The cat I didn't want was trying t get into the dishwasher. I stepped on it by accident for the tenth time in its already decrementing nine lives. In all, its a fine cat, except that it's never satisfied. The assigned bowl of cat food isn't empty, the cat just wants the scraps of the dishwasher. This house is too small to be a zoo.
One of the 27 chickens was lost today. An escape that cost my daughter several hours of her elective Saturday looking for it. I perceive it as a waste of time, but when you're 12, what could be more fun than trying to recover a recalcitrant bird. The thing flew into the brambles which drove the yellow lab nearly into a frenzy as every gene in its body went into retriever mode. At last notice, it's still lost and will probably freeze through the night.
The lab is a piece of work as well. She has a condition. The unfairness of it won't leave me alone. The disease sends her into convulsions when she runs too hard. I think there is even a name for it. Exercise Induced Collapse. Looks like a seizure to me. Recently, she fell into some bushes all locked up and eyes rolled back, and a stick punctured her scalp. That was a six hundred dollar cure at the vet, including the anesthesia and the drain tubes that remained for many weeks.
We have special needs pets. One of the chickens when not even a day out of the egg, had been left for dead by the hen that brooded over it. I think it actually did die, but Mei An gave it mouth to beak resuscitation and it has lived ever since. It too has seizures. Just when you think it dead, its eyes blink and it's back to wandering in search of bugs. The cat is orally fixated with a strong ongoing nursing preference for polar fleece.
We feed them on their terms. We let them in or out at their whim, I considered cutting a doggie door into one of the doors but I just can't bring myself to actually act on the notion of a private entrance for the throng of sub-human life forms that clutter my halls. Instead I numb my mind to the gross interruptions that are meant to be here for my pleasure. Slave or indentured servant ... either one is a notch or two down from where I thought I'd be.
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Just a follow up note about the lost chicken. She was in fact found by the convulsive lab and my daughter, at about 6am. Miraculously alive. When they flushed her out of the bramble, she flew a hundred yards before the poultry patrol extracted her from her crash-landing site. Another bush. Mei An and the dog, wearing an expression that clearly communicated complete credit for the effort, came in with the shivering bird that rests even now in the chicken hospital, a cardboard box in my daughter's room. She knows her birds and after warming it up with a blow dryer since it sat in the rain all night I think the thing will live.
Never mind the fact that the birds of the air have survived at night even in the drizzling rain. I'm actually more curious about the cat that has taken a sudden interest in the chicken hospital as well. Reminds me of the riddle about a fox a chicken and a bag of feed that need to be transported in a canoe across a river. Something is just bound to become lunch.
But the biggest riddle of all is how to explain my daughter's enthusiasm for getting up at 6am in the gray and wet morning when most days she fights the wake up call like cornered shrew. May wonders never cease.
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