Egg rescue and SADNESS

I used to have a friend who found playing cards on the sidewalk so frequently that he started looking them up to tell his fortune, just in case the fates were trying to leave him messages. I think he probably just had a lot of gamblers in the neighborhood, but it's a nice idea. This week I woke up from a nightmare for the fourth night in a row. Peeled a dead mouse off the library walkway. Fell asleep in a zoom meeting. Sat at the door waiting for patrons, staring at the sky and having an existential crisis. Discovered I’m one of the suspects in an Ann Cleeves book.

So when a playing card dropped out of a book I was handling, I went straight to the internets and looked that shit up.

Ten of Spades means SADNESS mixed with tears and disappointment. 

It isn’t just a bad card. It’s poisonous like jealousy. It will in a great measure counteract the good effects of the cards near you. You might be overcome by the feeling that nothing is right and the only thing you wish is to be to left alone. Ten of Spades is also a warning: take care not to get addicted to your sorrows.

 

Rude.

One of the wild hens behind my mother’s house pecks her babies to death. When we catch her on a clutch, the mental egg-hatching countdown starts, and our ears perk up for the sounds of infanticide. My mother still can’t drive with her recovering arm, so I came over for my weekend shift as caretaker and first thing this morning that stupid psychotic chicken started pecking her chicks as they hatched. We ran outside and grabbed up the survivors and the cracking eggs. One had already been murdered overnight, one had a horrific brain injury and is in a special hospice box with a warmer, and two got away alive. We dabbed ointment on the one that was bleeding, and we are on eggy watch now.

It is really hard not to mess with them. You imaging cracking them open and having fluff balls fall out, but what you’d get is a wet shrink-wrapped thing that bleeds to death. Let them work themselves out.

Will update this post as they hatch. Live video on my Instagram stories. 

Update:

Four viable chicks so far. Two eggs were having difficulty, so over the course of 8 hours we gently and slowly helped them along (don’t tear the membrane, give them a chance to struggle free so the blood vessels close), and they did finally break free, but one had a fatal birth defect, and it’s going to die. Which is fucking awful. The other, however, managed to get its shrink wrapping off just fine once it had some help.

Chopper, who made it out all by herself in record time 

Pecky, the baby who survived multiple head injuries 

Eggy, who had a little help and popped out successfully 

The lucky baby who escaped murder hen while she killed the others and hid crying in a flower pot until we rescued her

Update again:

Holy shit, what we thought was a scary birth defect was some kind of yolky prenatal weirdness, because she absorbed it all, kicked off her shell, and screamed “I’M ALIVE, MOTHERFUCKERS.” We apologized and cuddled her and took her out of the hospice box to put her in with the others. 5 survivors!

Update next morning:

Two more eggs hatched, one at bedtime and one in the morning. 

The chicks are in a bird cage with a soft pocketed warming pad suspended over them so that the pocket hangs down like a tunnel, and they’ve all crammed inside it to make a cuddle puddle. Guess what we didn’t need? 7 MORE CHICKENS. We will find good homes for these sweet nuggets.