Mart, of all the places , is giving me a REAL, honest to God, credit card. I'm not a huge fan of Wal*Mart, but in some really weird twist is appears that Wal*Mart is going to give me the biggest help I could ever get, by giving me the chance to own my own home. Not everyone can say that.

Even thought I am not a fan of Wal*Mart, I guess I will need it very soon. I'll need that credit card while furnishing my new house :D

Been Busy! Would you like some Pepper?

Not that the three of you 'prolly care much, but life is taking me all sorts of great places. I hope that things keep progressing.

It's funny how life can get so interesting and just when it feels like you have something to say you lose the energy. I feel like I want to blog more when nothing is going on then when it is.

I have an extra dog now, BTW, Don't y'all break your necks trying to adopt him all at once ;)







PEPPER The 12-year-old Great Dane/Lab mix

Add him to the Great Pyr and the beagle and there is a lot of shit in my yard. Butterflies like to sit on dog shit so I guess it makes my yard nicer.

There , I blogged

Battling My Dirt Demons (Your Domestic Advaice For The Day)

I'm going to be honest here. I am NOT clean by nature. I hate cleaning, really. Just to keep my house to the point where others would be doing a light once over takes a lot of work for me. I have gotten better over the years, but there were times when my house would have made a college student gag. But I have thwarted my dirt hording ways and I think I might be in the point in my life where I can maintain some domestic bliss, if not covered in cobwebs.This is why I feel it is important to add small nips of domestic lazy wisdom.

Here is today's...ready?

Get a shop Vacuum: Regular vacuums are great if you live by yourself and have no pets and your only bit of carpet is a 2x2 rug. For the rest of us, namely those with kids and dogs and husbands, all natural lovers of mud puddles and dirt, a more professional approach in needed.
Shop Vacs are multi useful. They can do windows, walls, pets, spiders and even sink drains, wet or dry.

I like to do a super vacuum about twice a month. This leads to large bits of dirt and dog hair that hang around for a while , but I love the "THWAMP" noise they make being sucked up the tube. I live for that noise.

So that is my advice , friends. And if , by chance, you happen to be like me in the unnaturally clean, it goes against my genetics, department. May the shop Vac be with us all.

Feck! S'hot!

Holy cow people! I chose to live in the mountains, not only because I feel it is the most beautiful place to live but also for is mild and cozy summers. Apparently someone left the temperature set on HELL this year because it feels like the deep south up in here. I don't do well with heat. It makes me a grumpy twat. If Alex and I had to live in the heat we would be divorced or I would be a widow.
But my real question is this, Is it this hot everywhere? I mean , it seems as if it were this hot in the gulf we would have the worlds largest deep fryer making crispy sea turtle sliders. (What? Too soon?)

Shit, it's almost too hot to type. I'm gonna go sit in an ice bath. What are you doing to keep cool?

Enjoy your Boom Booms

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Here is a wish for all of yo u out there to have safe and happy 4Th Of July. Don't get all liquored up and make an ass of yourself and don't blow your arm off with your illegal Tennessee fireworks. I will attempt to do the same.

The Man Who Moves Pianos

I feel very blessed today. I hate to admit it but the majority of my friends are raising kids alone in this world. Do I happen to have a knack for picking ball-busting, Lesbians as friends? Perhaps, but the reality is that I was blessed from day one. You see, when I got pregnant with the boy child, I had only known his father for 5 months. That's not "dating for 5 months", I mean it had been just about 5 months from the time I had met him at a raging Phat Tuesday party, until the day we found ourselves leaning over a pee stick (or three). Not the normal American courtship if you ask me. Or, maybe it is.
The night we found out, I gave him the choice. I said that I wanted to keep the baby and he was welcome to cut and run. I didn't want anything from him that he was not wanting to give. As I sat there pondering my options I envisioned myself tired and overworked at the local Waffle House, while my mother, who I will have moved in with, makes my life a living hell.
But then he surprised me. He told me he was with me and that he wanted to do this whole parent thing. We got married one the one year anniversary of out meeting and I was 8 months pregnant.
I am not going to say that it was easy. We fought like rabid cats and dogs over a steak, as many 21-year-old will do when pushed to the edge. But somehow we have made it. And we have grown. We rarely fight now and have slowly fallen in love and become best friends.
He is the Father of my children and loves them more than life itself. His eyes light up when he sees them and his smile is one of genuine delight. He could never leave them and he can't even stand for us to be gone for the night. He is a good man. He is a rare man.
Whenever I am trying to explain how much he loves me and his kids my mind always comes back to the tale of my piano. We moved into a home next to my grandmothers house. It was long ago abandoned, but it did contain my 1953 Kimball Piano with a working Lowery Organo (I'll write more about this one day). The damned thing weights close to 600 lbs. I decided that to leave it in my grandmothers house would mean certain death for it. I asked this darling man to move it over to our new house.
It took close to three hours. He would lay down a board, scoot the piano on and then lay down another. Snails move faster. He moved it across the yard, up the steps and into my bedroom. He also swore that he would never move it again. He has moved it 4 times since.

