The Chicken Diaper

Miss Henny Penny, with all her feathers, in happier days.

We just purchased my chicken a diaper. It is a lovely, handmade thing. Stitched to order, blue, with daisies emblazoned on its expanse; like an oilcloth, really—one we'll be using to catch crap.

—Why are you buying your chicken a diaper?

—Fibromyalgia, obviously.

The chicken does not have fibromyalgia, at least as far as I know. Come to think of it, though, I might need to check. If I apply pressure to her tender points, will she cry out in pain?

—Bokkkkkkkkkk! (Stop that.)

—I'm sorry, Miss Henny Penny, but you're very sick. Here, have some Lyrica and warm towel for your comb.

No, I am the one in question: the fibromyalgia-suffering, diaper-buying person you're looking for. My story goes like this:

In June, I was asked by a lovely friend of mine if I might like a chicken for my yard. Would you like a biscuit? Have you ever tried this meth? I have a chicken I can give you if you want. (This is how they hook you. One chicken for free and you're back for more.)

Oh, well, yes. We've wanted chickens. Who doesn't really? They're so fashionable right now, appearing at the Oscars, like accessories, with stars. Get a chicken, the thinking goes, produce your own eggs, and you have got out from under the thumb of egg companies, that unchecked tyrant in your life. We have ducks, but we're already bored with them. See one duck drill mud in your yard on a Monday morning and you've seen the whole thing. At least until they start up the rape camps during spring.

The proffered chicken, it happened, had been a victim of injustice and abuse. Menaced by her companions, she was deprived of water, starved, de-feathered and bloodied until the very point of death. Nursed back to health in my friend's small backyard, she was finally recovering, but my friend was ready to let her go. Her daughter was becoming attached. My friend had seen her, with the chicken on her lap, both of them coming down the slide. All this suffering increased the chicken's value in my eyes immeasurably. Sure, we decided. We'll take her: a chicken, eggs, and a chance to save the world.

The chicken arrived in a dog crate—a bright-eyed, obviously intelligent creature with pretty feathers like autumn leaves and a bright red comb.

Bokkkkkkk, she said, in a pleasant way.

We put her in a coop and run. She looked around, ate a bit and got bored, so she flew out. No, no, we told her. This is your house. She looked at us, as if to say she'd prefer to be with us. And flew. Hello, she said. We moved the dolly on which she was landing as she flew out of the coop. This threw her for a while. Then, she discovered she'd be fine just setting on the top of the wire of her fence. This went on. It was my my youngest's birthday party day. Mike and I looked at each other.

"I'm going to stay here and fix this," he said. Neither of us relished telling the chicken's former slide partner how she'd ended up in the road. I threw "the luau" by myself.

We built up the run to a height of over nine feet and the chicken finally consented to stay in. Where, though, could we get her some friends? Chickens are social creatures. They pine in isolation. We did not want her to pine. Finally, we purchased three chicks to raise by hand. The sweetest-tempered breeds you have, we told the man. No more would poor Miss Henny Penny be the victim of abuse. We raised the chicks in our living room under a heat lamp. When they got sour crop, I massaged their lumpy little digestive sacks until the food within disappeared. We coddled them. We fed treats of hand-grown sprouts of field peas raised in compost in my yard. When they were old enough, we moved them outside, where Henny Penny could see but couldn't reach. Furious, she lurked over them like an ill-tempered dragon stalking fat little donkeys near her cave. When they weren't close enough to launch at through the interfering fence wire, she stood in the corner and keened. The neighborhood resounded with her misery.

"She'll get used to them," I said with confidence. And this went on.

Finally, months later, it was time to introduce the friends. I'd read copious advice on this introduction, all conflicting, and was haunted by specter of pecked-out brains. The most progressive story I'd heard was of a man who, introducing two grown chickens, spent the day with them in their yard. When one attacked the other, he would pick up the hostile and pet it, assuring it that it was loved. This advice appealed immediately to me, since it allowed me both to act like Marshall Rosenberg and to hold chickens in the sunlight. I imagined myself like St. Francis of Assisi, spreading God's love amongst my fowl. At the end, everyone would be impressed.

—What a miracle it is you've worked here!

—You just have to get to the concerns underlying the behavior, I'd say humbly. Chickens, like us, want to know that they are loved.

—Can I quote you on that? they'd say.

—Why, sure.

Instead of this scenario, though, things went quickly ill. Henny Penny wanted the other chickens dead. They ran in terror, huddling, a bouquet a chickens, quivering under a chair. And after them again she went. I picked her up. No, no, I told her gently. These are your nice friends. Good chickens, nice chickens. She looked at me pensively. I set her down. And after them she went. Hours later, I tried singing children's songs.

These are the chickens in your neighborhood, in your neighborhood, in your neighborhood...

No dice. She was going to kill them. I imagined their bright eyes ripped out and bleeding, their brains exposed, their precious little feathers torn, which I had practically grown myself. I tried for days. Weeks. Then, finally, I gave up.

"We have to move her to her own coop," I told Mike.

We put Henny Penny in what had formerly been the chick's coop and moved it into our backyard. There, the dog discovered that he could eat both her eggs and her feed. Mike spent a weekend constructing a fence to keep him out. The water froze. Mike made a device with a light bulb and a paint can to keep the water warm. Which brings me to the fibromyalgia.

I have trouble with the cold. In winter, I make every effort to never leave my house. This is mostly because when I do, I start shaking, my holds turn blue and numb, my muscles tense up and then I cannot get warm for hours. During this time, the care of our flock of ducks and chickens falls entirely to my husband and my sons. The other day, though, I went out to visit the chicken—Mike had somewhere he had to be—and found her next to naked. Pin feathers, like porcupine quills punctuated her head and back. No one had thought to mention this development. Is she molting in January???? I began wildly to do research. Six times, I held the chicken up and looked at her for mites.

Bookkkkkkkkkkkkkk!!!!! she exclaimed as I searched carefully around her vent. I didn't know there would be a pelvic exam, she said.

I could find no evidence of mites. Finally, though, a friend put me in touch with another friend, whom she described as "a chicken savant." It was decided that the feather loss was due to stress. She's lonely. Of course. It's too cold. I don't go out there. She has no friends. Could the chicken I had so carefully tended die of broken heart and cold? Hold her every day, she said. Give her cat food for the protein. Her feathers should come back. Then, once they do, stick her in that other coop and let them duke it out. So much for Marshall Rosenberg.

OK, I thought. I can do that. I checked once more for mites. Then I started to worry. What if I don't go out and hold her because it's too damn cold? I can't let her die because of my Raynaud's Phenomenon.

Enter the diaper. If you can't go to the chicken, I thought, bring the chicken in your house.

