Tuesday, April 9, 2013

adventure chicken like to adventure




Walk into the kitchen for a snack. Oh, there's a chicken. 
Working on the computer, turn around and there in the middle of the office, standing quietly and watching. A chicken. What's this? Nesting inconspicuously in the dining room? That.darn.chicken.

Not content with a big yard, the chickens like to escape every now and then, and usually hang around pretty close. But this hen, noooo. She's climbing the stairs, peering around doorways, jumping on beds, going next door, walking up the street, generally having a good look around.  Then she decided that the cushion on the soft couch downstairs was an EXCELLENT place to start laying eggs (and taught the other two).  Why? WHY? What kind of heated carpeted pillowed chook house did she come from? Does she want to be a human? Or just comfortable? Or is adventure chicken just a pleasure-loving opportunist with a species identity crises?

Nothing quite like sitting down and discovering a clutch of eggs next to you. Or standing on chicken doo-doo before your first cup of tea for the day. Or explaining to guests that no she's not actually allowed in the house. Vigorous fence patrols and strengthening and the chickens are laying in their perfectly adequate nesting boxes again, and sleeping in their handmade weather-proof coop. 


ps. she ended up being called 'Adventure Chicken'. 'Ninja Chicken' is good at jumping and has black feathers, and the other chicken has no such impressionable qualities and is just called 'Other Chicken'.

Friday, January 11, 2013

you chose wrong







 

Dardestly endings from 'choose your own adventure' books on this website. I loved these as a kid, and when I first saw this site I was all like 'oooooh'.. I liked flipping through pages, and seeing all of those alternate possibilities. I liked choosing how the story unfolded. I liked how darn gory the endings were.

But then I started thinking, and now that I'm all grown up it's terrifying that it happens in real life. Okay perhaps not quite as gruesomely or dramatically, and with fewer aliens.. but we choose our own adventures everyday, and we can't flip ahead, or flip back to where we were. 

I've been making big choices lately, not my usual 'what flavor chips will go best with this movie?' kind of decisions, but some big relationship-ending, do-I-move-hundreds-of-kilometres-away, alter-the-course-of-your-life kinda ones. But I don't have a crystal ball or a book to look ahead, and I can't help but wonder, 

How do you know if you chose wrong?