sibling rivalry

My kids are jealous because yesterday I spent the afternoon making treats for my chickens...at least I think it's jealousy, it may just be that they don't like the way it made the house smell.  I've had a big bag 'o pig fat sitting in my freezer for quite awhile now and yesterday I decided to render it down into lard.  But, I don't need a half of pig worth of lard, so I melted it down just a bit, until it was liquid.  I mixed it with some scratch grains and poured it into aluminum pie pans and froze them for chicken treats.  Chickens love that kind of thing, and since it's so cold out (-5) the extra fat will help keep them toasty warm.  I scooped up enough to render down into 2 quarts of lard and have just enough cracklings to keep me happy (cracklings are the little bits of deep fried meat bits that were mixed in with the fat, they're yummy!)  But all that lard cooking made the whole house smell like a deep friend pork chop.  Ideally, I should have done this in the summer on the burner of our grill, but who wants to spend the day boiling fat when it's hot and humid outside, besides, then I'd have to store a bunch of chicken treats in the freezer for months at a time, because those are not things you're going to want to leave siting outside in the summer time, you'd have a gross greasy mess.  Anyway, I'm glad to have the bag of fat out of my freezer.  Hubs brought the rest of our friend Jim's chickens over to him today, we'd been storing them in our freezer for him, so, with the fat gone and the 20 chickens gone, I think I may be able to combine the contents of both my chest freezers into one.  Of course, that means that I"m going to have to clean out my small freezer to make room for a bunch more stuff, and who wants to clean out a freezer when it's a million stinking degrees below zero outside?  So that might be a job I'm going to procrastinate on for awhile.

Yesterday, I finally got around to watching the very last ever episode of Fringe.  I've been watching the show since the very first episode and here it is, 5 seasons later, and it's all done now.  It was a perfect and satisfying ending.  I have to admit, I was a bit concerned about how they were going to end it, it's a JJ Abrams show and, though I never watched it, I remember people being dissatisfied by the way he ended Lost.  But no, all loose ends were tied up satisfactorily.  I laughed, I cried, it was good, though I'm going to miss having Walter Bishop in my life.  Fringe has one of my favorite lines ever from a television show (besides everything ever said on Firefly):  "Why are shape-shifting soldiers from another universe stealing cryogenically frozen heads?"  How can you not love a show that has a character saying that with an absolutely serious look on their face?