I don't know if my kids will ever understand how lucky they are to have father that loves them so much, or if they will one day break his heart. But I do know that they are blessed. They have a Daddy that would bend time for them. Even if they never know. I know how lucky they are. And plan to remind them every day.

Porch Drinking: A History and an Award!

This morning, I was greatly pleased to find that I had won the coveted "Porch Drinking Award"! this award is special not only because there is only one and I have it, but also because of the history behind the award.

My neighbor, Toni (the chicken killer, among other things) showed up on my porch about three years ago with a bottle in her hand. I don't remember what was going on, as problems seem to come and go with us all and are usually not worth remembering, but suffice it to say that the problems was large enough that it required alcohol units at 10 am.

I remember thinking that this was perhaps the most amazing concept I had ever been privy to conceive. I was now a grown up, screw eating ice cream for breakfast. I could have liquor for breakfast! Forgetting any possible links to alcoholism, we happily took shots until the blue goo liquor was gone and unknowingly started a yearly tradition that marks the start of summer.

Much like Fight Club there are rules to porch drinking:
1) Porch drinking must be done early enough in the day to be considered improper.
2)Porch drinking must include one blue drink to honor the first blue liquor we consumed on that fateful day.

With school being out, porch drinking is set of commence very soon and I was so happy to win this wonderful award. And not, without further ado, I give you...

http://justsaying-toni.blogspot.com/
Please read Toni's blog @

Let There Be Fire!

This past winter happened to be the worst winter in a great many years, as many of you know. It also happened to be the year that I got the $357 electric bill. We had a propane stove, but it tended to cost a great deal too so we spent the winter using electric heat. Big No No in retrospect.
This winter also happened to bring about the worst ice storm I have personally ever heard about. I say heard about because when I heard about it I skipped town and packed up my entire family to the In-laws house in Winston-Salem. I am hard core but I hate ice. The ice storm was so bad that many of my neighbors lost power for over a week. we were lucky enough not to have any problems, but the storm left in its wake a veritable carnage of tree limbs. All over the county trees fell like Europeans with the plague.
For years, my husband had talked about putting in a wood stove. We did our research and looked over the news models and through the wanted ads in our local paper. We never found anything that seemed like a good deal.
This winter caused us to look around a bit more about the cost our electric space heaters were bringing on us.
My grandmothers house is next door to ours and it sits abandoned yet full of useful junk. I had known for awhile that my grandmothers cook stove, a giant, black, cast iron, behemoth, sat lodged into the floor of a back room, its feet sunk in where the wood had rotted out. It was entirely too big for our purposes.
I also knew that there was a smaller stove sitting behind it but every time I though to bring it up to my husband, a little bug in my ear (his name is Roger) kept telling me that this stove was broken so not to mention it.
After the devastation of a bad winter had begun to grow on us, my husband made the grand statement that we were going to switch to wood heat, and it would be this year. He wanted to know what the problems were with the small wood stove. I called my Mom to confirm that it was indeed broken.
"There is nothing wrong with that one" She replied whilst simultaneously popping my theory that my memory was perfect. "It's the big one that is broken". POP
So now we have a wood stove...




The Horrid winter that caused us so much pain and monetary suffering has now provided us with plenty of felled trees for fuel. And our country life continues.

