Easter Eggs, Herbs And OMG I Failed!

What a day!  Internet was out for most of it and we had to get the cable guy out here.  He ended up running totally new cable because the old cable was all beat up (he said).  I felt sorry for him having to crawl through the scary place under the house to run the cable.  Lots of creepy crawlies down there.  Now the internet is much faster and WORKING!

While I was having withdrawals from not being able to get online,  I dyed Easter eggs and The Murph and I went to the store and bought some vegetables and herbs to plant in the garden.  I couldn't get The Murph to dye any eggs though.  He's too manly for that kind of girly stuff.

Here's some of the herbs we bought... (they are all legal)

I snuck some catnip in for the cats along with the other herbs.  The Murph doesn't spoil his cats like I spoil mine so he wouldn't have approved of the catnip if he had noticed.  I can spoil his cats along with mine though.  Catnip should not be legal from the way my cats act around it.

I was skyping with The Boy last night and he asked me if I would help him find some sources for a paper he had to write.  I try to discourage this and make him find his own sources, but if he can convince me how terribly busy he is and he's working on another paper, studying for a test, etc, then I will help him a little.  I told him that I might if I had time, but I was in the middle of something so don't depend on it.

Well, I was busy and totally forgot to find any sources for him so just now as I am sending him a message that our internet is back up and running he skypes me with this very dramatic, over the top message that goes something like this...


The Boy:  "WHY HAVENT YOU GIVEN ME ANY SOURCES

                 YOU FAILED

                 YOU

                 FAILED!!!!!!

                 OMG
                 WHY DIDNT YOU DO IT

                 DID YOU EVEN LOOK

                 I DONT EVEN THINK YOU LOOKED

                 OMFG

                 WHY??????????"

I know this is a bad thing for him to say to me (extremely disrespectful), but I cracked up.  I don't know why I thought it was so funny.  The Murph did NOT think it was funny at all.  

I skyped back to him...

Me:   "No,  I'm not a failure.  I graduated from college 25 years ago." 

I didn't even get a chance to say anything else about it or give him another lecture on being a responsible adult now that he's 19 years old because the drama king had already gotten over it.  Before I could say anything, he was trying to test his server (which is with us 250 miles away from him in his bedroom)  to see if our new internet connection was any stronger than the old one.  

He says it's not.

I should send him some eggs.

The Not So Great Baby Chick Idea

I had this really, really great idea to surprise The Murph this year with a few baby chicks for Easter.  I thought wouldn't it be great to have our very own egg laying chickens so we could have healthy organic fresh eggs to eat.  Sure we live in a subdivision, not out in the country, but so what.  Every year The Murph has a little spot in his yard where he has a little vegetable garden.  We also planted several different types of herbs last year, so wouldn't it be great to throw in a few chickens and build a chicken coop behind the garden and have fresh eggs as well?

I researched all about it on the internet, found a hatchery that ships 1 day old baby chicks in small quantities (I was going to order 5) in a mixture of white egg layers and brown egg layers.  I found out what you would need to take care of the baby chicks until they got big enough to put out in the yard and was ready to buy a starter kit which included a heat lamp, feeder, waterer, and starter food.  

I even found a really cute place that makes "green" chicken coops that look like an English estate, made of recycled wood from old houses and approved by Martha Stewart.  I mean OMG MARTHA STEWART!  We have the absolute perfect place to put a coop in a separate fenced area in the back yard that was The Girl's play yard when she was little.  The baby chicks would even have an old swing set to play on.  

For the past several months I have really been getting excited about this chicken idea.  I even had names picked out for them depending on their individual personalities of course.  There would be little Tuula,  Sophia Grace,  Rosie, Angelina, Martha Claire...all great names for chickens I think.

So the other day when I am about to place the order, actually pulling out the credit card to make the payment, a sudden disturbing thought stops me.  

Are chickens even allowed in this golf course neighborhood community?  How would I found out?  

So I took a shot and googled the covenants for my neighborhood, not really expecting anything to come up on the internet, but there they were, right there at my fingertips, much like the baby chicken order.

I was extremely disappointed to discover that live poultry was NOT allowed in this neighborhood at all.       Absolutely forbidden.  Pit Bulls, deadly snakes and wild boar, perfectly acceptable, just NO chickens.  So much for fresh, organic, home grown eggs.  

I broke down and confessed to The Murph, told him all about my great idea for fresh eggs, but he didn't think the idea was so great.  The eggs at the the grocery store are perfectly fine with him he said and he's now very thankful for those neighborhood covenants.  Four cats are enough.

Internet Mystery Solved

This morning the Internet kept going down for some "unexplained" reason.  I was on my laptop and Ken was on his desktop computer and suddenly, for no reason at all, the Internet was gone.  I thought it was just being slow at first, but I tried for 20 minutes to get back online.  Ken finally gave up and got dressed to go work out.  Finally, I went downstairs to The Boy's area where our wireless router is located and just turned everything off and then immediately back on.  I came back up and got on my laptop, but the Internet still wouldn't come back up.  Frustrated, I gave up and went to work out at the gym.

When I got home I had ten missed calls and a text message from The Boy demanding to know why his servers were down.  I called him back and said I don't know, but I would like to know why our Internet isn't working. (We had a feeling The Boy had something to do with it)   I told him what I did earlier and he said "Oh, my gosh! I can't believe you did that!  Don't turn things off unless you call me first."

Apparently, The Boy was backing up his laptop to the server he has downstairs and it took longer than what he thought it would.  Ten hours.  So when we got up this morning and logged on our computers, he was taking up space with his backup almost 300 miles away.  Needless to say, it took me over an hour on the phone with him while he guided me through what to do to get the Internet back up and running.  I told him to NEVER do that again in the morning when we are always using the Internet.  He said he would let me know if it took that long again.  I just got a call from him wanting to start the back up over again now, since I screwed up his back up last night when I shut everything off this morning.

I told him to wait an hour or so and that seemed to be all right with him.  I really need to know what's going on downstairs on all those server things.  He was laughing at me today because I couldn't even figure out how to use the wireless mouse.  It had more buttons and things than I'm use to.  It's kind of scary knowing that The Boy is in control of our Internet set up!  If we ever have a problem with it, I don't think even the cable company that we get the Internet service from would know what to do to get us back up and running.  Not to mention the noise coming from down there....