Dog!

So.  The kids and Dan are still in Denver.  They're going to do some Daddy-kiddo bonding and take in the zoo and/or natural history museum.  And I get another day at home -- to clean house and enjoy having nobody coming behind me messing it up.  Ah!  Lovely.  Except...

I got up this morning, got ready for the day, turned on some morning music, put the kettle on for some chai, then opened the front door to feed the kitties and Noey, the labrador mix.  And Noey, who we've been tethering at night to keep her from wandering, had wriggled out of her tether. 

Here's the backstory to explain why that was a really bad thing:  Friday afternoon sometime, someone (a mystery person) left the door of the hen yard open and three of the chickens got out and were never retrieved.  And Noey loves chickens.  Loves them!  But, she doesn't eat them, thank heavens.  We've had to re-home several dogs because they looked at our henyard as their own private KFC.  The thing is that Noey loves to play with the chickens and, as you might guess, they do not like to play with Noey.  By the time she's given up on the idea, the chickens have gotten the worst of it; they're usually missing all their tail feathers and most of the feathers around their necks -- and they're usually in shock.  Most of them die of it.

Well, after Mass yesterday, I found one of the chickens Noey had scared witless a couple days ago and set up a temporary hen hospital on  the porch for her.  I got an old clothes basket and put it by the door in the shade with water, cut up apples and a little feed in it, with the hopes that a little down time would bring the victim back around.  I made sure Noey wouldn't bother it by tethering her, but I was a little worried that the cats might mess with the chicken, so I grabbed the closest thing to me to cover the top of the basket and weighted it with a big rock.  Stupid me, though.  The thing I grabbed was the lid of a great big bin that is temporarily on the porch waiting to be stored in pantry when I finish organizing it.  The bin was full of noodles, beans and a big bag of rice.

Remember how I said Noey had wriggled out of her tether this morning? 

Know what's all over my lawn this morning?  Fettucini, spaghetti, elbow macaroni, dried kidney beans, pearl barley, basmati rice...  Ripped up pieces of all the bags they came in.  And the newspaper that was missing yesterday -- that Noey must have hidden until this morning, so she could read it, maybe, while she munched on elbow macaroni.

=sigh=

And no kids to help clean up the mess.