Exhibit A: Check out Sarah Palin consulting notes written on her hand as she addresses a Tea Party crowd last weekend.

Lesson Learned: Never, ever write reminder notes on body parts. Some bloggers have questioned Palin’s intelligence given her need to write down her talking points (e.g., “Lift American Spirits”). Not me. I constantly write reminders to myself about simple, everyday tasks (e.g., this a.m.’s list “blog, car, lasagna, call re: derm appt”) and, like Palin, spell-out in advance the take-away points I want an audience to remember when I give a presentation. Palin’s problem was that she relied on a method (writing on one’s hand) that comes off as juvenile and a bit sneaky. Any other writing surface would have worked - note card, post-it, corner of newspaper, napkin, Kleenex, and, of course, paper. Bottom line - my son writing on his arm to remember to bring in lunch money is O.K. An aspiring leader of the free world furtively consulting her palm to recall her “inspiring” rhetoric is NOT O.K.

Exhibit B: Now watch Obama Press Secretary Robert Gibbs later poking fun at Palin’s use of “hand-written” notes.

Lesson Learned: People are either innately “Mean Girls,” or they’re not. Gibbs is not. For those who are not naturally snarky, it is very difficult to pull off snarky humor. (You can hear the groans in the press room at Gibbs’ cheap shot.) Listen, people who can quickly come up with a biting/sarcastic/wry/cynical quip have had a lifetime of practice. If you must plan in advance and put effort into being a Mean Girl, don’t bother. You’ll be the one who ends up looking silly. (Alas, as a person who is not quick on her feet, this is a lesson I’ve learned the hard way.)

Wise Women, what’s your reaction to Exhibit A or Exhibit B? And, if you’re one who jots down reminders on your hand or arm, please feel free to amend the “lesson learned.”

Since Elaine has been posting about such wise topics this week, I thought I would bring it down a notch.  I sit here thinking about Octomom’s new beach body.  Have you seen it on the cover of Star Magazine?  (No, don’t worry, I’m not a subscriber). She has dropped 145 pounds since giving birth to her eight babies.  I think to myself I did buy that Beach Body DVD set last May although no beach body did I attain in 2009 … I have to start working on that plan for 2010 now (work and children aside).

So back to Octomom.  How did she do it?  First, with no help from Nip and Tuck – just three hour daily work-outs at the gym of course.  Right.  Makes sense.  What?  How did she get away from her family of fourteen children (and no husband) for three hours a day?  Oh, her two nannies could take care of all those children.  Oh, OK. Makes sense.  What?  Two nannies?  Has our whacked out need for reality TV already made her a mint?  I guess so.  And I guess enough money to keep her out of the house shopping, working-out, and managing her public profile – while the 14 mint-makers lay about at home with the hired help.

This is hysterical.  What a brilliant solution to our airport security and health care crisis!

www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/01/full-body-scans-to-double-as-annual-checkups.html?printable=

At the risk of making you suffer through yet another blog on chickens (my daughter tells me I write way too much about them), I do need to update you on two rather momentous events that occurred over the past month.

First, 2009  was a really bad year for Michael Jackson.  In early December as I was walking up Park Avenue with some girl friends, my cell phone rang. On the other end was my daughter who was exclaiming “Mom, guess what happened” over and over again.  She kept pushing me to guess and then told me Sam was crying.  At this point I was bordering on hysteria.  I finally found out that our singing rooster, Michael Jackson, who I had been diligently trying to find a new home for, was found dead in the coop by my oldest son David.  ”OMG, Michael Jackson died” – I blurted out to my friends. They looked at me with strange stares.  ”Anne, that was 6 months ago.”

Broken neck.  Unfortunate coop malfunction … or murder I mused?  The metal feeder, which hangs from the ceiling and is suspended off the floor by an inch or so, had been knocked down, presumably falling over on MJ, who must have been enjoying his evening meal.  It was all a rather odd circumstance – the irony that this would happen …. and the victim would be the noisy one.  In the first 24 hours I was convinced someone must have gone in there, but my son, who hasn’t developed my level of cynicism, disagreed.

Well whatever happened, another MJ left this world, and left three very sad boys behind, and I must admit a couple of sad parents.  Although we quickly adjusted to the ease of walking into the coop without worrying that a protective Lakenvelder rooster might attack.

So then began part 2 of the story.  David started bringing eggs in from the coop and placing them under a heat lamp, until he could borrow an incubator from a friend.  Apparently eggs can be fertile for up to five days after a rooster has been in the vicinity.  While the first few eggs under the heat lamp became hard boiled, he ended up with nine eggs in the incubator. All this happened with little discussion, no planning or thoughts about the implications of just what this might lead to.

I silently calculated the days to figure out when we might have a hatch (21 days) – December 31st. This meant figuring out how to get the incubator up to Vermont for our vacation after Christmas.  So there we left after Christmas – four kids, 2 snowboards, 4 pairs of skis, lots of gear and food, and one egg incubator plugged into the car lighter.

On December 30th, we woke up to a bird singing outside our bedroom window….or so we thought.  We quickly realized that we were hearing peeps coming from the incubator.  After a long, hard day, that chick finally hatched around 6PM.  David was pacing like a nervous father, trying to get everything set up properly.  Twenty-four hours later, five more had hatched. And guess what?  I think three of them are roosters.  Lord help me.

I won’t begin to bore you with my worries now – like, what the heck do we do with six more chickens?  It’s too cold for them to be outside for quite a while, we need to figure out if we need to build another coop, and what about the roosters?  (and if I couldn’t get rid of a beautiful rare Lakenvelder rooster, how do I ever get rid of rooster mutts?)!

Hell, I might as well throw in the towel and say yes to getting that dog now.  Bring on the chaos! (Please feel free to talk me out of this).

