Welcome to the Larsen Home of less-than-perfect pets!

Doggy finds out the hard way that some kids play too rough.




Kitty discovers that not all stray cats want to be his friend.





And this is what the bottom of the pecking order looks like.






- posted by Christine @ 1:23 PM

 
This is interesting...there appears to be a direct correlation to which president's face mask sells more during the Halloween season to who actually wins the elections.

Wanna sneak peek at who is going to win this year's presidential election in this highly scientific strategy? Read the article.

And to think I imagined it had something to do with who had the funniest face.
- posted by Christine @ 3:18 PM

 
Having a puppy is hard enough. Try having a puppy with a broken leg.

A friend asked me the other day about my chickens and said, "You haven't been talking about your chickens much." Well, I still have four hens. Sadly one of the hens isn't looking very good. Apparently when you have no roosters, the hens tend to fight a lot more, so one hen, obviously at the bottom of the pecking order, is getting pretty shabby. I usually only see three hens out there eating so I'll peek in the coop and see hen #4 on the roost like she's in time-out or something.

There haven't been many eggs lately either. I haven't even had the energy to research this, so I'm just hoping it'll pick back up in a few weeks and that hen #4 will buck up and make a resolution that she will no longer be a chicken doormat.

I've had two cars at my disposal the last few months. I've never been fond of driving the van but it's actually quite handy when you're hauling around three kids and a dog. Of course it also allows for quite a bit more trash than my little green beast. It uses a lot more gas too, so every couple weeks I'll move all the car seats over to the little beast and drive it for a couple weeks, until I need the van again.

And now the van needs air in it's tires and an oil change, so I have decide if I want to actually maintain it (yes, I know that's what I'm suppose to do) or just switch over to the car for awhile and give myself time to forget about the van.

Today was trash day, another reason to hate Mondays, and as I was loading a huge can of garbage into the back of the van, something gray with a small tail could be seen running through the clear plastic bag. I had my usual heart palpitation when I see a rodent and dropped the garbage can. The bag didn't move. I pulled open a little hole in it as to give mousie a chance to escape but nothing happened. Knowing I have no one to turn to, I quickly sat the can up in the van and drove down the driveway faster than usual. I wasn't about to let another rodent invade yet another automobile I have to drive. When we got down to the road, I lifted up the can, let it crash to the ground, and mousie tore out the hole and ran into the neighbor's yard. Yes! Christine 1, mouse 0.

I went to a concert this weekend in the pouring rain. It's one of those situations where you have to weigh the soggy factor to the $40 ticket, the ticket won. I refused to put on an ugly black garbage bag that everyone else had on. I thought, how much more wet could I possibly get? Water was dripping out of my hair, streaming down my face. I rung rain out of my coat while the band yelled, 'Yeah Washington Fans!" A woman in front of us had her garbage bag on, only just her head was popping out of the top. Since everyone around me had their arms and head sticking out of the bags, I just naturally assumed that these were actually rain parkas that looked like garbage bags. The woman sheepishly turned around to see if anyone was watching as I wondered what she was up to. Then I burst into insane laughter as I saw her pushing her hand through the side of the bag, like watching the alien coming out of it's host.
- posted by Christine @ 4:16 PM

 
I should've picked up on the fact that since my 5-year-old son could pry open a large can of paint with a fork, he would eventually use the paint for something, even if I thought I was hiding the can from him.

The whole way home he kept saying he needed to go to Home Depot for a paint brush to "finish the house." I had no idea what he was talking about, and knew we didn't need another paint brush, so we skipped Home Depot and came home.

Sitting in my office this afternoon and about 10 or 15 minutes go by without my hearing noise from my son. I could see the garage light was on and ran over to the door. Opened it up, and there he is with an open paint can, a roller pan and a roller, rolling out white paint on two large pieces of wood that he's set up on two large saw horses.

He's such a crafty little guy, I hate to yell at him when he's just trying to be a little man (he says he's making a house for us).
- posted by Christine @ 2:05 PM

 
Due to an excessive amount of caffeinated tea, I was up until about 3 AM last night and caught a show on VH-1 called Totally Obsessed.

I have to say, this is my kind of show. I've had a few friends growing up that would be completely obsessed by something, and no matter what you talked about, the conversation would always circle back around to the thing they were so completely engrossed by. For instance, my dear friend and his Madonna obsession. I believe he grew out of it, but for a time, he had a huge drawer filled with any imaginable Madonna picture/article you could find, posters covering his walls. People even helped him accumulate his vast Madonna collection. Every time you heard "Madonna" you thought of him.

And if this VH-1 show had been on back then, I would've encouraged my friend to sign up. Last night they showed a woman who had become obsessed with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Why? Well she seemed to think they had taught her great wisdom, that the Michael Angelo turtle had sung a song (which she also sang on the show last night) that really went to her heart and made her see she could be anything she wanted to be, and in this case, a Mutant Ninja Turtle.

She saved up her money to buy these big fancy masks and went out in her family's front lawn to demonstrate the ninja moves she'd paid big bucks to learn so she could be just like the Ninja Turtles.

The scariest part about this was that she was completely serious. Her family just shrugged their shoulders as the daughter of the family put on her over-priced costums and added layers of mayonaisse to her pizza.

Another man was actually in debt over being completely obsessed with getting that Dukes of Hazzard General Lee car up and over the largest jump the car had ever been on for the now-dead show. His friend said he talks and talks about Dukes of Hazzard episodes as someone else had an interest in this.

I had a brief brush with an obsession a few years ago, or maybe just an intense focus. Earthquakes for me. I think it was hormones, or maybe just a chemical imbalance, but if I could have rigged up a seismograph in my office, I would have. I started to chart the local earthquakes on a map (there are quite a few of them in my area of the state, by the way). I had about 100 links to various web sites and even got daily updates from a woman in Oregon who says she can predict earthquakes by watching how the ants act around her house. I joined a discussion group online and participated in earthquake discussions. I constantly checked the UW Seismology Dept's web site to see if we'd had a recent earthquake.

Well, except for that last site, I managed to quit being so focused. My computer crashed and I lost my earthquake charting. I gave up on getting a seismograph (where would I get one anyway?). Nobody else seemed to care about earthquakes, and frankly, it was boring me too.

Where was I? Oh yeah, that was a great show. Of course I fell asleep before it was over but I'm certainly turning it on next time. They'll even have an episode with the guy obsessed with Peter Pan.
- posted by Christine @ 5:15 PM

 
I thought the millions of caterpillars from this summer would mean an onslaught of moths around this time. I'm happy to say that except for one small, gray moth that led my daughter into hysterics because it was flying around the top of the stairwell, I really haven't seen any.

Not the case, apparently, for Weird Al.
- posted by Christine @ 9:04 PM