After further reflection, I bought her a little jacket to go with that—a saddle, they called the thing. It's designed to keep chickens warm if they lose their feathers in the winter months. I chose a nice blue color that will coordinate with her diaper, although I don't suppose she'll be wearing both at the same time.

Joel Salatin, of Polyface Farms, said famously that keeping backyard chickens is no harder than keeping a parakeet. And perhaps it's not. I imagine wounded parakeets with tiny, handmade crutches, wings in little, knitted slings.

—Honey, did you remember to change the parakeet?

—No, I thought you did. Anyway, just smell him. His diaper's full.

Things You Should Know about Pet Ownership: Bathing Cats Sucks

Note: This is not Steve's cat. Photo Source: Flickr Creative Commons by Belal Khan. 

Today's post is by my friend Steve Niezgoda. When he is not bathing cats, Steve works as a material scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which, he says, involves using physics too complicated for anything practical to make models.These models, he explains, are the equivalent of telling kids "Santa brought you presents because you were good." instead of explaining how hard it is to save up all year for the loot and how papa had a nervous breakdown wondering if we bought too much/too little, all to teach a lesson about the joy of giving and being nice to each other. He almost posted a comment the other day about how it is unfair to generalize and say that non-bloggers never comment but then he chickened out. It was easier to prove me right than to try to be cogent and witty. However, he is going to be cogent and witty today for much longer than the space it takes to write a comment, so consider him amply redeemed. This is his tale:

Christy is gone for the evening and has tasked me with giving the dog (six years old) and the boy (three and 3/4 years old) a bath. The house we are renting has some odd features, one of which is a downstairs bathroom with a double shower. It is a huge stand up shower stall with two shower heads. The weird thing about it is no matter where you stand it is impossible to get the water from both shower heads pointed together, so you can't really get a luxurious spa experience. You just have to pick which shower head you want to use. It is like the person who designed the house liked the theory of showering with someone else, but wanted to make sure there was a wide and cold air gap to prevent any unnecessary touching between shower partners.

On this occasion, I find this setup very convenient for simultaneously bathing the dog and Emory. I can strip E-man down and put him under one shower and the dog under the other. Since the dog is allergic to every plant in the Jemez mountains, he has been getting a lot of baths lately. Of course with all that water flying around, I get drenched, so I usually just strip down to my underwear. A less self-conscious person would probably just get naked, but I feel weird being naked while showering with my dog and my son. One or the other would be O.K., but with both together, I feel like Animal Control and Child Protective Services are going to simultaneously break down the door at any minute.

So I bathe the dog and the kid–no problem. Dry dog off. Then Emory asks why we never give the cat a bath. I want to say that we just don't give cats baths, but instead I think, "Lets turn this into a teaching moment and show Emory why we don't give cats baths."

We got the cat, Millimeter, the same month Christy and I moved into our first apartment, about 13 years ago. Christy picked the cat (then six weeks old) from the shelter, had to go to a family function for the weekend, and I picked the kitten up from the shelter the next day. I didn't realize it, but she was very sick and had just about every parasite you could imagine. I just thought she slept a lot and was being picky and not wanting to eat her new kitten food. It turns out the cat almost died under my two days of care, and when Christy got home, she rushed her right off to the vet. I have yet to be forgiven for nearly killing the kitten though neglect, and was strongly reminded of it when I was first entrusted to watch then then infant Emory on my own for the first time. Anyway we had to give the kitten baths with a special medicine and that was my last experience in bathing a cat. She just kind of cried pitifully, looked like a drowned rat and tried her best to get out, but it was pretty easy to hold down a very sick tiny kitten. Just like my mother is still convinced I can't throw a baseball, I thought the 13 year-old cat would behave the same as a tiny sick kitten.

After chasing the cat around in my dripping wet underwear–we have concrete floors so I don't have to dry off too thoroughly–I catch the cat, put a collar and leash on her and bring her to the shower. Emory is singing songs from Peter Pan and alternately pretending he is Peter battling Captain Hook or Wendy being rescued by Peter. (This duality is expected from Emory, who loves his My Little Pony Doll, but pretends she is a Jedi and shoots death rays out of her eyes to kill Sith lords.) I bring the cat into the shower stream, holding her against my chest in a vain effort to comfort her. She promptly rakes my man-boobs with her claws and I drop her–but not the leash–and scream in pain. Emory starts screaming because I am screaming and the cat is bouncing around the shower like a ball in the lottery machines. In the confusion, I fall down and hit my head. Luckily I wasn't hurt or killed. At this point I was thinking that it is time to teach the boy to dial 911. I get up and realize the cat must have also whacked her head because she is lying limp on the shower floor. I look a little closer and she is not breathing. Her little wet chest is perfectly still, not moving up and down, and I said "Oh fuck, I just killed my wife's cat!" Time really slows down to a crawl while I think I will be moving into a studio apartment with my dog and have visitation rights with Emory every Easter that falls on a Tuesday.

I really don't know how long the cat continues not to breathe. It seems like two hours, but it is probably a second or two. I reach down and breath into the cat's nose. Her chest expands up, she coughs and then explodes into a furious rage. She claws my arms, my legs, and my chest and bit the middle finger on my right hand straight through. At this point Emory decides he needs to get out the shower–this second!!!!–and I had to hold the spinning death knives away from his tiny body as he nonchalantly strolls past the carnage and blood and demands I dry him off before he gets cold. I wrap the cat in a towel then somehow get Emory into a towel. The cat has calmed down now, and I put her into my bed under a down comforter, trying not to drip blood everywhere. Then I rinse out my wounds, put Emory into his pajamas and read him his bedtime stories.

This is about when Christy comes home. My finger is starting to swell, and she says I should go to the E.R. I probably would have, if left to my own devices, but since she suggested it I decide to tough it out. I go to work the next day and keep it wrapped up. By five my hand is swollen up to my wrist and I can't flex my fingers. At urgent care they re-open the entire wound to drain the abscesses that had already formed, tell me in no uncertain terms I am a fucking moron for waiting to see a doctor, and put me on more antibiotics then my mother-in-law got when she had MRSA.

And so I think that, just as I planned, Emory has learned an important lesson about why we should not bathe cats.

I want your funny pet story, too! See this post for guidelines.

Got a Harrowing Tale of Pet Ownership?

The first time you stand in your snow covered backyard at night, force feeding your dog hydrogen peroxide and waiting for him to bring up your Valentine's Day candy, you realize that pet ownership is something of a shell game. No one mentions the swallowed sewing needles, the $400 dental extractions, the refusal to use a litter pan. One day you are cuddling a kitten, its eyes wide with innocence, and the next you are administering subcutaneous fluids to that same animal by way of a coat hanger hung in your doorway, while she glowers at you with a promise of retribution. My lifelong love of pets has led me to bathe thumb-sized Russian dwarf hamsters with special hypoallergenic shampoo, to investigate the prospects for evacuating to a hotel with five ducks, and to end up adopting a dog from the arms of a young child in the parking lot of Lowe's Home Improvement, who later cost us thousands of dollars to treat a congenital kidney condition.

