The naming of chickens is serious stuff. I mean seriously, names are important. All our pets have names. We have beautiful little chickies happily scratching away in my husbands office until their big enough to go outside, and they need names. I can already tell them apart. There's the little mean one who's got Napoleon's syndrome. There's the big one with streaks on her head thats already getting pecked. Theirs the really good one at balancing who's sorta the clutch clown. My husband and I were passing suggestions around yesterday, after we went to bed. Its really the only time we get to 'talk' and see each other these days. He's at work before I get up, and I'm home after hes good and exhausted and needing to go to bed. I kept setting him off into fits and giggles. "We could name them after stars." Vega, Orion, etc.... and we deemed too pretentious. "We could name them after other animals..." After he decided he wanted to name one Cow and one Chicken after the cartoon. I had suggested Mable and Gertrude as a name for two of them, in which case he laughed at me. We threw around Dog, Skunk, Pig, and discarded it. Our favorite was naming them after music stars... the rooster would be "Prince". Then we could have Shania, Britanny, Madonna, Alanis, Selene, etc... you get the idea. That set him off into more fits and giggles.

We're still working on the names. Hes busy himself working on the Chicken Palace, so it will be ready when the pullets are. We had an old barn that collapsed from all the flooding and snow in the previous years, so my husband is taking all that carefully preserved wood and using it to build this giant 10X16 chicken house. It might be overkill, but these hens will be the most pampered hens on the block.

But one things for certain. Baby chickens are sooo adorable. They are tons of fun and cute to boot. They crawl all over you, and are so incredibly busy that its not even funny....

[ Continued ]

I'm not young, but neither am I not-young. I'm between being young and being not-young.

I feel like I need to say this primarily because of what I am going to talk about next.

I recently came across a podcast called "No One Can Know About This" which is basically a Let's Play for all of the currently released American Final Fantasy games.

I devoured the first season in two days (that's around 6+ hours of listening), and the second the first season finished, immediately downloaded every episode of season 2 (which has 14 episodes), and also downloaded all of season 3 (which has 27 episodes).

I'm not sure why, but listening to this podcast was refreshing. I felt like I had access to my childhood again, that years and years of being away from home, even being away from my home country, and listening to two guys grumble about grinding monsters in a forest, suddenly I felt like I was home again.

Of course, the feeling goes away as soon as you remove your earphones, but for that precious hour I forget whatever else is around me and remember when times were more innocent. When the only things I worried about was what game was coming out next, whether I remembered to pick up the toy I left when I climbed that tree in the front yard, or if I had cleaned my room yet.

It's a fantasy, of course. Which is why I think - after listening to 6 hours of the first season - I felt so incredibly drained and just wanted to shut my eyes and take a nap.

It's a very odd feeling. That rush of freedom, of access, like a spring wind is moving through your bones, and then suddenly the realization that gravity is actually a thing and it's happening right now.

I am thinking a lot (after watching the news) of our eastern friends. Liminal is in Maryland, Abashai is in Ohio, and everywhere in between we have Mizaharians all up and down the eastern seaboard. I thought I'd offer up the funniest snow thing I've ever heard for your consideration in today's blog. If you don't get the Little House on the Prairie joke you've never sat as a little girl and read all the Little House books - which are amazing for a girl of about 6-8 to enjoy. Also, we all have that neighbor. You know the one. The entire article is reposted here for your reading pleasure, but the original one was posted on NPR here. Hopefully married people and horse owners alike will enjoy the humor.

Jen

February 5, 2010

Laura Lorson is the producer, editor and local All Things Considered host for Kansas Public Radio.

Some advice for you folks in the mid-Atlantic on snowstorms: You can trust me; I live in the Midwest. We get phenomenal amounts of snow pretty regularly ... though I could see where you might not know that, because we have to get, like, apocalyptic amounts of ice before anyone on The Weather Channel bothers to point it out. So anyway, here are my rules for a safe, healthy, happy snow experience.

1. Chopping up your furniture for fuel goes a lot more smoothly if you keep your axes nice and sharp.

2. Do not pay more than $50 for a loaf of black-market Wonder Bread.

3. There's more food in your house than you think. Search the junk drawers — there are often stale Gummi bears and Lemonhead candies.

4. Check on your shut-in neighbors, especially the ones who don't think you are sufficiently serious about lawn care in the summertime. Be extra-nice and superconcerned while you are there. They will feel guilty. The evil glee in your heart w...

[ Continued ]

Top 10 Google searches that returned pages from Mizahar this past week, courtesy of Google webmaster tools...

#1 site:mizahar.com
#2 what does maseltoff mean
#3 mizahar
#4 what does maseltoff mean?
#5 curse gnosis
#6 gnosis curse
#7 what does maseltoff
#8 kelvic group
#9 mizah coin
#10 uldr

I am guilty of the entirety of #1 as I run it multiple times every day to check how many of our pages are on Google (they grow daily).

I do not think any of these surfers were looking for a play by post. We can gather a striking conclusion, though. The people rightfully demand to know who Maseltoff is, and we - not all those faceless corporate sites - have the Answer. Well, Colombina is probably the only one with the Answer, as she wrote the singular mention of a Maseltoff in our wiki.