How hard is it to purchase and put up a Christmas tree? For some inexplicable reason, our family seems to be tree-challenged.

We’ve had a few years of looping rope over the car to secure the tree on the roof. Only to discover that, while the tree was secure, we had inadvertently tied the car doors shut. (two times).

There are the times we had to stick our arm out the window and maintain a death grip on the Christmas tree to prevent it from slipping off, despite being tied to the roof (only fell off into the road one time).

We then learned to keep the rope from these trips home and use it to tie the tree up to some type of furniture to prevent the tree from leaning and tipping over (too many times to count).

You would think now, with an artificial tree, our days of XMAS tree mishaps would be over. But this year, we can’t get figure out how to plug together the string of lights on our pre-lit tree. In our defense, there are A LOT of plugs, but we’ve managed to figure it out in years past. Each of us has spent at least 20 minutes plugging different iterations of plugs together to find that magic combination that will make the whole tree light up (like a Christmas tree, natch).

I share these stories not to spotlight our family’s mechanical incompetence, but to explain why this site, passed along by Wise Woman Laurie, struck such a chord with me: There, I Fixed It. Each day, photos are posted celebrating “mankind’s eternal struggle to hammer square pegs into round holes (with duct tape.)” Obviously, the shopping cart/grill combo above was a stroke of brilliance. Check out these other ingenious examples below.

And, if anyone has any tips for our Christmas tree, I’m all ears. (Plan B is to hang regular lights leftover from years past on the allegedly pre-lit tree.)

For any of you following my previous blogs about my foray into backyard chicken farming, you know that I’m trying to find a home for my rooster – an unassuming, cute chick who grew a coxcomb and long tail feathers as s(he) grew, much to our surprise.  I’ve talked to Nature Centers, other backyard chicken enthusiasts, put ads on craigslist, backyard poultry message boards, etc.  While I’ve had two nibbles (even one from North Carolina) – no bites so far.  I have discovered through research that MJ is a rare Lakenvelder rooster – and quite a coveted bird by those who own roosters…. Interested yet?

Well, much to my amusement, two of my neighbors passed along “chicken” articles to me this past weekend.  One was from our backyard neighbor who we don’t know well – and I was quite concerned that MJ may be a little too noisy for her.  On the contrary, she told us she loved hearing the rooster, and doesn’t want us to get rid of it at all.  The article she passed along was about the growing trend to have backyard poultry – an article published in The New Yorker.

My other neighbor gave me an article just published in The Week magazine entitled Eating Arlene.  Arlene the rooster’s owner was in exactly our situation.  Bought some chicks, and one grew into a rooster.  After rationalizing the organic ways of the likes of Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle) – who both raise animals for consumption, this rooster owner decided to sacrifice her bird, and made Chicken Soup a la Arlene.  I must admit my stomach turned when I read the graphic details – I could never imagine doing such a thing.

So back to my neighbor….is she subtly trying to tell me something? She also casually mentioned to me in the last week that she’s thinking of getting a herding dog, and her breeder is concerned that there are chickens next door.  If this dog were ever to get loose, he may just be enjoying MJ Fricassee for dinner.  Imagine, going to the lengths of getting a dog, just to get rid of my rooster.  Obviously she’s hoping that I cook him up first.

Need a laugh today?  Watch this commercial – voted the best commercial in Europe!

On this Halloween weekend we got egged.  Not in the traditional sense, thank goodness.  We received our first real live egg from one of our chickens.  It’s silly how excited a little egg can make me.  I discovered it after I let the chickens outside during the afternoon, and noticed one chicken was missing.  As I was looking for her, I looked inside the coop, and saw an egg on the floor.  It was still warm, and cracked, although not leaking.  I then noticed the chicken nestled on top of the nesting boxes with her tail pushed up against the wall.  She evidently laid the egg, and as there is a small gap between the boxes and the wall, it dropped down to the floor.  Obviously a coop malfunction which we’ll need to remedy.  We recently purchased the oyster shells which we scattered (they provide the calcium to make the shells hard) and the flax seed, which we mix into their feed to ensure good Omega-3 eggs.

And now for an update on Michael Jackson (our rooster).  He is a fairly regular crooner now – note the pictures.  I think his increased vocalizations may be coinciding with the chickens coming into the egg laying stage.  While I do love to hear him crow during regular daylight hours, I listen with dismay when I’ve heard him at 3AM, 4AM, 5AM and 6AM.   So I am now on the path to find him a home.  I must admit I thought I’d have an easier time of it, but so far I have received three nos from sources that I thought were a fairly sure thing.  So I will keep trying.  Neighbors, rest assured, the singing rooster will be gone soon.

As I’m driving to Maine next weekend to visit my parents, my husband suggested I take him with me to give to the chicken farmer down the road from their house.  If I had to travel 8 hours with a rooster crooning in my backseat I think I would probably drive off  I-95. So I will keep trying, and hopefully MJ will be settled in a new home soon enough.

As I put the boys to bed last night they told me their new routine was to wake up, get dressed, run out to the coop and collect eggs, then have breakfast.  Sam has put his claim on the first egg – his breakfast for Monday morning.

Watching an uninvited guest slip through the door has never been so cute! Here’s a 15-second video from PetTube.com you’ll enjoy.

Dear Santa,

Notwithstanding the forest of artificial Christmas trees that have sprung up in every store, it seems a bit early to begin my holiday wish list. (And, as you know, I’m a bit ambivalent about the whole wish list craze in the first place.)

So, imagine my surprise when I stumbled across this neon-lettered wish list at a nearby gas station/corner store (less than a mile from my house, no less.)

When the next sign flashed to encourage quick action (or layaway as Plan B), I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

I may be out of step with my neighbors, but I’m sticking with “world peace” on my wish list this year.