I have related to all of you my animal hoarding history here and here and here. Now I am looking for proof that I am not alone in the world–just one crazy soul, afflicted by a desire to accumulate copious pets, impelled by my nature to spend down my income on rabbit care and nurse baby mice from a dropper. I want to create a community for us here on Faith in Ambiguity. (Well, it can be a community for us and for the people who enjoy laughing at us.) These don't actually need to be animal hoarding stories. They can be any sort of ridiculous animal story.

If you've got a funny animal story between 400 and 1200 words, please send it to me tara at faithinambiguity.com. I reserve the right to edit, proofread and make minor adjustments for style, but I promise I will run these by you before publishing, unless you don't care. If you can, please attach an appropriate, legally acquired image file with your post. If not, I will choose an appropriate image to go with it. I will list your name as a guest poster and link to your blog or any other personal site you would like me to link to highlighting your work. I will also tweet the link at least twice, post to my Facebook fan page and to the group blogging platform to which I belong and otherwise try and expose your post. (And you should, too!) By the way, non-bloggers are more than welcome! The first post in this series, which is excellent, is by a non-blogger friend of mine. I asked him to write his story up after I heard it. People who think they "can't write" often have really fabulous tales to tell. I can't wait to see what you all have to say.

And tune in tomorrow for the tale of a cat bath gone so terribly wrong it ended with mouth to mouth resuscitation and a visit to the ER.

The War on Women Moves into My Duck Yard: a Video Documentary

I must confess that I have lost my cool. Recently, my adrenalin has surged more than once as I have heard the deluge of news detailing exactly how old white men around the U.S intend to make my life more difficult. Apparently, some of their plans include legislation to interfere with my right to obtain contraception that will prevent me from producing hordes more male children with attentional problems, and other insulting things. I promise, though, that I won't go too far in this vein, since I have no intention of researching this post well enough to make a well-reasoned political argument, and I want all of the lovely Catholic women, who offer to pray for me, to continue reading my blog. We all know where I am headed with this, anyway.

I am going to talk about ducks.

While white men with power and influence are bossing women around all over the U.S., white ducks are doing the same thing in my back yard.

In case somehow you didn't already know, we have pet ducks–two males and two females. That is at least one male too many. Let me explain their living arrangements. They have a fenced area of my large back yard, which they have entirely purged of grass. There are two coops built back there, which were intended as ladies and gentlemen's quarters. They choose, however, to sleep in the same one, all together, every night. In the summer, we fill up two or three baby pools in our side yard for them to swim in (and drink from) which need to be replenished with fresh water every day. In winter, when we can't use our hose outlet, they get no ponds and we have to fill large thermoses from our sink and hang them on nails for them to drink. Ducks don't need to swim, they just like to. During this pond-free time, they grow to resemble waddling cotton balls that have been used to clean someone's butt.

We had to turn the water off in late October this fall, five months ago. So yesterday, I looked at my four white ducks, who have been happily sloshing around in puddles of their own feces for the last few weeks, since things have begun to thaw, and decided that they could really use baths. This was how Project Empower the Duck Hens got underway. It began innocuously enough. The hose which extends out to our side yard, where the ducks live, is currently frozen just under the surface of the ground so I had to lug around my good garden hose from out front and use it to fill their turtle sandbox pond.  Naturally, it got all covered with poo. (Duck husbandry is not the romantic avocation you have been led to believe.) Having done this, I decided to sprinkle my oldest duck a little. Usually ducks like this, but today, having seen no hose water since 2011, Aflac had forgotten what it was and decided it was probably battery acid. He ran away, quacking in terror. (I have written his very funny history elsewhere, and you should read it.)

The systematic oppression which I have intimated is going on this mating season is being perpetrated thus: In the video below, please meet Nibbles and Sweet Pea. Currently, Sweet Pea, who is the bustier, larger duck, is being confined to the "non-bedroom" coop by Q-Tip, one of our two male ducks. I believe this is a misguided attempt on his part to compel to produce ducklings, much as the GOP is apparently compelling women to bear young. (Whoops, sorry.) Sweet Pea is laying eggs, but she is doing it only at night, in a separate coop, so he has her sitting all day in a coop on some utterly imaginary eggs, and for this she is denied food and water and, today, a bath. Men.

Observing this situation, my eldest son and I started guarding the pond so the poor girls could take a bath. Here, poor little Nibbles, my runty female with a voice like a squeaky toy, is attempting to get clean when she is rudely chased away from the bath which these asshole males clearly believe is theirs.

Understandably, Sweet Pea was a little too scared to get in, even though Rowan was holding the males at bay. Finally, we got her into the pond (which I couldn't film because of the water and feathers flying everywhere), but the boys escaped and bullied her and her sister back out again.

At this point, we got fed up with the Patriarchy of the Pond. Here you see Rowan, removing the offenders and my youngest, attempting to restore justice to the world. (Note Rowan's coldly delivered scientific explanation of the natural scheme of things and Mikalh's deeply empathetic reaction to the situation. That's my kids, in a nutshell there, in case anyone cares.)

The result of this twenty-minutes-long line drawn in the sand was, basically, that the girls got to bathe at least long enough that they now resemble ducks and not pieces of wadded up cotton stuck to a tush. We couldn't really keep the boys at bay for any length of time. They were hellbent on making sure the girls could not have access to the water, the food or their freedom.

What instinct governs this behavior in male ducks, and male humans, is difficult to say. My assessment is that we must remain forever vigilant, protecting our sisters in their baths from the nefarious attentions of misogynist and power-hungry white drakes, who wish to stand on our backs and crush us, to prevent us from bathing or from leaving our coops.

It takes a village to protect the liberty of one waterfowl. We are all of us, sisters.

The Quackers: From back L:-Sweet Pea, Q-Tip, Aflac. R-Nibbles.

Weirdly, my mother has also written on this subject this week. Apparently my ducks inspire writers in much the same way that that the Madonna inspired painters of the Renaissance. They have their own genre.

The Collected Works of Duck (all on the subject of these particular ducks)

By me

Animal Lover Part II: The Empire Quacks Back
The story of why the Hell I have these pet ducks and how this proves I am crazy.

Animal Lover Part III: The Duck Wars (or Our Adventures in Omnivorous Pet Husbandry)

Why it's OK to kill your pet, as long as it's a duck.

Duck Rental
A business enterprise I am thinking of starting.

By my Mom

I Don't Get It
Humans have a tangled relationship with animals. (Reflections on why her daughter–me–killed the duck.)

Ducks are Not Nice People
Thoughts on why ducks are really not as you have been lead to believe.

