The Chickens Are Out To Get Me!

Yesterday, while my sister was away at a day-camp for Cross Country, I took it upon myself to perform her daily chore of feeding the chickens. I scooped out a bucket of scratch corn and scattered it out for the chickens. Then I looked inside the house - the layena (it's a type of food) bins were empty - completely empty. So, I went back to the feed storage area and went to get some layena - and was assaulted by at least twenty roaches of varying size! Big fat ones, tiny baby ones, all ugly and all rapidly scurrying about. But I managed to get three buckets of layena to fill up the bins. After all, the chickens couldn't have put the roaches there, could they? So, I went back into the chicken pen and paused outside the doorway of their little house, inside which were the two layena bins. I paused because the entire ceiling and walls of this little house were covered in new and old spider webs displaying a coloful variety of dead things - cockroaches, flies, other spiders. But I bucked up my courage enough to duck inside and bring the buckets in with me. It was then that I spied the collection of about 7 or 8 eggs in the corner under the roost. The chickens like to lay there occasionally instead of in their nests. I ducked down even more and used a long stick to retrieve them, and then I threw them to the chickens. Chickens will eat anything, even their own young, infact I think they see it as sort of a delicasy because the moment I throw one egg, they all scramble towards helter-skelter as if it were the best treat in the world. Also, there was no telling how long the eggs had been there, so it was safer to let the chickens eat them than to bring them into the house and let humans get botulism. So, after all that time in the chicken house, I became complacent. The bins had dirt in them, so I made to pick one bin up and dump it out, but the moment I removed it from the wall, all manner of insects went pell-mell everywhere, but I was more concerned with the big, many-legged, black and grey spider that was very much alive on the wall behind the bin. I don't exactly remember exiting the chicken house, I just remember standing in their little bit of earth staring at the doorway into the house, trying to bolster up my courage again to return into the house. Ten minutes later, I succeeded in quickly ducking into the house, putting the bin to rights, pouring the layena into both bins, and high-tailing it out. The chickens couldn't have been responsible for letting that great big spider live free inside their house to terrorize me, could they? Well then I decided that it was time to return one chicken who had been setting on several eggs for over 8 weeks in a separate enclosure back to the main yard. The eggs weren't going to hatch. So, I picked up the bucket she was in (a three-gallon bucket on its side with a bunch of straw on the bottom made for a good sort of shelter and nest). I tilted it upward carefully so that she fell to the bottom and couldn't make worm's meat out of my fingers, and then quickly entered the main enclosure once more. I gently set her out, nest, eggs, and all, and then she swelled to twice her size and jumped back on the nest, but I shooed her away, after she repeatedly tried to attack me. And then comes the coupe de gras that let me know without a doubt that the chickens were out to get me. There were only two eggs in her now vacated nest. I picked them up and noted how light they were. Indeed, all they contained was a shriveled up yolk that rolled around inside like a baby's rattle. I threw one down to the chickens - and it EXPLODED! Not, eww, a-big-mess-everywhere-exploded, I mean the egg shell exploded on impact just like TNT - splattering egg shell shrapnel in a hemisphere of a radius of at least six feet, peppering my legs with sharp fragments. It even made a bomb-like popping noise when it exploded. I guess the gases inside had built in the heat to a tremendous pressure so that any weakening of the outer shell would act like a trigger. I retreated to a safe distance from the other egg, and threw something at it. It too exploded upon impact like the first. Those sneaky little devils! I can't believe the chickens engineered something like that! I mean I was so close to some sort of injury to my head - I shook the egg beside my ear! It could have exploded then, and lucky for the chickens that it didn't! Well, my word! So, battle scarred and shell-shocked, I returned to the house (the human house) and then made the discovery of the over 60 (I counted) mosquito bites to my legs, excluding the backs of my legs, my arms, my hands, and my neck. Over 60! Those chickens no doubt wanted to have the mosquitos drain me enough to make me pass out from the shock of the egg explosions, and then who knows what they would have done to me! My sister can tend them now, for all I care, I won't go back in there.

"Don't think of yourself as a really ugly person - think of yourself as a really pretty monkey."