Wheel Spinning

I'm an expert.  I can manifest more ways to spin my wheels...

Oh sure, it looks like real business, and anyone will tell you that life happens.  But really???

Every morning dawns bright with pure potential.  16 hours with which to make things happen.  Then "Fate?" intervenes.

This morning as I began a very involved project, I heard my hens literally shrieking for help.  I know their voices.  I know the clucks and cackles that mean "Hey! All the nesting boxes are full!" and the angry squawks that result from being pecked, and all the other sounds that used to bring me running.  But today, I heard a bonafide SOS distress call.  And I dropped everything, and practically tore the door off the hinges.  I may even have plowed through a fence.

Good thing too.  I startled a hawk and he flew into the fence twice, before finally navigating his way out of the yard.  And I saw before my eyes a landscape completely bare of hens.  Where in the world were my girls?

So I ran down to where I saw the hawk lift off from, and saw hen feathers all around.  With a sense of dread, I started calling and hunting along the fence line, and way back in a corner of the fence, where the black berry brambles have grown to cover an old broken chair, I saw four little feathered bums all crammed into a space that seemed impossibly small to harbor four fully grown hens.

I coaxed them out with my usual "chick chick chick", and they gingerly stepped out of the briars.  I looked each one over, and they all clustered around me as we paraded in triumph back to the hen house.  And I praised them for their quick thinking and ability to protect themselves from predators while I fed them a little extra feed, because who wouldn't want to have a little something after cheating death.

Then I began building little shelters all over their yard.  Which of course took time away from the other project that I had abandoned for the defense of my flock.  I finally stopped at six hiding places.  It was a beautiful day and they had a ball investigating all of the new play houses in their yard.

But when I came inside and looked at the clock it was 12:30.  And so it goes.  Yes, I got on with the project I was supposed to be working on, which also took longer than I intended...

But that's another story.