Duck Rental

One of the travails of duck husbandry turns out to be travel. When we are planning to go out of town I inevitably end up realizing, with horror "Oh God, we have to find someone to take care of them again!" It is difficult to imagine that any neighborhood child, for ten dollars a day, would enjoy dealing with feces-infused duck water, an electric fence and four feathered nincompoops that thinks he's a murderer. However, we have always found such a person. Some kids seem to think it is fun.

This has lead us to a new line of thinking entirely. Perhaps, what we need to do is work the supply side of the equation instead. My husband thinks that what we need to do is sell the whole situation as a "duck rental." The ad might look something like this:

DUCK RENTAL: Risk free– play small-scale urban farmer right here in beautiful Northern New Mexico. For one week, you can enjoy duck ownership with no commitment. Relish hours of amusement at their playful antics. Take advantage of great photo ops. Take home free fertilizer and eggs. At the end of one week, walk away with no major investment of time or money spent, and no ducks. The perfect scenario. Bring the kids.
WARNING: Some risk of Salmonella. All liability assumed by renter.

What do you guys think? You in?

Another Win for Cats

My dog fawning over my mother on Christmas

Throughout my life I have had many cats. I have had only had two dogs. One of them, Otis, died when I was still in preschool, and his name still carries the weight of legend. Saying Otis did things is like saying that Harriet Tubman did things. Except that Harriet Tubman never ate whole chicken carcasses. As far as I know.

The other dog is one that we have now. His name is Xavier. I have described him before as a black lab with dwarfism and ears like a donkey. He is also somewhat like a low-rider Ferengi. His primary activity is carefully watching doors to see whether anything menacing emerges from any of them. When he is not doing that, he pines. He has raised pining to an art form. Corgi mixes, apparently, can make specific sound effects that no other life form can make. If you can imagine a Scooby Doo who is both less intelligible and more prone to ennui, you will have a strong sense of what this sounds like.

We currently have one cat, Marmalade Lion. My husband does not especially care for this cat. He is really a very sweet cat, and I don't understand why Mike doesn't like him, since he has only such has minor flaws as one expects in all house pets. One is that he has a meow that sounds somewhat like the death scream of a tortured weasel. This is the one that bothers my husband the most, especially during periods of time when the cat has stayed in all night and demanded to be let out at 2 A.M. Another small failing is that he bites suddenly when being petted. But only occasionally. Also, he likes to "make biscuits" on people. He kneads us with his claws with great affection for upwards of ten minutes while contemplating settling on a lap, and, if petted during this time, he will yowl angrily and continue kneading with his sharp claws. Otherwise, though, he is a perfectly charming cat.

A year ago, my husband decided, without my knowledge or input, to train this cat to stop meowing. Every time he yowled, Mike would spray him with water. Which caused him to yowl again louder and Mike to spray again. Et cetera. From this, Mike learned a valuable lesson. Cats cannot be trained not to meow. Our cat, apparently, continued meowing until dripping wet, and the only result is now that he is terrified of my husband.  Thus concluded Mike's science experiment on cat behavior.

There is a slight note of resentment between my husband and myself on the subject of cats. He claims to like them. I claim he likes theoretical cats but not actual cats, all of whom, in my experience, are certifiably crazy in exactly the way he explains causes him to dislike M. Lion. Cats, he says, that he picks or with whom he has lived, are not crazy, but are pleasant, and smarter than mine. And so on.

The night before last, my eighth grader had a sort of brief interruption to his normal composure after being told that we needed to look over his four year plan for high school and fill it in. During this unfortunate period of emotional distress, several items in his room were relocated from their normal locations in a sudden manner. Among them was a bar of extra dark chocolate that we had given him for Valentine's Day and which he had not eaten much of.

Our dog discovered this state of affairs only moments before I did, and when I arrived, he was eating parts of the golden wrapper. What followed was an internet search, a call to the veterinarian and a dose of hydrogen peroxide, which happily, was administered by my teenager, whose fault this all was. Then he got to stay outside in the snow with the dog to see if he threw up. It took the dog a while to throw up and, when he did, he looked at his puddle of vomit and thought to himself "Chocolate syrup!" and then Rowan had to get a bag and paper towel and clean it all up from the snow to prevent Xavier from re-ingesting it and starting the cycle all over again.

Say what you will about cats. They don't eat a bar of extra dark Valentine's chocolate with part of the wrapper AND THEN have to have vomiting forcibly induced AND THEN try to eat the vomited chocolate for a snack.

Cats do dark, horrible things. It is true. But they tend not to do mindlessly foul things. The foul things they do have the quality of calculation and staged protest. I am irked by animals that think of their own regurgitated offal as a dessert.

As fond as I am of my dog, I consider this episode to be a black mark against his character, at least inasmuch my as my cat yowling like a possessed demon in the wee hours of the morning is considered a deeply problematic trait. In the decades old war of cats vs. dogs, as captured by Rudyard Kipling in his classic tale, The Cat That Walked by Himself, I consider this another win for cats.

Although, probably, it just tells you more about teenagers as a species than anything else...

On Dead Beavers, Feline Gremlin Attacks and Herman Cain

I cannot think of anything coherent to write for you this Saturday, so, after torturing myself by attempting to wrap my mind around several subjects which went nowhere, I have decided to share several random thoughts with you, which are of great interest to me.

• There was a beautiful woman in Trader Joe's today wearing a hat that looked like a dead beaver. The dead beaver was arranged so that its lifeless limbs dangled on either side of her cheekbones. I believe these were intended to be something like straps. She was otherwise nicely dressed, but behaved quite aggressively in the crowded aisles, very nearly elbowing aside aging hippies to get to the evening primrose oil–that kind of thing. Trader Joe's is an interesting place.


• I have discovered that there is a place on my cat's back, where if he is scratched, he suddenly becomes a vicious, snarling attack gremlin. It is 100% reliable in all tests that I have done that scratching here will produce this behavior. If I stop scratching there, he returns to purring in a relaxed fashion but waves his tail menacingly to warn against future scratch attacks. I tried to get a picture of this for you, but my cat became distressed by the presence of the camera and ran off set during the photo shoot. You will have to take my word for it.


• My whole family has become obsessed with Bad Lip Reading videos. They have changed our lives. Thanks to "tangledlou" of Periphery for sparking this particular inferno of mental lollygagging. (If you haven't seen these, you won't understand what the fuck I am talking about. However, that is probably normal for my readers. That said, go watch them all right now!) We are so enamored that I am now waking up and saying to my husband by way of morning greeting, "We ain't never had this–an old, rotten eagle's nest." to which he replies, "Jackpot, fishy poopy pants! You're gonna wish you could buy me a tin cup for all these nickels. I'll get you!" My fourteen year old says to me while clearing the table, "If you refuse, I'll haunt your prostate." and my sixth grader periodically interjects into conversation the statement: "That's why the thick, Spartan women are so important."

