Critter Snark

Okay– I’ll admit it.  Sometimes, I look forward to Saturday Snark because really?  My real life just isn’t that interesting.  

The little kids are cute:  Squish is sleeping with my old teddy bear and a couple of sock monkeys–she drags them from the bunk bed to our own bed in the middle of the night, and the effect is charming. 

Zoomboy keeps telling bad jokes:  What’s ice cream’s favorite day?  SUNday!  (Get it?  Because there’s ice cream sundaes, and it’s sunday–it’s a homophone mom, two words that sound the same but are spelled different and have different meanings.  That’s why it’s funny.)

Chicken is both growing up and not–we made it all the way to the DMV yesterday for her permit test, only to discover she’d forgotten some of her paperwork.  She cried all the way home.  I told her at least she didn’t fail anything but paperwork, and hell–the entire family has practically invented such a thing as a paperwork handicap.  She should be proud.  She looked cute in them genes.  

Big T is looking for a job–in a haphazard, random, awkward way worthy of any slacking college student still living with his parents.  He’s still a good boy–he’s just a good boy with too much time on his hands, and a terrible case of jealousy for not beating his little sister to the driver’s permit stage.  

And Mate bought me a new computer for Christmas.  No, not on it yet–that whole “transfer files” thing seems to be causing him oodles of trouble.  But it’s so pretty, it looks like it’s made of stars.  

There’s more–but I can’t post about it yet.  I’ll let you all know–for one thing, there’s some news on something that’s been going on for a long time, that I’ve kept off the blog.  It’s sort of big and painful–but I can’t quite talk about it yet.  (Nothing bad about the family, or the writing–so, really, something we can live with.  NO need to panic. Really.)  You’ll know it when you see it, ‘kay?

And in the meantime–here’s my Saturday snark for Marie Sexton’s blog.  It’s from The Winter Mating Rituals of Fur-Bearing Critters again–and it’s one of the many times Crawford’s minimalist way of speaking takes us by surprise:

“The sheep nibbles,” was what Ben said. He held up a sleeve that was a
little sodden and had bits of grass on it. “Do the other things, the llamas—”

“Alpacas.”

“Yeah, do they nibble like sheep?”

Craw frowned. “No. The girls will spit if they don’t
want to be mated, but then, wouldn’t blame them.”

Ben blinked and then opened his eyes really wide. “I don’t… God. Don’t tell
me what that looks like.”

Craw thought about it, his eyes moving restlessly on
the road as he tried to figure out if there was any other way for the
long-necked, long-legged critters to go. “It looks like two alpacas fucking,
mostly,” he said apologetically. “Of course, sometimes, the boy can’t get his
boy parts past the girl’s furry ass, and he needs a little help, so then it
looks like two alpacas fucking while their handler’s giving the one on top a
handjob.”

He looked sideways as Ben’s giggles took over the car.
“Well, I didn’t say it was a picnic for the handlers.”

And that was it. Ben, the pretty man he’d been trying
to impress, was leaning back in the seat of his truck, poinging like popcorn in
an old metal pan, and laughing so hard there were tears tracking down the
beginning creases at the corners of his eyes.

Apparently the alpacas weren’t the only ones who had
made a fucking impression.