Tying Up Loose Ends

The centipede infestation continues unabated. Neighbors have told us they're having the same problem, so it must be something with the weather or the crop-harvesting. Poor Andrew -- he doesn't tend to be bothered by bugs, but centipedes just gross him out, and he's been talking frequently about moving away from this house! Like, NOW!

The guy who left the political yardsign in our front yard still has not been back to retrieve his sign. This amuses me.

The road hazard that I encountered on Sept 25 did some damage after all. The tires made it through, apparently unscathed. But the "flex pipe" going from the engine to the exhaust system had a gash in it. The last week I've been driving around sounding like a hot-rodder. Didn't bother to make an appt for fixing it because of plans to be in Milwaukee. So a phone call to the mechanic was one of the first orders of business when we got home on Monday afternoon. When we picked it up today, it wasn't even that terrible a bill! Hooray!

And for those of you who have asked about the hog's head, it is all taken care of. It was boiled for hours and hours yesterday in a huge pot, bigger than a water-bath canner. When Philip came home from work, he began taking the meat off. We didn't like it. He ended up throwing the meat out. I don't know if the icky flavor was due to the head having been roasted on the spit with the rest of the piggy, or if it was because of being boiled with all the other "stuff" that comes with a head (teeth, eyes, skin, etc) instead of just bone, fat, and meat.

When I was checking at one point to determine whether it was done, I reached into the pot and grabbed something that turned out not to be muscle. Oops, I yanked a tooth out of the jawbone. I didn't know if I had ruined something Philip would want, so I left the tooth on the counter. Maggie thought that was interesting, as on the previous day she'd just had a discussion about her loose tooth and that the doctor might have to pull it prior to intubation. (By the way, the tooth fairy does know to visit hospital patients under those circumstances -- so declares the nurse-practioner.)

Well, anyway, regardless of the flavor of the meat, Philip still wanted the bones. So last night he was picking apart this skull. "Oooooh, Mom, you gotta see the soft palate on this animal! Isn't it interesting?" (I hate to admit it, but it was pretty. It had a pattern that would make a very nice floor tile or wall paper.) "Hey, mom, I've got the eyeball. You wanna see?" "NO!!!" (I get really creeped out by eyeballs. And some people actually dissect sheep eyeballs for homeschool science. Yuck!) At this point, I figured it was time for me to get out of range of hearing Philip's discoveries.

I don't know where this skull is now. Maybe it boiled too long and crumbled. We can only hope.