Somehow, in the Land of Faith in Ambiguity, random absurdity makes sense in a way that institutional religion, organizational theory and politics just don't. So, thank you for reading me. It's nice to know someone wants to engage with you at all when you dislike simple solutions, institutions and small talk and instead prefer to spend your time writing and thinking about humor on the approximate level of Pig Latin for adults.

"Everybody needs Toucan Stubs." Have a nice weekend.

When Compassion Goes Terribly Wrong, or How to Avoid Taking Goldfinches on Family Road Trips

I want to tell you about the Mother's Day weekend that my family traveled to the Durango Shootout Soccer Tournament.

News Flash:  Motherhood has reached such a debased level in our society that, in appreciation of their gift of life and subsequent unceasing nurture, mothers are in turn rewarded by spending Mother's Day Weekend sitting in uncomfortable camp chairs cheering for their sons at the sidelines of huge windy fields, holding bottles of Gatorade. There is no justice.

Devin loving soccer, 2006

My middle child, Devin has been playing soccer since kindergarten. It is his greatest passion. Playing competitive soccer where we live is an enormous commitment. It involves two to four road trips to  tournaments a year, with expenses. More onerous still is the commitment, for ten weeks each in spring and in fall to be in Bernalillo, an hour and half away from us, every Saturday morning for a game.

Saying no to a child who expresses such dedication to any endeavor seems somehow wrong to us, so here we found ourselves, taking an expensive road trip to Durango, just like we're some sort of upper middle class family that we are not, because we love this child.


At the time of this event, my son Devin was in fifth grade. It was three in the afternoon and Mike, my mom and I were waiting, minivan loaded, for Rowan and Devin to come back from school so that we could hop in the van and undertake the four hour drive to Durango.

Thirteen year-old Rowan arrived first, hanging up his backpack with the sound of his usual artillery of terse adolescent questions and total confusion as to what we were doing.

Ten more minutes passed. Then twenty. And still no Devin.

I began starting to really worry about where my soccer star was, when finally he arrived, thirty-five minutes after school had let out, on our front door step, holding a baby goldfinch.

Devin: "Can I keep him?"

Me: "What? We are going to Durango! We are going there right now for your soccer tournament! We cannot take a baby goldfinch with us!"

Devin now began weeping piteously and with utter sincerity.

Devin: "But he hopped up onto my pant leg! And all of my friends decided that I should the one to take care of him. Can I please just take care of him? Please??"

Me: "Devin, I need you to listen to reason here. We will be traveling in the car four hours and then staying in a hotel.  What are we going to do with a baby goldfinch? How would you take care of it?"

Tears now began rolling in spates down his reddened cheeks as he protectively clutched this tiny bird in his hands.

Devin: "Mom, my whole class is counting on me! They chose me to take care of this bird! Please let me take care of it!"

All reason aside, each deeply accented "please" was something of a pull on my own heart. He paused to catch his breath.

 "It's just that I've never had an animal to take care of all on my own."

At this point, I was struck speechless and had to walk away for a few moments.

You will not understand my reaction unless I explain that we had, at this time, five pet ducks, who were Devin's primary responsibility and which we got because he likes ducks. We also had three cats and a dog. It was, to put it mildly, very difficult to imagine a shortage of animals requiring his care.

These heated negotiations continued, well past the point when we should have already left, until finally he realized that he would not be able to keep this bird as a pet, and I finally realized that we were going to have to take this bird to a Wildlife Shelter on the way to Durango.

With an air of resignation on the part of everyone, we then loaded the three kids, my mother, and the tiny goldfinch into the car and drove to the Espanola Wildlife Center, an organization to which we have historically already been a major contributor–not of funds, but of fledgling birds, ineptly separated from their mothers.

After tearfully dropping the goldfinch off, and driving on toward Durango, I confided in my husband that perhaps I had no right to be so irritated with this particular incident, given the fact that as a full-grown adult of twenty-nine, I adopted a baby mouse and took it on a 1,000 mile road trip with two children under the age of seven, feeding it out of a dropper.

"Probably not," Mike said.

I suppose that when we strive to raise compassionate children, we don't have any right to be upset that they bring home baby birds, half-strangled rats or drug-addicted felons. This is what we raised them to do. Because we taught them that they should lend a helping hand, speak up for the downtrodden and restore justice through the provision of Friskies to all of the neighborhood feral cats.

Quite apart from winning soccer tournaments, they are making the world a better place.

Devin at the Durango Tournament, May 2011

P.S. I'll tell you later about the Tournament. That deserves it's own blog post.

Animal Lover Part III: The Duck Wars (or Our Adventures in Omnivorous Pet Husbandry)

I originally published this post back in September, when no one read my blog but my parents and three personal friends. I am now re-publishing it because of the enormous demand for human interest blog pieces about ducks. I think it can really make a difference. (It can't, but you should read it anyway.)


This post is Part III of my pet saga. Parts I and II can be found here.

We have pet ducks, which live in the fenced side yard of our half-duplex suburban home. These ducks are a cross between pets and a sort of fucked up 4H project gone awry.

The rationale for that situation is explained in Part II of my pet saga, so I won't bore you with it. Suffice it to say, I have a few screws loose in the pet department. Long story short, we ended up with three male ducks and two females, which is somewhat like keeping a low-security prison shower with three testosterone-driven convicts on PCP and two witless pacifists who keep dropping the soap.

The suggested ratio of males to females in a flock is actually one to six. Siren, the third and last-acquired of these males was immediately placed on Death Row at the time his gender was identifiable, since having more male ducks, we knew, was not advisable. Female ducks, it seems, are sometimes "mated to death" in these types of circumstances. So much for the romanticization of Nature.

Ultimately, though, I wouldn't let my husband kill him. In theory, I didn't have an ethical problem with this idea. We eat meat, and I am not stupid or unconscious enough to be interested in pretending that it isn't, in fact, flesh that we are consuming, and flesh, at that rate, which generally once belonged to an animal living in very unhappy circumstances.

Xavier, worshiping us.

However, I had raised the darn duck almost from birth and, for purely emotional reasons on the part of myself and my two youngest children, I withdrew my yes vote on culling Siren. The measure died on the floor, to the extreme irritation of my dear husband, also a former vegetarian, who had, and has, a serious interest in raising animals for meat and killing them himself, so that he can feel more comfortable about eating meat. (This may hearken back to some sort of male, hunter-gatherer imperative still in his DNA, or it may be because he doesn't really love any of our animals, besides the dog, who worships him with a comically abject devotion.)

