Roll With the Punches

I've been having kind of a hard time lately, to be honest. For starters, I had to put down two of my last three chickens a couple weeks ago because they got attacked by the dogs. I thought I had adequately socialized my dogs and my chickens, but apparently I was wrong. The first time I let the chickens free range throughout the entire yard, two chickens came up missing. Days later, my wife found one chicken still alive in the yard as the dogs were attacking her again. She had deep flesh wounds, so I had to put her down.

The next day, I found my rooster walking around in the yard. He didn't look so hot. He didn't try to run too fast as I approached him to see how he was doing. He also had some pretty bad wounds, so I put him down as well.

A few more days later, I found the last chicken--which I thought was dead because I hadn't seen her for days. She was hanging out on the big wood pile in my back yard. I'm guessing she had been there the entire time--almost like a man shipwrecked on a lone island in the ocean. I went to pick her up, but she was moving around very well. She evaded me for three laps around and over the wood pile as I tried to catch her. I could see she had some feathers missing from the back of her neck and head so I knew she had been attacked.

Since she appeared to be in good health, I left the door to the pen open and waited until nightfall to pick her up off her sleeping perch. I examined her--she looked fairly good, all things considered. She had a little wound on the top of her head where the feathers were missing, but by the time I caught up with her, it had scabbed over and was well on its way to healing.

She is sleeping in her pen right now. She's my survivor. My other hen and my rooster were also survivors. These are the last three chickens from the flock of thirteen I acquired in November 2009. The first ten died within the first year. These three had all survived the attacks by dogs, the starvation, (DISCLAIMER FOR PETA ACTIVISTS: The starvation was not my fault. One of my chickens somehow developed one lame leg, so she could not scratch around in the yard. After trying to serve her bagged feed for days, which she rejected, I put her down to prevent her from starving to death.) the freezing weather, and the poor air quality. They probably would have had a much longer life had I not made the stupid move of allowing my dogs and chickens access to the same land.

In other life difficulty news, I just received a letter from an attorney stating that I owed money for a deficiency on a foreclosure that took place three years ago. This was a big, nasty surprise to me because I hadn't heard anything from them for three years. I thought if I was going to owe money to someone I'd at least know about it relatively soon after defaulting. Ya know? I guess maybe they didn't sell it for a long time after taking it back from me. I don't know.

Finally, my car broke down. I should have seen it coming. I did see it coming, really. So I guess I should say I should have prepared for it. I was driving home from Phillip's wedding when it started overheating. I discovered there was a heater core hose that was spraying fluid, so I replaced it.

That didn't solve the problem.

So I replaced the thermostat, just for S's and G's. The car kept staying stable for a little while then overheating. The weird thing was that the radiator still had plenty of fluid in it after it was overheating. That's why I thought it could be the thermostat. Anyway, I worked on the car all day. I ran out of time and had to drive to work in this car. It was fine for a while, then overheated, then cooled back down. It did this progressively until it just went up--WAY up--and never came back down. Luckily I made it to work even though I was 30 minutes late.

The only thing to do is keep pushing--count my blessing, pull up the ol' bootstraps, and march on.