Nine Days, Eight Chickens

Huckleberry coffee in the Chicago skyline mug, the hum of the studio fans and the traffic outside for my morning music. Today is the first of the single-digit days in the countdown to the deadline for the completion of my manuscript. I am exhausted. My mother (my scribe) is exhausted. Dee (the book minion and one of the studio elves) is exhausted. Exhaustion is rampant. And yet, I, at least, am also exhilarated. Barring unforeseen catastrophe, and with all requisite knocking on wood, I will finish on time. I have 191 pages of text out of 240, and we have been cranking out 6-12 pages a day for the past week or so.

But hubris is ever the nemesis. I no sooner wrote the above paragraph than I discovered Baxter had been left in the backyard. With the chickens. And then there were eight. We mourn Willow, and I dread telling Jessie when she gets home. It took time, a shovel and a pick-ax--and I still didn't get very deep--but Willow is laid to rest in the bamboo with a very large rock over her grave. And wasn't I the one who was contemplating eating our girls at some point when they grew old? Guess that's right out when I am this undone by the end of one. And Baxter. Now that he's killed one, he can never be let out into the yard with them again. I'll need to find time this weekend to fix the front yard gates so they both close easily and he can be let out there.


Now I need to gather myself back together and get on with work. Oh this is hard.