another burn-your-own birthday

My mother had the plans laid and the tickets booked; the day after her birthday, she was taking the teenager and hopping a plane to upstate Washington to visit her dad. From there, they'd ride the rails across the country to Indiana for summer parties and sneaky property purchases (she has a friend who wants to sell some land, but I am still lobbying hard for the haunted graveyard). 

So on the day of her birthday, we met at Gyu Kaku, our favorite restaurant for letting the kids play with fire while we talk trash over a pint. 

Probably not one of my kids' fingers

When it was time for cake, I dug in my bag and realized I didn't have even remotely enough candles. Roman numerals were too hard to engineer with wax sticks, so we figured out the number in binary and jammed the purples in for ones and the green in for zero.

on this, the occasion of my mother turning 111011

Then our waitress offered to take a picture of us. Result:

modern technology is no match for a stranger's cosmic mandate to take blurry pictures

This was all going pretty well, until we went back to her place for presents. As soon as we put the kettle on for a nice pot of tea, one of the wild chickens that lives in the gulch behind her house dropped a baby out of the roosting tree (a chicken baby, not a human baby), and the little guy started running in circles, screaming his head off for every feral cat in the neighborhood to come eat him. We spent an hour chasing the chickadoo around bushes and through fences until we finally mesmerized him with a flashlight and nabbed him, tucking him up for the night in the mini coop my mother uses for her foster chicks. She rehabs wild birds that her school kids find orphaned (sometimes because they themselves orphaned the things), and right now she's got a couple of half-grown chicks clucking around in there. With the chickens tucked up to bed, we finally had a cup of tea, tidied wrapping paper, and said goodnight. As we left, my mother planted a kiss on my cheek and said, closing the door, "Oh, and you're taking my chickens while I'm on the mainland, BYE."

WHAT.

So now the teenager and his grandma are off on adventures, and my coop is full of surly adolescent chickens. Plucky the Terrible Terror is pretty cheesed, and I keep having to peel the cats off the sides of coop because the little nuggets look so delicious in there.

But it began paying off immediately. The man decided that it is more gas efficient just to camp out at grandma's place with the kids while feeding her cats, and I suddenly have the ENTIRE HOUSE to my ENTIRE SELF for ENTIRE NIGHTS. Am going to eat shrimp, listen to endless crime podcasts, and paint until my eyeballs fall out.

(Note to ax murderers: please disregard.)