It is actually very strange that I should end up even considering committing pet homicide. I became a vegetarian, on my own, when I was six, due to my gradual discovery of the obvious hypocrisy involved in both loving animals and eating the bodies of other animals. I maintained this custom my entire childhood, despite the fact that no other member of my family ever became vegetarian until I reached adolescence, and none permanently. I was even vegan for a time. I stopped being vegetarian when I was twenty-eight, at the point when I realized that I no longer felt that the rationale I'd once had for being vegetarian would endure my entire adulthood, and when my body seemed to be demanding a higher protein diet.

I still felt, and feel, that we have an ethical responsibility to consider the conditions of animals that are raised to become meat for us. I dislike factory farming, and we inch every year closer to our goal of buying meat only from ethical sources. This year we are buying half of a local cow, whom we will meet in less than two weeks, before her death. I no longer feel uncomfortable with the food chain aspect of meat consumption. I don't necessarily feel that this denotes a lack of compassion on my part, and I say that having stood on both sides of this argument. I think life is infinitely more complicated than almost anyone will admit (hence my faith in ambiguity, I suppose). At any rate, the beneficiary of this cognitive dissonance, the duck lived on unharmed.

Our adolescent ducklings, being menaced by the mean adult ducks.

Fast forward a year and a half to last Thursday morning, and we find the duck in question, inside his electrified, predator-proof enclosure, with a severely injured wing, obviously broken and with an open wound, cause unknown. After this unhappy discovery, I suggested that my husband, who was home sick from work with a bronchial infection, call the kind and knowledgeable woman who had given us another of our ducks, and ask her for advice, while I went to work.

Thank God for poultry mentors.

While expressing no irritation at all at being disturbed in the middle of tending to her own menagerie of children and feathered friends, Vivian suggested that we might take Siren to a vet in Espanola, whose prices were not unreasonable, but that, following that, we would likely need to rehabilitate this drake in our house, perhaps all winter.

Upon receiving this news, without a tinge of angst or internal conflict, I declared that we needed to kill the sucker.

If you are one of my morally distinguished readers, who is a member of PETA, I must apologize at this point. My former self would be aghast at this decision, and so would many people who do, in fact, eat meat, if my casual acquaintances are any basis for judgment.

Here is my explanation, for what it's worth:

The duck was suffering. Or at least I assume he was suffering. Duck suffering is perhaps not very easy to distinguish from the absence of duck suffering, both involving the tendency to waddle around looking doofish and occasionally commence gargling water full of one's own feces. At any rate, I assumed that there was pain involved in the situation, as the wound looked relatively nasty. I really couldn't live with the idea that this animal should be made to feel continuous pain with no relief.


The second consideration was financial. A year or so ago, we paid close to a thousand dollars to treat our dog for a kidney condition. He is a member of our family, and I would do it again. However, we temporarily accrued debt to deal with him, and I hated that. When we acquired ducks, I knew that I wouldn't be willing to shell out big bucks for their medical conditions. I worked, while in my early twenties, at several vets' offices, and, during that time, paid out what must have been close to a third of my income, having various tumors removed from pet rats, spaying bunnies, and treating them for stomach impactions, which they suffered due to the unwitting consumption of non-food items such as candles. I carefully tended all my animals on my negligible wage, and made that care a big priority in my life.

And then I had children.

Following that series of events, I altered my financial priorities in favor of garnering every resource, often quite limited, to put toward their care and enrichment. I love my animals, but they are not my kids anymore because I already have enough of those. I was not going to pay out any considerable amount to care for an animal that was originally intended to be dinner for my husband. (A proviso: had this been one of the "pet ducks" which eats out of our hand and which we particularly like, I am not sure how we would have made this decision. It was made easier by the fact that it was this particular duck that was injured.)

The last factor we considered weighing against Siren was the fact that there is absolutely no damn way I was living with an adult duck in my house. Believe it or not, people do this . And more power to them. I once kept rabbits loose in my house, which I intended to litterbox-train. This project was not a success, as far as my carpet was concerned. Most recently, I long-term fostered two cats while friends were on vacation, which resulted in six or more trips to the vet with abscessed puncture wounds, a bunch of highly stressed cats, and a completely ruined carpet in my sons' room. This resulted in a great exhaustion for questionable house pets on my part. I'm kind of over it.

as posted here

Ducks poo a LOT. They are hands down the foulest creatures I have ever kept, with absolutely no regard for hygiene and a total absence of common sense. I am probably never going to be willing to raise ducklings indoors again, in an enclosed area, let alone a ten-pound adult Pekin . We have one bathroom, three bedrooms, a small galley kitchen and a living room which does duty as office, family room, dining room, and study. This was a straight-up no go.


I guess what I'm saying is that if we were rich and had a bigger house, and if my husband was somewhat more like Albert Schweitzer, Siren's life could have been saved. And I could also have had a separate room where I could keep hedgehogs hidden from Mike. But I digress.

There was, however, at least one problem with proceeding with a plan to humanely dispose of this duck.


Mikalh, my six-year-old, was distraught in the morning when he heard that Siren was injured and might need to be put down. So, telling him that we executed the duck was going to be a problem, if we went through with it. Here, I felt torn. I tend to believe that if you don't want to tell your children the truth about something, it may be that you should re-examine what you're doing, rather than tell the lie. That said, I don't believe that it is OK to traumatize your children in order to avoid experiencing momentary moral discomfort. Mike and I talked about it and concluded that we were willing to minimally evade the truth but not willing to tell a lie which would require an entire fabrication of the truth and become a false tale oft retold to Mikalh. We decided we needed to be forthcoming.

However, when Mike had gotten as far as saying "You know how Siren was hurt this morning...," Mikalh stopped him.

"Now you are going to make me feel sad."

He made clear that he didn't want to talk about it, and we decided to honor that. He still hasn't mentioned it, five days later, although we feel sure he generally understood what would happen.

Anyway, the end of the story is really the end of the duck.

Mike took him over to Vivian's house, where her husband very generously showed him how to kill and prepare the duck for consumption. My oldest son went with him, always having wanted to be a part of this long-awaited event. Later, the two of them came back with a smallish kitchen garbage bag filled with what remained of this duck we had raised from his second day of life and set it in the sink. I think I felt a little sad, a little conflicted. But not too much.

Devin (my eleven-year-old) cried when he first came in from soccer practice to see the bag, but then he took a shower and came down having quietly resolved within himself whatever grief he experienced, and reckoned with the reality of the situation. Mike talked with him about why we did this, and what it means to eat meat; the importance of confronting the truth of it, rather than blissfully ignoring it while we dine on the sundered flesh of an unknown animal whose life was a made a continuous misery for the sole purpose of our consumption. He understood, if only intellectually.

I think my take-away is that our human relationship with animals is tortured and strange, full of illogic and pretense. My mother, inspired by the same experience, wrote a blog post on the subject, more thoughtful and more comprehensive than what I have written here. (You should read it.) For myself, I feel somewhat more honest an omnivore today than I was before last Thursday. I know that Siren lived a happy life, even attaining the rank of patriarch during his time with us. I raised him, let him learn to swim in the sink, fed him every morning, changed his pond water, raked up tons of poop-sodden straw, and spent hours watching his antics as part of the flock.