Have I Lost My Mind?

Yes, friends, that is what you think it is. In an effort to save money and...well that's about all ( I could give a shit about the environment and because I live so green as a way of saving money, I'm allowed to say that), I have made the last of the major conversions in modern self sustaining parenting. The cloth diaper.
Years ago I would have said that I would use cloth over my own poor, dead carcass, but it appears that I have grown quite fond of the taste of my own words and in actuality, I must admit, I adore the damned things.
But as you can tell from the photo, these ain't your Grannies cloth diapers. Gone are the days of diaper pins and leaks. The new fangled things set me back $140 and will last until my daughter is out of diapers. The bells and whistles allow the diaper to grow with the baby and I could not be more in love.
So, as I sit here chewing on the bones of my words, I have to admit that making grandiose statements about what I will not ever do seems to be a lesson I need to take out of all this. No more saying that I will not do anything, even if its eating a grape out of a police officers butt crack. They might one day find that such actions are the cure for cancers and I'd be stuck eating more words...and grapes

On The line

This Mothers Day, instead of flowers and candies and other normal Mothers day fare, I asked my husband to put a clothes line up for me. As part of my country living fantasy, the idea of drying my clothes in a dryer seemed a little to easy and the only solution was to dry my clothes old school.
We went, family in tow, to our local hardware store (Lowe's is a brand started about 45 minutes from where we live, so much like buying Tyson chicken, we still get to count it as a local business and it's always important to buy local). They had several nifty devices for installing your own clothes line. One was a snappy line that pulled out all retractable like and was $13.00. We placed this in our cart and looked at the large octagonal varieties that my husband said looked trashy. I am not sure why that would look any more trashy than hanging your ripped undies from a tree, which is what I had been doing, but he was raised in a higher tax bracket than I and is much more "down" with what is proper.
When we came to the widget isle my husband found some pulleys and clothes line and decided that he was going to make me a clothes line himself. It would be twice as long and would have the pulleys so I could stand on the porch and pull the laundry to me. How exciting!
We got to the register and paid $19.00 for the parts to build the thing, costing more then the clothes line we were going to buy (making it yourself does not always save you money). It took us several hours to get the darn thing up, hanging one end from a tree and the other from my front porch. Finally it was done and I washed my first load of clothes giddily in anticipation. I set out my entire load of laundry and the weight of the wet clothes pulled my new clothesline down to the ground. I tried not to act disappointed, but my husband went to bed that night with promises to "fix it" so I carried on happily with my new clothes line.
Upon waking the next morning I found that the knot in the line had been weak and all my clean clothes were now resting on the ground. I picked them up and shook out the dirt and put them away (I don't like to repeat work after I have already done it once).
My husband retied the line and pulled the tree pulley higher so that the sag is gone but now I have to stand on a paint can to load the laundry on it.



This morning I woke up to find that the wind had blown and taken my pants with it up to the higher branches of a locust tree. My son happily got the ladder and pulled them down for me.
I am happy with my clothes line, even though it has its problems, it was made with love and good intentions. Hopefully it will last me many years and my laundry hanging skills will improve and well as my electric bill.

The Country Store

Every picturesque vision of country life includes the tiny local store where patrons get bags of feeds and sugar. My country tale is no different except the bags of feed are potato chips and the sugar has already been baked into a delicious good.
The Plan B is that country store. If Plan A fails you always have the Plan B. It is a tiny little store located at the end of a very notorious road. This road is said to encompass all the bad things about Tennessee into one little area of NC.
What I have often found about such areas is that the people who live there are usually quite nice, if somewhat...well, let's say...country. I'm OK with that. I was raised around it and it does not bother me. If fact I have been known to be a little bit country myself. If the people who live on said road want to call themselves country that's fine. If you do then you'll be in trouble. It's rude to judge, people.
Anyway, the Plan B happens to be the social center for the entire area. I met the owner a few years ago simply by hanging out inside. We started chatting and my visits got longer and longer. Soon the owner and I were good friends and she offered me the chance to work at the store.
I love my costumers. We have a great relationship. One gentleman who comes is has a long standing "cuss" war with me. We both love foul language and he and I are always trying to gross each other out, much to the enjoyment of his teenage son. Other costumers are people a few words. One simple says " Pack o' Durango" and hands you the exact amount with change for the tobacco. We get the good the bad and the trashy. The pregnant teenager. The construction worker or old man who hits on anything that walks. The Customers who think that all the women who work there are the same person. And we even get the joy of getting to call 911 for domestic disputes.
All in all the Plan B is the center of our country community, farmers, meth heads, Transplants and church goers. It laces together the different types of people into one group. People for whom Plan A failed.

