Dude, I can’t believe it’s 2013. It isn’t so much that time flies and blah blah blah, as the fact that for the first time since I was, I dunno, six, I didn’t make it until midnight. The sad part is, we have kept our California schedule the entire time we’ve been here, so midnight was really like 10pm for us. Who can’t stay up until ten at night?

We intended to go out New Year’s Eve, but my husband was sick. He started feeling crummy early in the day, and by the afternoon his lips were white and he looked like hell. Still, he drove around to scout dive bars to ring in the year. It didn’t happen. By seven in the evening he had on a hoodie and pajamas, and had wrapped himself in a blanket on the couch. We watched Men in Black 3 (don’t judge us, we’ve made our way through everything halfway decent, and it was either that or Battleship), and called it a night right after.

Boy, ain’t we some partying fools.

Anyway, prior to that, we did manage to fit in some fun. As part of our ‘let’s stop ripping each other a new one’ agreement, my husband and I decided to take a couple of days and try to do something that didn’t involve cleaning or fixing stuff. Notice the word try. We planned on seeing Dale Watson on Sunday night. Well, I wanted to see Dale Watson, my husband was more interested in Chicken Shit Bingo. Apparently they put a bunch of chickens on a board marked with squares and take bets on which chicken will go first.

Lovely.

I thought it sounded disgusting, but my husband reasoned I’d get a post out of it. As it turned out, he got the time wrong, and so we missed the whole thing. I can’t say I’m sorry – chickens give me the heebie jeebies. All that pecking makes me nervous.

Speaking of which, we stumbled across this place:

Now multiply this by 20 and you'll have the size of the place.

In the main building they had a plethora of stuffed this and that’s, stags, bears, wart hogs, snakes, and more animal skins than you could ever imagine, plus a gargantuan pair of horns that cost 20 grand. They were as tall as me. It was quite the scene, complete with a chain smoking owner, which seemed like a terrible idea. Aside from cancer and secondhand smoke, one smoldering ash probably would have lit the place up like a Roman candle.

A surprising amount of people were shopping there, one of which was a little girl frantically digging through boxes of bones and antlers. I don’t know what she was looking for exactly, but when she found it, she held the remains up to her mother and shouted in near hysteria, “It’s only five bucks!!”

Over the weekend we went with my dad to see Hitchcock, which, if you’re interested and haven’t seen it, was pretty good. It seemed only fitting that we ran into this afterward while in the parking lot of the grocery store.

Caw!

They were everywhere, and I mean everywhere. Tens of thousands of birds apparently decided this was the place to be, they swooped around, and made all sorts of racket, which of course meant my husband had to stop and take pictures. Did I mention it isn’t just chickens that give me the creeps? I really, really dislike birds, and so while he snapped pics I crouched Tipi Hedren-style and told my man to hurry the hell up. If someone is going to get doused with bird droppings, it’s going to be me. I blame the 80s for my bird hate. Remember when everyone had those high, teased, horrible bangs? Yeah, I had those too, in the fourth and fifth grade. It wasn’t my best look. Once, while hanging out with my friends in the courtyard outside at school, a bird dropped a perfectly aimed load right onto my hair sprayed bangs. It sort of spread across my shellacked pouf like an outer shell of bird poo, which more or less cemented my lifelong dislike of birds.

Huh. Clearly, I lost any thread of cohesiveness in this post a few paragraphs back, so let me end by saying I am totally psyched about the new year. I won’t go all resolution-y on you, but I do promise to get back to my regularly scheduled blog posts now that the holidays are over.

Happy New Year homies!