winter blues trip #1

Last week was a glorious one for one main reason: I only went to work for 1.5 days. Monday was a holiday and Wednesday we left for a trip to San Diego to visit my brother.

Bro-ter, as I like to call him, was graduating from recruiting school for the marines (much to his dismay- no one really wants to be a recruiter. It's like being a missionary except without any of the spiritual blessings associated with religion and a lot of cold calls and public speaking. Yuck). And since I'd never had the pleasure of visiting a military base, we popped in for the occasion.

Our first night there we stayed on base in "billeting," which is a weird word for fancy barracks for soldiers on a short-term stay or their visiting families. Think dorm room circa 1960. After bro-ter's graduation, we hung around San Diego with him until his flight left. Although I felt a bid morbid doing so with a marine brother, we spent about an hour wandering around a navy cemetery, pristinely located on a peninsula overlooking the bay and Pacific ocean. Beautiful.

The next day the sun finally succumbed to my pleadings and showed its face for a few hours in the afternoon.

It was here that we spent my favorite part of the trip: watching the sea lions and seals sun themselves. They looked like big dead blobs on the beach, but I assure you, they were very much alive. I NEED one.

We also visited the statue modeled after the famous picture of the sailor kissing a nurse. There was a posse of teenage Italian students that arrived there just before us, and like all Italians, they dominated the whole area with their loud Italian chattering while their chaperon directed each of them to imitate the famous kiss. I think ours beat theirs.

She's a HE?

T-rav posted this on his family's blog. I thought I'd share it with all of you.

Have you ever gone through life thinking that something was one way and then it turned out to be the other? We've had a chicken for four months that we thought was a hen. When we bought her she was too young to lay eggs, so we didn't worry too much about her. The other two hens we bought at the same time started laying eggs about a month ago, but Blackie never did. We did our internet homework and found out that chickens of her breed don't like to lay eggs in cold weather so we made some excuses for her. Yesterday I observed some suspicious barnyard/backyard behavior involving the chicken in question and another hen and I knew I needed to go back to the source of all light and knowledge in the world...the internet. I found the above picture and our "hen" looks suspiciously more like the one the right than the left. "She" also fits a whole lot of other patterns that make "her" a "him". So it turns out that our late blooming hen is actually a rooster. I feel kind of confused and both Kelly and I have had a hard time changing to masculine pronouns when referring to Blackie.

I think the most helpful bit of information that I found for how to tell the difference between a Black Jersey Giant hen and rooster was the one that told me to look into their eyes. A hen has a peaceful absent sort of look in her eye while a rooster should have an intense look with a glimmer of anger or rage. Today we made sure to look our chicken in the eye and sure enough, there is a fire burning behind those beady black eyes.

-Trav