Lilacs

Well, Friends, it's that time of year that always marks the start of true Spring for me. Out front there are rows and rows of 10 foot tall lilac bushes that sprout their pretty flowers but once a year. That time of year has come.
When my Grandmother was a little girl she planted but one bush outside her house. From this one bush, hundreds have appeared, making a veritable wall separating her house from the road, Making her home a haven that cannot be spotted by the passing motorist.
The Lilacs, to me, bring a sign that the snowy/muddy/icy conditions may well give us a break for a while, but I have to admit there have been many years that old Jack Frost nipped off the lilacs blooms before they even had a chance. After the winter we just had I am in awe that the lilacs were even given a chance. The worst winter in the century and it farted out real looser like. I'm OK with that.
When I see the purple blooms of the lilac, I am reminded of my childhood, when we live with my invalid Grandmother. She used to keep spectacular gardens and when she became ill, she was never able to work in her flowers again. There are still remnants of her legacy scattered over the property. Rose bushes bloom, daffodils and lily's and even a blue berry bush that my mother says never bloomed while my Grandmother was alive. The bush now provides gallons of fruit every year that is shared by my neighbors and whoever happens to like blue berries.
At this special time of year I like to celebrate the lilac, who only shows it face for such a short time, but graces us with the sweetest smell on earth.

Won't You Be My Neighbor?

When I say my husband and I live in the country, I don't mean we have 6 million square miles of desolate greenery. We live in what I would call a rural neighborhood. That means that everyone has a a pretty good amount of land and there is no zoning. You could have a toilet in your yard where we live but you can still see your neighbors house. I have already written about one neighbor, my partner in chicken killing, but when you live where I live it is important to know who it is that lives near you.
I have lived on this property my entire life. My kids will be the 7th generation of my family to be raised on this little plot of rock and sod. Growing up in Appalachia, this is not that uncommon. Many of the families around these parts have ancestors that go back to the 1600s, mine included. Out of these families, there are many who still reside on the piece of land bought many years ago for a few dollars.
Of the people who live near me , there are many who attended the same school as I did, and now their children go there as well as do mine. It's a sweet dream to feel so connected everywhere I go.
One neighbor, who has a daughter in my son's class, came over to day to play my piano. She does not read music but plays by ear and she blows even seasoned players out of the water. She became a Mother at 16 and despite what Dr. Drew thinks about unwed teenage Mothers she has done a fine job raising her daughter who is very sweet. They are both very good singers and today they graced my family with some Gospel music. This particular neighbor still lives with her parents and her father it the go to man for anything farm wise. You need to know how to bury a cabbage or fix a lawn mower or make homemade blueberry wine and he is your man. Such knowledge is a true blessing and a rarity in this day and age.



