The phone rings a lot around here. During the day it is usually someone asking a question about the business. At night the kid gets his turn when his friends call to talk. When the phone rang tonight I automatically handed it to him.

But this time the call was for me. A lady I know was asking me if I know anything about chickens. Sadly, no, I don't know all that much about chickens.

"Well, the thing is, one of our roosters has gone mean and is attacking the kids."

"Hey I do know this much, you shoot it."

She wanted to know if she could eat it. I thought it would be ok as long as the rooster was not too old.

"So, exactly how do you kill a chicken?"

Believe it or not, I know in general how to answer this question. I have even done it, many many years ago.

"Well, you get you a stick of firewood that can stand up on end. You get you a hatchet. You put your chicken in a burlap sack, with the head sticking out. You put the neck on the wood, take the hatchet, and chop it's head off. Then you hold on to the sack, hard."

She took it well. She even asked the next logical question: "What do you do next?"

My experience does not extend to plucking chickens. I am pretty sure it involves boiling water.

The Internet is a big place. If any of my gentle readers has a clue as to how to get the chicken from bag to fryer, please speak up now.

Think of the children.

I can offer no excuse. Rudeness is a terrible way to deal with a situation. I do know that I tend to be direct by nature. I am often able to tone that down a bit especially when the person I am talking to does not know me well. It helps a lot that I do not allow myself to get angry very often.

I did let myself get angry at you. I flew hot when you winked your eye at me and suggested I let a certain rule slide. The rules I follow were put in place by the people I work for. These are hard working people who are trying to make a living and provide for their families. They trust me to make sure nobody takes unfair advantage of their hard work. I found out earlier this summer exactly how far I am willing to go to protect their interests, and it is scary.

I am sorry that your son suffered collateral damage in this. Young folks should be encouraged in their ventures. I believe that I did say something to that effect at the time. You would have done much better to back off and let him handle the situation, even if the result would have been the same.

We all have events we attend to connect with the people we know and meet new folks with similar interests. Maybe you do the girls night out, the boy's night out, or the barbecue on the patio.

I do the annual farm tour.

I know, no geeky creds here, but I can flat out show you which squash blossoms you can stuff without reducing the crop, tell you when yer lettuce is pretty well past it, and tell you which weeds are good for foraging.

I volunteered this year at Charles Church's place. It is close to the house and totally awesome.

You need to think about where your food comes from. It is important.

As in 2007, A List Apart is surveying all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes websites. They will analyze this year’s data and publish the results and also provide an “anonymized” version of the raw data. I took it, and so should you.

So I joined another social networking group. Actually I joined maybe a week ago, and just now got around to blogging about it. Here I was, trying to work up the energy to drop the networks I have joined, perfectly good networks, all of them, I just don't have the time.

But this one is going to be different, or so they tell me. This network will make me famous and well loved, and I think they mentioned cute and skinny too.

No not really.

What group organizer Laurie did promise was that I would have to do nothing at all, and I was all over it like white on rice.

So today, I removed all my poor neglected blog networks and replaced them with the new button. Here it is right here:

There is any number of things the group has planned to do, for instance we are not going to hop on a plane and fly somewhere expensive and get drunk. We have, however, chosen which shoes we will wear when we don't do any of this. Is this a great group or what?

I am looking forward to visiting all the individual blogs of the people who make up the group and leaving lots of witty comments and maybe enticing them to come back here and comment and then maybe we can all be BFF and swap shoe care tips. In the meantime, I will link to the blogroll that Laurie has painstakingly assembled. I loves me an alphabetical list.

Until we replace all this with an email list,

~anti

I have been using Akismet for spam protection for a little over a year now. It has been pretty good.

It has just missed some spam over the last couple of days. Obviously, somebody has tweaked their spambot. The thing is, anything not caught by the spam filter is sent to Friendfeed and God knows where else. My apologies if you have been subjected to random characters on my behalf. I do what I can to reduce the signal-to-noise ratio.

And so, I have switched spam prevention. I now use Mollom for my spam prevention needs. I am kinda excited about this, as the same awesome guy who wrote this very blog software that I use here is responsible for Mollom.

Thing is, Mollom requires a specific privacy policy. I don't think Mollum is worse than Akismet in the privacy department. They just require more disclosure.

Anyway, if you are wanting to comment on this post, or maybe one a little older, you will be subject to the Mollom policy before I have spelled it out for you here. Sorry. If you already have an account on this site you will not be affected at all. Let's hear it for old friends.

Here's hoping the Internet can continue to be usable by humans.