It represented an enormous investment of time and money, if all we were going to take away was a duck roast. So, in some strange way it was possible to see him as both a pet and a commodity at the same time.

In the aftermath, peace has descended on the duck yard. My long-exiled, original duck, Aflac, is now waddling around happily with the rest of the flock, rather than having to maintain a safe distance from any giant antagonist. The females appear to have forgotten Siren. Or, at least, they behave, in every respect, the same way as if nothing had happened. We are thinking we can now get another female, which would be a lot more useful than our testosterone-mad prior flock. Life hums on.

I want to officially say thanks to Siren for the year and half of entertainment he provided. If there is an afterlife for waterfowl, here's hoping he will enjoy years more of gargling heavenly poop-water and chasing girls.

 R.I.P. SIREN 

March 2010-September 2011

Animal Lover Part II: The Empire Quacks Back

Devin, 2006

I originally published this post back in December of 2010, when no one read my blog but my parents. I am publishing it again now that I have some cousins who will read it, too. 


This post is Part II of my pet saga. Part I is here.

Our nickname for my middle son, Devin, has for a long time been Devy Ducks and later "The Duck." He is so into this that, two years ago, he actually dressed as a duck for Halloween with a homemade shirt that said, on the front, "Does the Duck Ever Stop?" and on the back, "No!"

Given this, I guess it is natural that a year and a half ago, a bit before Easter, he approached me and asked if perhaps he could have a pet duck this springtime. I dismissed this out of hand. Keep in mind that we live in a suburban area, in half a duplex in fact. Granted, we do have a large backyard, but this still seemed like sort of a bad idea. However, a couple of factors worked in his favor. The first of these is that my husband, who is usually very reluctant to acquire new animals, has always wanted a duck. He just thinks they are cute. The second thing was that someone offered an adult male duck on Freecycle a few days later. It seemed to me, faithless as I am, that the Universe wanted for us to have this duck. (Kind of like the aforementioned baby mouse, I guess.) 

So, naturally, my husband went out, bought fencing materials and a gate, a smallish pond and chicken feed, and spent a day or two and several hundred dollars preparing our back yard for Duck William Aflac the Third―Aflac for short. Apparently Aflac's previous living arrangements, with a group of hens, did not work out due to his tendency to corner and sexually assault them, which, for some reason, stressed them out. We really enjoyed Aflac, but he seemed lonely, always waiting outside for some attention from us, so later that summer, we acquired a Crested White Drake, whom we call Q-Tip. He has what appears to be either an afro or a small turban on the top of his head. He hated and feared us, and the turban of silly feathers is really his most pleasing quality. But he and Aflac loved each other. So that was all well and good. We built them a coop heaped with warm straw and enjoyed taking care of them. Their antics would provide hours of free entertainment for us.

And then winter came, with its attendant 7 a.m. sojourns to the duck coop to bring in their frozen-over water full of disgusting mud and poo, clean same in the kitchen sink and return this to our yard. The path to their coop became a sort of unnecessary slalom and this occasionally resulted in an unintended trip into the fence with great force. Given the real drag that this situation had become, the only logical course of action was to acquire three more ducks the following spring, and so we did that.

The thinking went like this: These ducks are really a pain in the ass to take care of in winter and they are both male, so they don't provide any real benefit in terms of natural resources, unless you like copious quantities of pond-scummy vile green poop (and who doesn't?). So, since we have them, what we really need is some females to produce eggs, thereby justifying this project and turning us from idiots with strange ideas of fun into something else―urban farmers. We would in fact become part of a movement that may well save humanity, by encouraging all of us to provide food for our families humanely and ethically and teaching our children to appreciate their connection to nature and the earth, to re-invest themselves in the ancient wisdom of small-scale food production. We agreed that we would buy three ducklings and cull any males that we happened to end up with, thereby increasing immeasurably our total coolness and environmental street cred. Then we would begin harvesting eggs.

Photo by Chris Sharratt

So, we went to a feed store in Santa Fe, and after doing hours of internet research on what would be the very best kind of duck to acquire, keeping in mind noise level, egg production, size relative to our existing males, and general temperament, we got three yellow ducklings of enigmatic lineage, which was the only kind that they had. We sort of assumed they might be Pekins, which is what Aflac is, so at least they would fit in. They were just about the cutest thing you had ever seen and would cuddle up right against us or walk around on a towel on the living room floor, peeping and generally being adorable. For eight weeks, it was necessary to keep them inside, in a fenced-in baby pool in the corner of my kitchen, so that the outside weather could get warm enough and they could grow thick enough feathers to survive outside in Northern New Mexico. During this time, they ballooned in size to ungainly creatures approximately ten times their original stature and proved that, indeed, ducks are the grossest animals alive. Upon returning home from work to check on them, I would discover their makeshift brooder smeared entirely with duck feces from end to end, their waterer turned over and food scattered throughout the area, intermingled with crap. It smelled like a barn no matter how many times a day I cleaned it, and by the end of the eight-week period, I had resolved never ever to undertake this project again.

Ultimately, we were able to move them outside to a brand new coop my husband had built, whereupon it turned out that Aflac and Q-Tip hated them with an animus heretofore unknown in the avian world. The new ducks were found trapped in a tiny corner of cement walkway, away from food and water, and quacking away with bewildered panic, while my two oafish male ducks patrolled the rest of the yard to assure their sovereignty over this entire area. I was advised by the online duck community to a) allow this matter to resolve itself over time b) house them separately or c) cull at least one of the now three male ducks, if not two, and allow peace to reign in the back yard.

Unfortunately, it became clear at this point that my two youngest boys would suffer lifelong PTSD if we were to proceed with our plan to kill even one single duck. I must also admit to certain maternal feelings toward each of them myself, so we installed Siren (the new male) and his female cohorts, Sweet Pea and Nibbles, in the backyard outside the fenced duck area until another solution became apparent. My husband then commenced extended sulking about the loss of his agreed-upon duck dinner and made it clear that this had been a case of bait-and-switch, for which he would not fall again. Somehow, however, our marriage survived.

In the end, Siren swelled to become an ungainly creature twice Aflac's weight and, when reintroduced into the duck yard with his female minions, proved that he remembered how Aflac had treated him and was ready to kick some ass. This began a period during which Aflac was put in his place―almost all of his back neck feathers pulled out and free reign of the back yard now denied to him, he was consigned to a life of lonely repentance, while Q-Tip was accepted into the newly dominant duck colony.

Finally, at great length, relative peace has been restored to the duck yard, and each duck now has his or her rightful place in the consortium of waterfowl, Aflac now being allowed amnesty in return for the understanding that he is to eat last and have only provisional access to any female partner.

