I had three black Araucana hens, two of which died, one by a predator, one from unknown causes. The one remaining hen, who I named Condoleezza, lays the beautiful blue eggs for which the breed is renowned. However in April she went broody for about four months recently snapping out of it and now again this stupid damn hen is at it again. She sits on useless eggs that’ll never hatch and of course then doesn’t bother to lay her own.

I’d just been proudly handing out blue eggs to people like Trevor and Elsa, but now we’ll have to wait months for more of them. I know, I could get another Araucana or two, but then if they also like sitting on the nest all day it wouldn’t be worth the gamble. I’ll just eat the other hens’ more normal coloured eggs and put up with this idiot of a chicken.

I need to renew my passport as Margaret and I are off to our beloved Yucatan in February, and I said to Calvin I decided to just get the paper copy and do it the old-fashioned way. He said he had to do it that way himself, given despite having a Bachelor of Computer Science, he couldn’t bust the Government of Canada website to do it online. So if he can’t do it, no one can.

And speaking of technology that could cripple a Boomer, I’m now waiting for Trevor to format my memoir, Nuttier than a Fruitcake, in preparation for its launch on the Amazon book site. Then we still have to meet to fool around with pricing, and I’ll have to write some preamble or other, and hopefully with God’s good grace, we can have an ISBN by September 30.

Why September 30 you ask? Because the Canadian Book Club awards require a submission by that date, and they have memoir as one of their categories. Vain and impossible, I know, but I’m doin’ it anyway. I’m going to enter my book and see what happens. Stranger things have occurred, right?

Mom remains a handful and mainly because she still believes she’s the queen. I was there a couple of days ago, and Luke and Jan came for dinner as usual. No one but mom wanted dessert, and at that point Luke stood up and said his back hurt and he wanted to go home. Jan was surprised he was leaving but then left with him.

As mom was chowing down on the prune cake with whip I’d made, she decided to get pissy, and just as Jan was going down the stairs she called her back. I waved Jan on. Then I came in and said what did you want to tell Jan? Mom said I want to tell her never to leave the table when someone is still eating. I said well from now on, unfortunately, things like that will occur and you won’t be able to control them.

Mom’s still scared shitless of dying, too, so that kind of hard control of everything makes life very difficult. She worries about so many useless things that at 100.5 years of age, one would have hoped she would have come to terms with them. She’s no Buddhist, I can tell you that for sure.

Meanwhile I revel in simple joys, such as learning how to make a nice yeast dough for the aforementioned prune cake. I’ve been frightened of yeast in the past but just decided to take the bull by the horns and give it a try, and then what happened was a lovely, fluffy bottom crust. As I said if you don’t try you’ll never win. Fingers crossed for my book.

The contest won’t announce anything until November, so I’ll have to try to be Zen.