A busy day, kinda

It's 2pm and I have no shame in admitting that I just woke up. Seriously. See, Grandma's flight was at 6:10 this morning, so in order to get her to the airport early, Rebecca, Grandma Betty, and I left the house at 4am.

At 11pm or so last night, I thought I'd read for a bit and then try to get 3 hours of sleep. At 1:30am, I decided that I could make it through the night awake, took a shower, and then began watching P.S. I love you. I cried like a baby for almost the entire movie. Trust me, I did. Two things in life are guaranteed to make me cry, and those are death, and other people crying, and there's a lot of that in P.S. I love you, not that it wasn't a great movie, because it was beyond great: it was perfect. Anyway, I got through 3/4 of it before it was time to leave, so we left for the airport in New Bern, got there at 4:35, checked Grandma in, and waited until she boarded her plane before we left, making it home around 6:15.

I then returned to my room to see the rest of the movie, and cried some more at the happy ending, and then was settling in to watching the deleted scenes somewhere around 7am when I heard a hen start squawking. There is a distinctive cry hens make, indeed all chickens make, when they are in distress and put in fear of their life, and this was that cry. I shot out of bed and out of the house to see what was attacking it, and found the dogs chasing it through the yard, trying to catch it with their mouths. They've already killed one chicken, about a month ago, and because no one was here at the time, they really couldn't be punished for it because they'd wouldn't have known you were punishing them for the chicken and not something else. But this time, I had to act quickly before they killed the chicken, and I wrestled it from them and was delighted to see that but for the loss of a lot of feathers, she was fine. I put her back in the cage and selected a large stick with which to beat the dogs. I feel like a monster, but that's the punishment I saw Dad use when Bonnie, Lou, and Scrappy tried to kill a rooster many years ago, and they never tried anything again after that. I whacked both Zeus and Zoey three times, and it really hurt to see them cower like that, but they have to know that chasing chickens is not allowed. Dad has told me that his family used to kill dogs for stealing eggs, so I can always make a case that they've been let off easy, and they seemed just fine by the time we got back to the house. I still feel incredibly guilty though, which I why I'm justifying myself, but let me continue.

I made it back inside at about 7:30, and then I was agitated and pissed, so falling asleep wasn't easy despite how tired I was. I did succumb to sleep, and have now just woken up. I've done a lot today for someone who's just woken up!