The Mother of my chicken killing friend also is very much a self made woman. She lives in the house my great grandparents built, at the top of the small road leading to three houses, all occupied by close family. She gardens every year and raises chickens. When the porch need a new roof she pulls out her hammer and goes to ripping. She is the epitome of a strong Appalachian woman.
A few miles down the road, in a small house next to the New river lives the sister of my oldest living friend. This friend has long since moved on to bigger and better things as a documentary film maker, but her sister lives in the house that they were all raised in . Their Mother has a Doctorate in Anthropology so going over to their house was always a learning experience filled with lessons from other cultures. They had the largest collection of National Geographic I had ever seen ( not that I had any idea what the publication was before I met them). My parents were not, let's say, Cultured like Sisters mother was. In this light it would be easy to say that these girls, childhood friends, were the start of my desire for an education, to better myself and learn more about the world outside of my own. Sister is very much like her mother in that respect, and her three children are being raised with such a respect for the world around us. It's really a beautiful thing.
Not all neighbors around me are kind. One in particular owns a mobile home part across the road. When my dogs get out the shoots a gun over their heads and we actually had to report him to animal control recently as he was keeping goats, and not very kindly. The final straw for us was when he let a few die and didn't remove their bodies from the pen. When you are in the country, sometimes a lot of things get swept under the rug.
We have our share of meth heads and drunks. Parties and Parasites but for some reason I love them to. They make life interesting when they set their house on fire, let their 15-year -old get drunk in the yard or drive their car down the road on only three tires with the back axle locked up. I take each one with stride and try to accept them for what they are, even if it is nothing more that entertainment purposes.
Either way I am surrounded by life at its best and worst and wouldn't change much of it if I could. Just like everything in life, it's a dance that it going to go on with or without you, so you might as well jump in and get to know your neighbors.

I am Over-Hung

So , sometimes in the country things can get boring. The last few days have been rainy and cold. Last night we actually made a fire in our wood stove. It's April, people, almost May. Why am I having to make a fire?
It's nasty outside and I have a toothache. I am out of painkillers and I don't want to ask for more because I am scared they will think I am an addict, so I persevere on painfully. All of this combined made for the perfect ingredient for some good old fashion depression. I had the yucks, the blahs, the blues.
I am still nursing my 5 month old daughter and have been religiously pumping milk from the day she was born. This all resulted in a surplus of the liquid gold, frozen in my freezer. Why not, I asked myself, take a night off from nursing and have a few glasses of wine. I used to drink a lot, and enjoyed doing so, but i got tired of waking up in the morning wondering if my husband was going to be mad at me from something I did or said while drinking, so I just up and quit. Alcohol is not my friend. But last night I tried to reconcile with my old friend. The weather was perfect and so was the wine.
I bought myself one of those little 4-packs of bottles, thinking that I would drink 2 and save the other 2 for later. I ran a warm bath, lit some candles (because the light bulbs are out in my bathroom) and grabbed a book. It was truly a night for relaxation and enjoyment of the great indoors.
The bath water was hot and turned my skin red, and the wine was tasty and turned my lips blue. When I got out of the bath both bottles were gone and my blood pressure was nearing stroke levels. With my head spinning I stepped out of the bath and lay down on the bathroom floor for about an hour because it was cool but also because I couldn't get up.
I traipsed into my bedroom with bits of dirt from my bathroom floor stuck to my face, only to find that my husband had already gone to sleep. How exciting! I was going to have another glass!
After that I am not really sure what happened. I know that I was listening to music because all the songs on my IPOD were different. I also know I started planning my wedding, because hubby and I never had one and I was aparently making notes on menus and seating arrangements.
The next thing I knew I woke up at 4 am and my daughter was in her room crying for her nightime nursing. I walked bleary-eyed to the sink and fixed up a bottle and then gave it to her as I tried to figure out what had happened. All 4 bottles were gone!
I woke again at about 8 am and imeaditally wanted to yarf. I remember now why I don't drink. So here I am, still feeling like I want to climb under my bed and die. It does not help that the weather is no better, or maybe it does. I don't know that I could handle the sunlight at this point without hissing like a vampire and hiding in the closet.

Time To Die, Clucker

Four weeks ago my husband and I purchased 29 baby chicks from a mail order hatchery. The peeps arrived one cold Monday morning at 6 am, much to my dismay. Contrary to common country lore, I don't like to get up with the chickens. I took my 7-year-old son with me on this journey and was quite happy to find that all the chicks made the journey safely.

About a week ago one of my Leghorns, a white egg layer, began doing some pretty funny looking dance moves, cocking it's head to one side and running around in circles. Ever the worrier, I knew that something funky was going on with this chicken. A few days later found the poor bird was unable to stand properly and a quick Google search returned the diagnosis or Mereks Disease, a type of herpes that causes tumors to grow all over the bird. It was then that I knew I had two very hard choices to make. Choice one would be to allow this bird to die on its own, which was sure to happen eventually, and choice two was to end the life of the bird myself.

