Monday, Monday

Over forty years ago, I was lying on the operating table waiting to have a nerve in my finger reattached. The procedure was going to be to freeze my lower arm, operate while I was awake, and then send me home. Well, they froze my arm all right but forgot to tie off the arm so the freezing stuff didn't go through my body.  I kept saying that something was wrong but they were too busy discussing all the fascinating things they had done over the weekend to pay any attention. They kept reassuring me that it was normal to be apprehensive but everything was all right. I should have known better; kicked up more of a fuss. After all, this is the profession that came up with using the word 'discomfort' for PAIN!

Things weren't all right. They froze my heart and I was clinically dead. I remember hovering above the operating room thinking "this is a really stupid way to die". But then the doctor turned from chatting with his colleagues, saw what was happening, threw himself over my body and ripped out the needle". So I was saved to live to write this blog.

Ever since I have made it a hard and fast rule not to undertake any new venture on a Monday. People are always still half in the mind set of the weekend. Mondays just don't work out well for me. If I make an appointment on a Monday, they call back and reschedule, or cancel or shift me to someone else. If I live dangerously and actually have an appointment on a Monday, it will snow 17 inches (and that includes in August).

So when Dan and Yael came home one Sunday evening with 6 Brown Shaver laying hens and turned care of them over to me the next morning, I knew I was in trouble. This was partially my fault. I had wanted chickens for years. My friend, Marie, had warned me about chickens but I didn't listen. We would have eggs; we would dispose of kitchen scraps; and in the fullness of time, we would have roast chicken. What could go wrong?

After Sunday evening comes Monday and the curse continued. I got the chickens out of the coop and into the hastily wired enclosure. I fed them the correct amount of very, very expensive chicken feed. It seems that kitchen scraps have to be supplemented with proper chicken feed which makes what I spend on my grossly indulged cat seem like, well, chicken feed.

Then I went off to my daily chores. I returned barely an hour later to find that one of these supposedly dumb birds had found a way out of the chicken wire and had invaded the potting shed with the expected chaos. While I was trying to shoo her back to the enclosure, another prisoner made a break for it. This time through the wire and out into the forest beyond. I ran around like a chicken with its head cut off (oops!) trying to round up the escapees. Meanwhile the other 4 were squawking, running, and make their own prison attempts. It took almost an hour but I got them back.

Now, several days later, they have gotten me almost fully trained. I open the coop at 7:30 am, throw out fresh green stuff, clean the coop, rake the shavings, and search vainly for eggs. In the midmorning I again look for eggs. The first 2 days I got 5 each day, I am now down to 2 per day. The chickens roam the forest, the potting shed, just about anywhere they want to. I search everywhere for additional eggs but no luck.

At 6:00 pm, I go back to the coop area, bribe the hens with scraps and yet more chicken feed and literally make little trails of feed back to the entrance to the coop enclosure. Sometimes they humor me and come. Sometimes they don't. If they don't, I get out this long piece of metal and corral them between it and trees, or fence, or whatever and steer them in.

Then I walk all around the house to get into the enclosure and push them into the coop one at a time. I have found a big, fat stick for this so 4 of them go docilely enough but the last 2 fight to the final ditch. It is usually almost 7 pm before I am finished. If you factor in my time, these are pretty darn expensive eggs.