The Broken Butt Roundup

There's just something wrong with that title.

And yet... there's no other way to say it.

How have y'all been spending the last week or so? I've missed you like the Dickens. (Where did that saying come from? Certainly not from, you know, a yearning to be reading Charles Dickens. Let's think for a minute....

Okay. Enough thinking.)

I can't wait to catch up on blog reading. I can't believe I can sit upright and type. I can't believe I have SO MANY blog posts in my brain just bursting to be, um, posted, and meanwhile I'm writing about my broken hiney and issues thereabout.

So let's get it over with: I'm too young for a hip replacement, or it's apparently not beyond hope of healing, or my doctor is into cruel and unusual punishment of my wild youth (I used to babysit my doctor's kids when I was a teenager. He knows too much.), or... my pain threshold is epic and I am paying the price of being too long too tough.

Who knows. What I DO KNOW is that I can walk today! Just like leaving a Benny Hin revival. (Only partly joking. And nobody smacked me on the forehead. I just laid in bed with a fever that killed a lot of brain cells and forced me not to move around much, that's all. God does work in mysterious ways. And it shouldn't take deathlike symptoms to keep me resting, now should it?)

Consider the parenthetical statements on, friends. I have so much to tell you and no way to categorize it all.

Of course we should start with the farm news:

This morning one of the rotten chicken-shredding dogs was baa-aack! I kid you not, the little monster (insert other, stronger word if you must -- my kids are in the room) had the nerve to come around looking for seconds.

Unluckily, as it happened, Sarah had already done her morning chores and the new little sweet hens were pecking around their yard like appetizers for the mongrel.

The rooster (of course, he's one of the formerly loathed cuckoo morons, but we can't put him in the crockpot now, not after his brush with death brought out his finer quality: lone survival) crowed a warning! Madeleine leapt to attention! We recognized the muddy furry beast as not one of our farmyard! We quickly dialed Daddy's cell phone!

Daddy u-turned his car and chased off the threat with a big stick and not a soft word! The girls closed the hens (and their protecting moron) into the safety of the henhouse! All was well!

But wait! No sooner did Daddy go back to the necessary commute but the DOG DID RETURN! (The nerve of him!)

We ran out of exclamation points!

I gimped myself out there because the horrid creature was actually IN the chicken yard after tunneling under the fence. This was obviously too big a job for the girls alone. He was snorfling around the hen's little sliding door and trying to work his way in to the ever-replenishing (Thank you, KL, for the new hens) breakfast buffet. And here's the bummer: He looked like a perfectly nice dog.

Oy.

I hauled him out of the chicken yard and of course called my husband. What to do? A nice little (albeit blood-hungry) dog whose owners are (darn it all anyway) nice neighbors of ours.

Chicken-hunting dogs. You can't live with 'em. You can't shoot 'em.

So I locked him in our kennel (Thanks, Carolyn, for the loan of your boys to put that together.) and the girls blocked the henhouse door with bricks. It was an exciting, and oh-so-typical welcome back to the walking life.