Right after I moved in, my first order of business was to play house sitter for my colleague Julie and her veritable stable of animals. Fortunately for me, just before she left for vacation, she found a friend who wanted the dog she had recently adopted, but even without the dog, her house is the closest I have come to living on a farm on a long term basis. In addition to two children, she has seven cats, a dozen or so chickens, and a parakeet.
The parakeet is really what qualifies it for farm status, however.
Julie went on vacation for about a week and a half and I was tasked with taking care of the farm.
The whole thing was running well until one day, I forgot to check on the chickens until a little bit later. There are enough chickens that it's not super hard for one of them to escape while you're entering and exiting the pen, and this was on a day that I needed to perform some additional maintenance on the pen, and as such was hanging around for a little while. Between refilling the water canister and the food container, I was working on things in the coop for several minutes before I noticed that the smallest chicken had escaped from the coop.
Most of the chickens don't move too terribly quickly, Julie & Co make it look like it's not actually too hard to just lean over and pick them up. On the other hand, the smallest chicken, which is all black, moves very quickly. I refer to her as Tiny Black Chicken. Anyway, Tiny Black Chicken got out and decided to hang out in an area between the coop and the back of Julie's house. Unfortunately for everybody involved, the coop is not in a corner or directly up against the edge of the property. The first time I pursued TBC, I accidentally chased her around toward the back of the property, behind the back garage. After about 45 minutes, I was able to shunt TBC back into the pen.
A day or so later, I saw TBC out of the pen again, except this time it was before I got home. My guess is that TBC had been out a majority of the day. Fortunately, this time I was able to use some of the tactics I had learnt previously to get her back into the pen and then close up the hole through which I think she escaped. Once that happened, she didn't escape again, at least not on my watch.
I honestly forget if it was before or after, but the cats also did some interesting things. To be honest, I hadn't interacted them much while Julie was gone, and I definitely hadn't bothered to put too much effort into keeping Bast, the newest of her cats, separated from the others. In the week or so that I'd been here, I had learnt that Bast tends to hang out in the kitchen during the day and otherwise spends her time in Rachel's room, because two of Julie's other cats (part of a triad of kittens that are now three years old, who Julie calls "the kittens" anyway) are very big bullies.
One evening, one of the jerkface brothers (or their sister) was camping in front of Rachel's room, which is where Bast hangs out. I had opened the room to get something for Bast and left it open when I went downstairs. I like to think that Bast is at least vaguely fond of me, so she followed and disaster ensued somewhere in the space between Bast and the food source. Bast and one of the jerkface kittens had gotten into a fairly big fight, and I was certainly not shy about letting the kittens know by raising my voice significantly as I (slowly and unsuccessfully) chased after them.
To this day, I remain unsure of exactly which jerkface kitten it had been. The giant wads of hair indicate that it was the sister, who has very long hair, but in Coryland, the two brothers are the biggest jerks, and one or more of them camps the door to the room where Bast stays. Unfortunately, after I spent more than an hour calming down and catching my breath (running up all of those stairs while yelling at near top volume is tiring!) I had to keep Bast in Rachel's room the whole time. It has now been nearly a month since Julie's vacation and I think just today has been the first time I've seen Bast back outside that room, which is sad.
Other than that, I got a lot of writing done, and ate lots of pasta and soup on my own. To be honest, the other really interesting aspect of Julie's Vacation is that it was one of the first times I have been alone in a house for any appreciable amount of time. The last time it happened was when I house-sat for dad and Brenda several years ago (possibly before I was diagnosed) and before that, I don't know if I've ever had a home to myself for any significant amount of time. I might at some point use a different post to wax philosophic about whether or not I'll ever have a home that's exclusively mine, but for the time being, it was interesting to experience even just a week of being in (mostly) my own home on my own. Aside from cat spats, it was oddly quiet.