These ducks, which we have tenderly raised by hand, regard us, naturally, as maniacal axe murderers and avoid contact with us as much as possible. It amuses my husband to pass through their yard with his bicycle on the way from the storage area to the front, in order to watch them quack in prolonged dread and race, as fast as their little webbed feet can carry them, to the gate to escape this monstrosity. Unfortunately for them, the gate is of course where he is heading anyway, to their total shock and dismay. Discovering that the beast with two wheels and a man attached is headed directly toward them, they attempt to fly away, crashing repeatedly into our juniper bush, the lilac, and the fence.

So, in the end, they are wonderful pets, and they say that a playful, close relationship with such a pet can lower your risk of depression, diabetes, Ebola, and diarrhea. And we have lots of eggs.

Don't think I don't know what I’m doing.

Tune in next time for the true story of how we murdered one of our ducks, and why. Please don't call PETA before I can explain.

Animal Lover Part I: The Saga Begins

I originally published this post back in December of 2010, when no one read my blog but my parents and my pet cat. It is actually pretty good. But it is very long. So, with a nod to Star Wars, I am breaking it into a trilogy and re-publishing it. Enjoy!

When I was a small child, I had a habit of acquiring various animals, with or without the explicit permission of my parents. Mainly, this took the form of cats. For instance, when I was about six, I adopted a grey and white Persian-mix female cat who came to the front doorstep. I called her Pretty Paws (because my best friend had a cat named Pretty Paws already and six-year-olds rarely consider originality a real virtue).

Over the years, this particular cat brought my family great joy and amusement through her various activities, which included hurling herself from the pear tree in our back yard onto the screen door, where she remained for as long as it took for someone to arrive and let her in the house. Later on, after we had moved twice and the cat's mental acuity was perhaps somewhat dimmed, she took to spending long hours sunning herself on the roof of our rented house. For reasons which may have included feline arthritis or perhaps early signs of Alzheimer's, Pretty Paws did not feel the need to leave the roof in order to relieve herself, so, unfortunately, when we vacated our Tiburon house, its roof remained peppered with fossilized cat turds, scattered proportionately across its surface. Such was her legacy.

Photo by Jamie Guimond Productions

Still later, this cat took to talking to herself in the middle of the night, specifically saying in what appeared to be a Japanese accent "Herrrrrooo! Hoar are rou?" I have found a helpful video on YouTube to allow you to picture this more easily.

However, I was unable to find a cat that really approximated the creepy phantasmagoric horror movie quality my cat brought to this project. I guess, take what I've given you and imagine the same thing done by a straggly, emaciated cat hiding behind the half-closed door of a nearby room at 2 a.m., with a voice like a throat cancer victim.

Without boring you with unnecessary detail, I will say that my animal acquisitions over the years have included unauthorized teddy bear hamsters; schizophrenic tabbies; two rabbits, which I attempted to "housetrain" unsuccessfully and keep inside the house uncaged; and an enormous homemade bottomless rat castle with five rats whom I had bred myself, and which I kept in my parents' kitchen after I moved out.

Surprisingly, adulthood has not really stopped me from continuing this practice. At the age of thirty-five, I still experience a sort of glee when reminding myself that no one can actually STOP me from acquiring whatever animal I want (unless you ask my husband, anyway). At one point, when living under the trees in the redwood forest of Sonoma County, I had six cats, many of whom had been born under my house. This, to be fair, was not my fault, since neither the mother nor father cat were mine to spay or neuter. However, rather than finding homes for these accidental kittens, I naturally adopted all of them, including those with unrepentantly feral and occasionally vicious tendencies. Three of these were matching long-haired ginger tabbies, one of whom, Marmalade Lion, I still have.

For another case, when first visiting Santa Fe on an eight-week summer pilgrimage as a newly single mother with two young children, I returned home on my 1,000-mile car trip with a baby field mouse that required careful nursing multiple times a day with a dropper full of specialized formula.

Photo by Jennifer Jordan

Really, this could happen to anyone.

One doesn't simply turn away from an infant field mouse which fell from some random stranger's ceiling in a state which is marked by the occasional but persistent presence of bubonic plague outbreaks. Not merely because you are about to drive for four days with two children under the age of seven, and plan to visit the Grand Canyon and Knott's Berry Farm. The mouse, Thimble, accompanied us to various restaurants, theme parks, and historical points of interest, and especially enjoyed the log ride. My good friend, Merisha, kept him safe inside her bra throughout most of the trip.

So, anyway, if I skip a few interesting points for the sake of attention span, that brings me to the present. Our current circumstances are not totally unreasonable. We have only one dog, which we ended up with while shopping at Lowe's in Espanola four years ago. He seems to be part Corgi and part lab. Imagine a low rider Labrador Retriever. Or a lab with dwarfism and large ears like a donkey. I still have Marmalade Lion, who is a sweet cat with an unfortunately nerve-wracking meow and a tendency to extreme paranoia. I am currently borrowing two additional cats, Gui and Gubal, for the length of a year while my friends, their owners, are living in Slovenia.

And then there are five ducks....

You'll have to read my next post to find out about them. (Do you like the way I provided a hook? My writing is like crack. Come back later and get more. Just a little more. It totally won't hurt you at all.)

Clearly my dog has been talking to door to door Mormons.

Today's #ReverbBroads11 prompt: Silent Sunday. Just post a picture that represents your day.

(Sorry, I may have mentioned I don't follow directions especially well.)

Clearly my dog has been talking to door to door Mormons because somebody told him it was Christmas and yesterday morning he was bouncing up and down like some sort of forty pound donkey-eared Mexican Jumping bean and making it impossible for my mother to get her camera set up.

He didn't even seem disappointed that he didn't have a stocking to open. 

Lock Me Up Before I Start Acquiring Hedgehogs

On Hedgehog Central , I found the following:

"Because they are quiet, they are very easy to travel with. Most people aren’t even aware that a pet hedgehog is nearby. Many hotels that restrict other animals such as cats and dogs will allow hedgehogs."

SOLD!

Now I just have to figure out how I can get my husband to let me have one, so that we can go on a road trip and stay at Motel 6 with it.

I will need to come up with a permaculture or urban homesteading sort of justification. Perhaps, if we needed bristles, say in order to make our own....toothbrushes.

I'm not holding out much hope. Mike seems to have decided that we can't have any new pets that he won't get to eat eventually (a longer explanation of this will follow in a later post). I'm pretty sure people don't eat hedgehogs, and I don't think I would want one if I had to stick it in the crock pot.

But just look at that face.

How can you say no to THAT?

UPDATE 10/1:

Save the hedgehogs from global warming!!!! Now it is more important than ever that I take care of the hedgehogs. Just look what global warming has done to them!!!