Merit Badge in Bartering

Ah, a reprieve from my Girl Scout Cookie withdrawal.  My colleagues and I have joined the Polyface Farms buying club (read all about Polyface in The Omnivore's Dilemma, my favorite book of 2008) and one of us has been picking up all of our orders.  Turns out that one colleague got my second chicken.  Rather than deal with the difficulties of shuttling the chicken around, as this colleague also happened to be my dealer for GS cookie highs, I told her I'd trade her the chicken for however many boxes of cookies it came to.

So if you've ever wondered how many boxes of Thin Mints =  one 4.5 lb organic free range chicken, the answer is:

Here's the hard part, and where the true test of my former-girl scout ethics lies:  do I share them with my husband or keep them all for myself?

Apres Ikea...le deluge.

After 2.5 years of putting off new bookcases because Any Day Now Workers Will Be Traipsing Through Our House, we have resigned ourselves that if Workers Actually Do Any Work On Our House, It Will Be a Sign of the Second Coming.  So we decided to console ourselves with this realization by tackling the clutter we've put up with these last 2.5 years and ran off to Ikea to get some bookcases.  Their motto should be "Apres nous...le deluge."  A deluge of cardboard, paper, and allen wrenches that will surely last for days/weeks while we try to figure out how to affix these things to the wall and wire the lights.