This was the week from hell. It started last week.
Last week some woman crashed into my van with her car. We reported the accident to our various insurance agencies and I thought it was behind us. The van is banged up but drivable and no one was hurt.
Monday morning, Harland was home with a croupy cough. I knew the day would not be productive: the only thing I could hope to do with two toddlers at home is prevent them from breaking things or injuring each other.
That same morning, I brought the chickens their water, opened their coop door and was horrified to see a Leghorn emerge with blood all over her face, comb and no-longer pristine white feathers. In a panic, I scooped her up, toted her inside and began cleaning the blood off her face and comb. While I cleaned her, she pooped all over the kitchen floor.
Harland, who had been watching the whole scene, remarked on his way out of the kitchen:
"And THAT is why you shouldn't have chickens in the house!"
I was able to clean most of the poor chicken's face, but blood was coming out of the tips of her comb so that with every shake of her head, blood spattered all over her, me and the kitchen. What to do?
I pulled the dog crate out of the basement and made a quick chicken home for the two bloody Leghorns. (The second Leghorn was just as bloody as the first.) Each time I would get one chicken cleaned up and the bleeding stopped, she would rub her head against the cage until the comb started bleeding again! Argh.
Why were these chickens' combs bleeding? It appeared that the tips of the combs had frostbite--despite my best efforts to prevent and treat it--and the bleeding was coming from areas where the frostbite was not too bad or where a patch of skin had been scratched off. And the blood started to flow more freely once the chickens warmed up: very soon I had a six-foot diameter blood spatter pattern on the floor around the cage due to the vigorous and constant shaking of bloody chicken heads.
It was traumatic. At one point I was crouched on the ground near the cage, talking to the chickens in an attempt to calm them and convince them to stop shaking their bloody heads. Harland came over and informed me:
"Mom, you're standing in blood. Can we make jello now? I want the red kind."
Right, so, onward! Onward to the red jello project, with clucking, blood dripping chickens in the background.
But the problem was nagging me: if these chickens had frostbite, what was to prevent the other chickens from getting it? Obviously the coop was not warm enough.... Once the jello project was over, I began Operation Heat the Coop, something I swore I would never do. (Read too many stories about people who lost an entire flock when the heat lamp went out one night. But the way these Leghorns were bleeding, I was afraid I was going to lose them for lack of any heat source in the coop.)
Armed with a ladder, screwdriver, hammer, heat lamp and copious amounts of outdoor extension cords, I trudged out to the coop. An hour or so later, a heat lamp had been MacGyvered in the coop and was radiating warmth. I covered the roof of the coop, too, hoping that extra insulation would help keep the heat in. But the poor Leghorns were still bleeding: they needed more time in the house, time for their combs to heal and their spirits to calm. I decided they would stay the night...and maybe the next day.
Now that the chickens had been taken care of, I moved on to the laundry. Five loads in, the washer began making a terrible grinding and banging sound. Five loads of laundry is enough, right? We'd make it the rest of the week....
When Jim came home I told him about the washing machine's horrible noise. We both looked at each other with dread. The previous owners of our house must have done home improvements when they were drunk because they literally built the washer and dryer into the bathroom: the only way to get either one out is to break down a wall. No joke. Not an exaggeration. There was no way to pull the washing machine out from the wall even an inch. Before a repair man can take a look at it, we'd first have to take a sledgehammer to the wall. And neither of us have the energy for that.
"Here's what we're going to do," Jim told me. "It still works, right? The thing still turns? Great. We're going to use it until it doesn't work at all, until it's totally broken. Then we'll take it out in pieces and throw it away."
I didn't want to point out the obvious flaw in his plan--how would we get the new washing machine IN?--so I kept quiet. The day had been bad enough.
A banged up car, bloody chickens and a broken washing machine--and it was only Monday!
Hello, Week From Hell.
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