Not my ideal way to wake up.

You know your day's going to be crap when you're woken up by a quail using your face as a landing pad not once, but twice. I need to get a carabiner on the cage, because Dust's mate is able to pick the keyed lock. Don't ask me how - I have no idea how she does it, but this is the third time she has escaped.

The second time she landed on my face, I snarled, chucked a towel under her, curled my hand over her back and went back to sleep. She was contentedly sitting in the towel, making little cricket noises at me, when I woke up a couple hours later. She normally hates being held, so I have no clue what's up with her.

That Guy is off winter camping. He set off Friday after work, with the intent to set up camp - complete with brand new stove - in the dark. I informed him that he's not allowed to catch pneumonia and die. Ever. Hopefully, all went well and he did not freeze vital bits of himself off overnight.

I have random veggies in my fridge. I'm tempted to make soup. Celery, onions, scallions, fresh parsley, other fresh herbs, garlic, and I think I have canned veggies that need to go away also. That plus barley sounds like it would be a decent soup. Maybe. How is it that I have no canned tomatoes? I swear I canned 8 gazillion of them this summer! Apparently I eat a lot of tomatoes. Probably part of being a pastavore.

L. is arriving next Saturday, which means I need to clear out all the junk in the fridge and stock up on cooking ingredients. I should see if the sourdough starter is still alive. If not, I have other starters in my fridge courtesy of the Not My Cat Pixel.

I now have a full incubator of quail eggs. Expect disgustingly cute pictures of impossibly tiny fuzzy chicks sometime around Christmas. Provided they hatch. No, they're not all mine. 13 of them are mine. The other 25+ are from an egg swap. The rules said "Send six eggs.." and my partner apparently wanted to send MANY. Hopefully at least some will hatch! It's winter. I need cute fuzzy baby cuteness. The kind that doesn't require kicking and screaming its way out of my uterus. See, if I could grow human infants in uterine replicators, I'd have ten by now.

Probably a good thing that uterine replicators don't exist.

For everything else, there's Mastercard

A neighbor from down the street did her yearly holiday cookie delivery today. She knocked, I invited her in because freezing rain and sleet and snow are falling from the sky. She took one look at the cages full of quail in my living room and her eyes got very wide. She stammered, "Those aren't.. aren't.. RITUAL.. birds, are they?" Not parsing it, I stared blankly and may have said "Whut?" "You're not going to.. cut their heads off or.. or.. do anything with their .. entrails, are you?"

And here's where I lost a great opportunity to rock the spooky pagan street cred. I busted out laughing right in her face, instead of coming up with some sort of witty, evil retort.

Quail: $3.50/bird
Cages: $500
Feed/grit: $50
Look on your neighbor's face when she sees ZOMG BIRDS in the wacky pagan's living room right before a major holiday: Priceless.

At least she brought cookies. I mean, really. If you're going to accuse me - me, the KNOWN VEGETARIAN - about the reckless slaughter of my pets for arcane divination purposes, you'd damn well better be standing there with a plate of homemade cookies and fudge!

Nom. Fudge!