Recipe Round Up Information Page

I’ve added a Recipe Round Up Information Page and linked it from the Recipe Round Up graphic in the side bar.

Update on Monday, June 11, 2007 at 8:43AM by rebecca

Speaking of the Recipe Round Up, don’t forget that the next one is this coming Thursday, June 14 at Simply a Musing Blog. Category: Desserts.

When The Fish Tank Leaks, Go With the Flow

I had a pretty good handle on everything—lawn, garden, preparing for the upcoming major family events—until the fish tank leaked. Someone in this family awoke yesterday morning to find several inches of water in the top drawer of their dresser.  You know what top drawers hold, right? Yep, there was a laundry emergency as well as a flood emergency.

Our aquarium is the 30 gallon one, so there was lots more water waiting to leak still in the tank. Thankfully, I had another tank, smaller, along with all the proper aquarium do-dads, unused in the basement.  (Pack rats, you know, live for days like yesterday, when their habit of keeping every single thing that might come in handy someday actually comes in handy for a day.) But you can’t just plop tropical fish into a just-now-set-up aquarium. They need the water to be just the right  temperature and something has to be done about the nasty chlorine in freshly run tap water. 

Since the fish had to stay in the leaky tank until the new one was safe for them, I put 9x13 baking pans in the drawer to catch the leaking water, and then emptied them every hour until the temperature was right in the new tank. All the fish made the move to the new tank quite nicely, and none have died yet, although they do keep banging into each other and panicking. They’re country fish, I guess, and not used to overcrowding.

Then came the bailing. You can’t just lift up a 30 gallon tank and carry it outside to dump the rest of the water out, you know. Nope, you’ve got to bail, which is not a very pleasant job, no matter how clean you think you keep your fish tank. The fish tank still isn’t cleaned out; that’s on my agenda for this afternoon.

Monday, oldest son will look at the tank to see if he can fix it. He is a glazier by trade, so he’s done it before, only for pay.

While we’re on the subject of oldest son and pay: He’s been doing contract work–communications, they call it—for the Yukon Literacy Coalition. He’s set up a new website for them, which you can look at right here; and updated and edited the Yukon Literacy Guide. This weekend is the annual literacy summit, so he’s been putting in 16 hour days getting ready for that. Things should slow down for him after that, and then he will have time to catch up on things he’s been neglecting, like his dormant blog and my fish tank.

As long as I’m already a little off-topic, I’m going to just continue with the flow. Speaking of Yukon web sites, Urban Yukon, an aggregator and guide for “the best Yukon-related blogs written on a variety of topics” has been redesigned with a snappy new design and some new features, including random photos from a few Yukon photo feeds. Right now, it seems a little heavy on embarrassing old photos from this family, but I’m sure it’ll move on to subjects of more wide-ranging interest shortly.

Oh, as long as we’re covering fish and Yukon blogs, here’s a Yukon fishing blog called Fish on Yukon. 

Do you like everything you read to be in tight little organized packages? My advice to you: Skip this post.

Is a Headless Chicken Stupid?

If you ever need confirmation of the stupidity of the human race, the place to  look is at the search queries people use. For a while I was jealous of Kim’s “lifespan of a pickled egg,” but I then got my own really stupid query last week: life span of headless chicken. Once again, I could feel superior in the stupidity department.  

Until I investigated. If you click on the search link above, you’ll find that my blog is second on the list; number one is a link to www.thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongest domainnameatlonglast.com. So of course, I clicked on the link. Who wouldn’t? 

This is the go-to place for information about longest stuff, like the longest female beard ever (Way to go, Vivian!), the longest parasite (Kudos to Sally Mae Wallace!), or the world’s longest dog tongue (Good girl, Brandy!). It’s at this very informative site that I discovered that my stupid search query might not be so stupid after all.

As it turns out, the longest life span of a headless chicken is eighteen months.

In Fruita, Colorado, on September 10 1945, farmer Lloyd Olsen was sent out to kill a chicken for dinner. His mother-in-law loved to eat the neck, so Mr. Olsen tried to chop off as little of the neck as possible. With a swing of his axe, off came the head. The chicken, now known as ‘Mike the Headless Chicken’, started to run around as chickens do, but never stopped.

And when Mike did finally keel over, it was, by all accounts, an untimely death.

Mike finally died in 1947, after living for 18 months. He started choking in the middle of the night, and since the Olsen’s left the syringes they used to clear his esophagus at the sideshow, they could not save him.

Who knows how long Mike might have lived were it not for the unfortunate choking incident, although some might say he was already living on borrowed time.

Mike the Headless Chicken has a song written for him. You can listen to it sung or you can just read the lyrics. I suggest the latter option.

The Cluck Stops Here: The Ballad of Mike the Headless Chicken

©2006, Julianne Mangin, Carol E. Rand

INTRO:
Mike the headless
Mike the headless
Mike the headless chicken! (2x)

He was just another nameless chicken
Scratching in his barnyard pen
Nothing much to live for
Just some food, and a little hen
He didn’t know what a hatchet was
Or what a skillet was for
But one false whack of the farmer’s axe
Made him a metaphor

CHORUS:
MIKE! MIKE! MIKE! MIKE!
Mike the headless chicken
Mike the headless chicken
Mike the headless chicken
Mike the headless chicken*
(*leave off the last word, in the final chorus)

Mike the headless chicken
Lost his head but found his fame
Mike the headless chicken
That’s why he got a name
He was headed for the kitchen
When fortune made its strike
How could they cook a chicken
As remarkable as Mike?

CHORUS

Even folks from far away
Knew the chicken who survived
Mike traveled the sideshow circuit
In 1945
Kept alive by an eyedropper
Food and water down his gullet
He even gained a couple of pounds
Now that’s a healthy pullet

CHORUS

Eighteen months without a head
Was enough for Miracle Mike
He didn’t even get a headstone
I can’t imagine why
He lived and died in the forties
Times were different then
Yet now we have celebrities
With no more brains than him

CHORUS (last)

The song may be stupid; I’m guessing the headless chicken was stupid. But apparently the query wasn’t.