Now I know that some PETA nuts out there will be screeching about taking the bird to a vet,but lets be real here people, the darn thing cost $2.50 and most vets don't even handle chickens unless it's for dinner. Never to be dissuaded from my task I waited another two days, doing research on the subject of chicken euthanasia. Google will truly provide all answers.

There were several methods given on various "chicken" forums, some seemed harsh others almost ridiculous. One site suggested that I give the bird a mixture of vinegar and baking soda. The idea is to choke the bird to death, the reality is that the bird spends several minutes choking before it finally bites it. Plus, this method seemed more like a science project than a method of death. "Hey, look Kids! This is called a "chemical reaction!" Yeah...no thanks.

Another method required an ax and a chopping block, which I am sure works well if the chicken is big enough to have enough space to keep you from chopping off your own fingers.

Finally I settled on a method that I though I could both physically manage and would be fast for the chicken. The idea is to hold the body of the bird in one hand and the head in the other. Using a perfectly balanced amount of force, one pulls from each end in a quick manner, snapping the neck and ending the life of the chick almost instantly. The key word here is "balanced". Put too little pressure and you just hurt the chicken, too much and you end up with what , I can only imagine, looks like opening a bottle of champagne. So you see my hesitation and reasoning for not wanting to rush into this task. Something like this takes girl balls and girl balls are not easily grown.

Finally, after watching the chick have a rough morning, with the other little chicks pecking the shit out of it (something that chickens apparently enjoy greatly), I grew some girl balls. Well, just one, actually. I knew I could do the act, I just didn't know if I could do it alone.

Enter the next door neighbor. I have lived next to this girl my entire life. We are great friends, the best really, the kind of friend you can REALLY call if you need something. The type of friend that will help you kill a chicken.

Although she was not pleased with the idea, my friend agreed and brought with her, her son who was willing to actually perform the act. She showed up in record time and when I pulled the little bird from the basket we all let out a collective "Awww" for it's pitiful condition. The time had come...

We took the little guy outside and looked about for the proper place to do the deed. A block of wood was not found so a board became our gallows. We began our attempt by trying to figure out a way to pull the poor birds twisted neck from its body. After attempting this is occurred to us that we would each be holding an end with less than 2 inches between our fingers and were expecting a 12-year-old boy to be able to hit somewhere in this 2 inch space with enough force to remove the head and still manage to not cut our fingers off. Yes, friends this was stupid and dangerous and not what we were going to attempt.

So it was back to square one, and the original plan. As I held out the chicken to my neighbor she took hold of its tiny little head and took a deep breath. "I can't do it" she said, letting go of the head only to regain control and grab it's head once again. " OK, I can do this!"

She began pulling from its head and I, fearing that she would not use enough pressure, pulled it's body in the opposite direction. We felt a snap. The chicken went limp...only to come alive moments later with the tenacity of a fully grown rooster.

"Oh shit!" I cried and placed the chick on the ground. My neighbor and I did the icky dance, which looks like a mixture of a Native American rain dance and a crazy person trying rid their body of a thousand imaginary spiders. My son, who had been hiding in the closet, heard the noise and came running outside asking us with a trembling lip if the chicken was dead yet.

" Of course it is honey." I replied " When things like this die it takes a while for their body to stop twitching"

It was at this point that the chick stopped moving and lay silent and still on the ground at our feet. We stood in a circle around it waiting...

Then as if enacting a horror movie, the chicks eye shot open. I could almost hear the music from the movie "Psycho" blasting with an "Eek Eek Eeeeeeek". My neighbor and I immediately started performing the icky dance again and I began screaming at her son to "Hit it, Trey! Hit it in the head!! Oh. My. GOD!"

My Neighbor, in an act I will never be able to thank her enough for, squatted down and popped the chickens neck again, finishing the job we started and ending our birds suffering. The chicken was given a lovely resting place and my family returned to almost normal.

It occurred to me that day, that things like this happen often to me in my quest for self sustaining living, and perhaps I should find a proper place to tell these stories. Enter, Tales From The Country. I will try to update and re-create my families struggles with country life. We shall laugh, we shall cry and in the end, hopefully we shall succeed!