the strange case of the disapearing weekend

If it supposedly flies when you're having fun, I think time moves even faster when you're trying to get things done. I had lofty ambitions of productivity this weekend and achieved a small portion of what I intended to. Sitting here on a chilly Sunday evening, watching twilight fade behind bare trees and little lights glowing in the distant valley, I feel good. Friday, another hen was lost to a hungry hawk and April was kind enough to wait until I was driving home before breaking the news. Losing a lady chicken is always tough no matter how many times it has happened before. We have been lucky the past few weeks with our flock spending the work week confined to the coop and then having a few glorious days of freedom from Friday through Sunday. I'm not sure who between us looks forward to the weekend more. If I was a betting man, I would say the chickens since they get to peck around for bugs and tender shoots instead of pruning fruit trees or repairing faucets in their leisure time. When I got home Friday evening, I went to the garage for a shovel and pitchfork and then walked over to the murder scene. Hawks, much like zombies, seem to have a taste for brains because I have yet to find one of my chicken's heads still attached when they get attacked by those flighted zombie devil birds. April came out and told me the story while I dug a grave in the compost pile for our black australorp. Until we are able to get our chain link fence aviary built behind our chicken coop, we will continue to test our luck as Friday through Sunday free-rangers, at the mercy of the Hawk posse. Saturday morning came later than I had planned for, we threw on some dump appropriate duds and loaded the pickup with refuse before making the bi-weekly journey to the local "convenience center" on Dragstrip Road. I unloaded our crud into the dumpsters and sorted our recyclables into metal, glass and plastic while April watched an Asian couple try to decide if an old couch was worth rescuing from a certain doom. Afterwards, we brunched on delicious BBQ at Hannah's before reloading the truck with chicken feed, pine shavings and a large metal trough for the chicks we have coming in early April. Final stop was Lowe's where we picked up a new faucet and the stuff you need to install one. We lingered amongst the kitchen cabinets, tile flooring, showers and bathtubs awhile, dreaming. One the ride home, April announced that she would install the new faucet all by herself. I was foolishly about to offer my assistance but my curiosity about potentially having a wonderous Mrs. Fix-It available at my disposal got the best of me so I kept my mouth shut. Besides, I had planned to shovel out a year's worth of chicken deuce, decomposing pine shavings and fine particulate dust out of the chicken coop and prepare it for our new arrivals. I got a N95 respirator from April to keep the stuff I was stirring up out of my lungs and got down to business. I was about halfway through shoveling chicken crap and wood chips into a wheelbarrow and dumping it into the compost pile when I saw my lovely wife approaching. She informed that the faucet install was going swimmingly save for a massive crack in the PVC pipe that she had just discovered. In man speak, that translates to: "I just cracked the PVC pipe to the faucet." I was slightly worried until she mentioned that she had shut off that water main in the basement which moved my concern-o-meter up a few notches and I followed her inside to see what the situation was. In one of the few instances I can remember where things weren't actually as bad as I had imagined, I saw that the problem was really that the dude who built our house had decided to bond all the PVC pipe straight into the faucet without using any of those convenient supply hoses that can be easily removed. The crack in the pipe was really the least of our troubles we were going to have to cut the line anyways and install a straight valve before we could install a supply line that would fit the new faucet. Actually, I knew none of this at the time besides that we needed a PVC pipe cutter and some sort of adapter for the 1/2 inch line to connect a supply line to. My wife, the plumbing genius, returned to Lowe's to spend more money to fix a problem we really didn't need to fix in the first place. By the time she was back, I had finished shoveling out the coop and had the chickens put up for the night. I returned to my wife and her faucet nemesis inside covered in a fine dust of shaving and chicken poo and crawled under the sink to cut the lines with the pipe cutter she had acquired. That part of the operation went smoothly and we were ready to pull off the old faucet when we realized the previous installer had actually cemented the plastic nut holding the faucet to the sink to the metal nipple. After maybe an hour and a half of trying tin snips, hacksaw, reciprocating saw, pliers and elbow grease we finally got it off and the sink pulled out. The rest of the install went smoothly, as I followed orders like a monkey being directed by a plumbing puppet master. The bloody knuckles and PVC shavings in my eyes were nothing compared to the satisfaction of turning on the shiny new faucet for the first time and hearing the air clear the lines before gushing smoothly out in a triumphant flow. Sunday morning I had a strong hankering for some apple granola and made a beeline for the kitchen. April joined me as I munched happily while making up one of my famous lists laying out the tasks of the day. She asked me why I never cross anything off these lists, instead just adding the things not done to a newer, longer list. I did not have a satisfactory answer so I told her to mind her own beeswax. We ended up finishing pruning the entire bottom orchard and making the pile of wood to be chipped even more enormous. I had planned on taking some pictures to accompany this post but the sun was on the way down and I was already beat. So that's what it was, another weekend gone, a little more done and lots more still left on the list...God willing, we'll get most of it done by next winter.