phosfate

"What is an owl pellet? It's the football-shaped object regurgitated twice a day by owls, which contains the skeleton of at least one owl meal, be it a mouse, vole, shrew, or small bird."

http://www.amazon.com/Owl-Puke-Book-Jane-Hammerslough/dp/0761131868

Just witnessed West Side Story as directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring 500 sparrows and six grackles warring in a parking lot over something that might once have been a hamburger bun.

The grackles won. The songs were terrible.

Sorry for the saturation on this. I was trying to get the fluorescent green thread to show up -- it's bright yellow in the picture -- and it didn't wanna.

Anyway, this is a hack of a 99-cent Mickey punchneedle kit. The stitching isn't very good, but at least there's a lot of it.

Spider was gone when I got home yesterday. I'm actually a bit upset about this.

Walked to bookstore, got some new stuff. Went from there to Target (the Haunted Serial Killer Woods have been cut down, so there's a shortcut now), got ten tons of groceries, took it home in a cab.

The taxi driver, Ms DeNiro, was reading an ancient, coverless Zenna Henderson (not while driving). We both agree that nothing is funnier than a McDonald's on a Thursday morning, when 800 old people meet for coffee.

Speaking of driving while reading, when you're on a bus you can look down directly into people's cars. Saw a woman driving with an open novel in her lap the other day. Sadly, the jacket was the wrong color for Twilight, which would have made it stupidly perfect.

Also, little kids in the backs of cars will look up at you and wave. :D

Plants vs. Zombies continues to be awesome. One of the mini-games is Slot Machine. I've found you can use it for the equivalent of leveling, and am raising $20,000 for an extra plant slot. There are levels where half the yard is covered in fog, and it's genuinely scary -- at least as much as a game with Michael Jackson and back-up dancer zombies can be.

Also, I fed the Failcake to the birds. At least, I assume it was the birds. There may be some seriously sugared-up possums out there.

Venus, Jupiter, and the Moon are all out there right now going:

) :

It's pretty cool.

Long story, but the power company wouldn't cut my trees, so I got Will the lawn guy (hi Will!) to do it. Which he did, stealthily.

I come home yesterday with food and drugs, and have to make a couple trips from the house to the car to unload everything. There's something odd about the light, but I don't pay much attention. Then I see this squirrel come out of the bush by the window, and park on the invisible tree. And he starts yelling at me.

(The invisible tree is this tree I didn't even know existed until I hacked at the giant window bush, which got a bit out of control. I thought it was a part of the widgy tree. Nope. Whole new tree.)

I look at him. "What?"

*stream of squirrel cussin'*

"What? You're fine."

*more rodental invective*

So I walk over to the invisible tree. "What is your problem?" There are wood chips on the ground. And O HAI NEWLY TRIMMED TREES. Apparently Will was there. Or I was a victim of the Phantom Arborist, who has terrorized the prairie ever since the construction of Arbor Lodge. "Oh. Well, sorry."

*squirrel blue streak*

"Dude. It's not like anybody's gonna hurt you back here anyway. Look at you. You're huge."

*Jerry Springer beeps, curses*

"That would be more convincing if you didn't have a huge nut in your mouth, fatso."

I go inside. I am faintly disturbed that this tree rat is actually able to make the connection between Will and his chainsaw and me, and knows to blame me for it. Also, the way he was sitting on the branch, I got to see a lot more of his genitals than I really cared to. He was packing more than just the one nut, is what I'm saying.

TITLE: Mr. Staker's Holiday
FANDOM: Hot Fuzz
AUTHOR: annlarimer and viedma
WORD COUNT: Lots, like...whoah, 9,700.
RATING: PG for goddamn swearing, violence
WARNINGS: Movie spoilers, American spelling, writers who think they're fucking hilarious. Contains peanuts.
SUMMARY: Bread. Bread. BREAD BREAD BREADBREADBREADBREADBREADBREAD!
NOTES: Crit is love.
DISCLAIMER: Hot Fuzz belongs to breadbread Rogue and bread bread bread. Bread. No infringeBREAD! BREAD! BREADBREADBREADBREAD!tendedBREAD!


Mr. Staker's Holiday

When you looked at it a certain way, the whole thing was Nicholas Angel's fault. If not for him, Sandford, Gloucestershire would not be on its third police station in as many years, and the village's swan population would not be Britain's highest per capita.

"That boy," Andy Wainwright said later, "Is wound too tight."

It started like this.

Nicholas was no longer the ticking time bomb of no one was quite sure what that he had once been, but he was, as Danny Butterman said, always thinking away. Even in his sleep.

Late one night -- or rather, very early one morning -- Nicholas suddenly woke, sat bolt upright, and said, to no one in particular, "Swans don't honk. Swans do not honk!" ( more )

Came home, had dinner, looked at the computer. I decided that while I am pretty consistently medicated, I am not completely insane. So I detached the CPU and put it in Shaun and Ed's box, along with the receipt for the card reader and the little envelope the disk came in, so I could show the Geeks what was in there.

Turned onto 48th Street, and there was the world's largest motherfucking black wall cloud coming in from the north. Oh goody.

Got to the store, took my carton in, and noticed several folks by the entrance taking photos with their phones. Not of me. Somewhere in the vicinity of 40th and O Streets was...it wasn't a cyclone, but it was cone shaped. Like a giant Dairy Queen cone, upside down and pointing to the ground. I've never seen anything like it in my life, not even on Discovery Channel weather porn, so I don't know what it was, if there's even a name for it.

If there's no name for it, I hereby name it the Larimer Formation. You're welcome.

Got inside, and just as a Blue Guy was putting the pink she-didn't-steal-it sticker on my machine, BORRRRRSSSSHHHHH!!! it started raining like...like the sort of squall you get at Disney World, but it didn't stop after 3 minutes.

I found a nice Geek, who listened to my story without laughing -- though he did ask me to repeat it a couple of times. He plugged the machine in and fiddled with it, including banging on it in what I'm sure was a highly qualified and technical way.

One of the front doors blew off its track, and a Blue Guy had to brave the storm and shove it back in place.

Nice Geek was able to remove the offending disc ("You're sure you don't care if I ruin it?" "I kind of hope you do, really.") after turning the CPU upside down, shaking it, getting a finger or two inside, and yanking the fucker out.

I'm gonna let you make your own joke there.

He tested the machine again, and pronounced it fit for service. No charge. "I didn't do anything, really." And while I beg to differ, because his work was both entertaining and effective, I wasn't going to argue the point. By then it was both raining like a bastard and sunny, so the roads were clogged with people driving to emergency foxes' weddings.

"I wouldn't take that out in the rain, though," Nice Geek said.

"Oh HELL no." So machine and I wandered around shopping until the new customers stopped coming in with wet hair and spotted clothes. I bought SimCity Societies.

Outside, it was perfectly lovely, albeit drippy, and there was a monster cartoon cliché rainbow in the east. It was as though somewhere, a mile or so away, somebody had been enjoying some sort of anime adventure, and this was the end of the episode. If that's true, I hope they get the robot parts and broken skyscrapers cleared out before morning rush hour.

Okay, here it's morning rush 15 minutes, but you know what I mean.