I relish this entry…for it is one of my very last non-NaNoWriMo entries. I am currently well-rested and mostly sane. I’ll keep you posted on how my mental state is as things progress.
Today I realized I’ve turned into a 17th-century tavern wench. I’ve got these adorable little banties, you see, and they spend all day milling around in my backyard, and they spend all night snoozing in the hut I built for them in April. I go out once a day, to check their water and feed, and to make sure they’re doing all right.
The cool thing about having chookies is that you almost never throw away food scraps–slightly wilted lettuce, tomato butts, stale cookies–everything can go into the backyard and I have their undying loyalty, for I am Food. They also eat Girlie leftovers, because she eats about forty-eight mini-meals a day, and always leaves bread crusts of a few raisins or apple rinds. I used to pile all her scraps into a bowl and put them out in the backyard, sending the chooks into a frenzy of ecstatic squawking and pecking and general freak-outs.
Unfortunately, my backyard is much lower than the front yard. When you come into the house, you can enter on the first floor, walk to the back of the house, and peer down into the backyard which is a storey below (so my backyard access is through the basement). Oftentimes when I am at home and ready to feed the chickens some scraps, I am not wearing shoes or pants or am feeling very lazy, or all three at once. So I devised a new method. I open the kitchen window, and rocket the jammy toast scraps, cheese bits, or banana butts into the backyard. They immediately come running, flapping their sad little wings to get more velocity. I don’t think this really speeds them up any, since they just end up traveling in zig-zaggy arcs, instead of running it a straight line. But it sure looks funny.
They fight over the scraps until they’re gone, and then go back to pecking at imaginary bugs and rolling in the dirt.
I think this is the perfect method, but Mr. Husband disagrees with me. Very surprising, since he is a Boy, and I thought boys liked it when things were rocketed around. Doesn’t he know about Jackass? So I stopped doing it…in front of him. (I am trainable like a cat.) But I think he suspects I still do it.
“Hey,” he said on Sunday morning, “Did you notice the chickens freak out and run over whenever you open the kitchen window?” He thinks for a minute, looking into the backyard and begins filling the sink to wash the dishes. “Are you throwing food out the window again?” I give him a non-committal shrug. “That is so trashy!” he says.
Hey, you can take the girl out of the trailer park…
“That’s how the plague started in London, you know,” he says.
“But they eat the little toast bits right away,” I say. “We’re not drawing rats. I think it’s very clever.”
That’s me, the Queen of Efficiency.
