Visitors & Newborns

Last weekend I had a visit from Leigh - an old friend from Alaska who's been living in Atlanta for almost ten years now. Oh my lord, is Leigh pregnant! Very pregnant! Ready to drop any moment. In fact, she even had a contraction while she was here. She woke up Sunday morning and realized that if she didn't come visit me that day, it would be months before another visit was possible.

So she loaded her little girl, a couple calzones and her giant pregnant belly in the car and drove out to Spenardo del Sur to spend an afternoon with me and the critters. Nothing makes me so acutely aware of how limited my current social circle is like spending time with a "real" person.


One of the cats, Moonpie, had kittens earlier this week. I need more cats like a need a fucking hole in the head. I have far too many cats for an almost 40-year-old never-married woman living alone in a trailer in rural Alabama.

To complicate matters, Moonpie decided to have her kittens in the chicken coop. Found her one morning while collecting eggs. She was nursing her newborns in a corner nest formerly reserved for egg laying.

Moonpie loves the chicken coop. She's often followed me in there, usually following me out when I leave. Once, I unknowingly locked her in there. I returned a few hours later to find her sitting on the roost with a few of the chickens.

I'll have to move her out of there soon. I'm going to Michigan for a few days and the chicken coop will be locked the entire time. There'll be no free-ranging for the birds until I get back - easier for the person who'll be tending the birds while I'm away. Besides, my alpha-male rooster, Gimpy, is starting to get annoyed with having a cat in his kingdom.

Me and a couple neighbor-cousins are driving to Michigan for the first weekend of August to attend my parents' 50th anniversary party. Should be back in time to celebrate my 40th birthday. Most likely, I will spend the momentous occasion drinking cheap beer, sitting under the stars, tending a bonfire, accompanied by far too many cats.


Still no sign of baby goats. They should be born very soon. Hopefully it doesn't happen while I'm out of town. I also hope to get one or two more batches of baby chicks before summer's over.


Sorry for the lack of photos in these last few posts. I'm still stuck using this turn-of-the-century computer and I have yet to even see if it's compatible with my camera. I'll get around to figuring it out soon.

For those interested, my website archives are still available over at RanchoSpenardo.com. I may soon have that domain name point over to this new blog. I'm still hoping to find a computer made in this century that will allow me to go back to posting at the original site. I have so much going on right now that I really don't even want to deal with any of this computer shit. Ugh.