Days Off

I like to think the Universe and I have an understanding about our relationship. It likes to fuck with me just for the fun of it sometimes, and I like to laugh about it after I’m done shaking my fist at the sky and swearing. It works for us.

The last few days have been a great example of this. I’d been planning to taking just a couple of days off from my day job to hang around the farm, so leading up to those days the Universe made sure I would really appreciate them. Or maybe this is just the price you pay for trying to mess with the natural order of things and save a pair of tiny little Nuggets that otherwise wouldn’t have made it.

I really didn’t know what the hell to do with them when I went to work, and I couldn’t just leave them home to starve, so, this happened…

Yep. Just driving through the pouring down rain with a couple of little birds in a basket next to me. That’s normal.

Just about the time everyone who works with me and saw a basket of birds on my desk was convinced that my descent into tragic bird-lady madness was inevitable, I found a nature rehab center in Ohio that would take the little guys and foster them.

This was also about the time the heat lamp I brought died, so I jumped in my car to take them to the wildlife center between meetings, turned the heat in my car up to 85 to keep them as warm as possible, and got about half way there before this:

I don’t know if I can really describe to you what I looked like at this point, but imagine, if you will, I’d been sweating my ass off in an 85-degree car for 20 minutes, then did a lot of punching the steering wheel and swearing, then spent another fifteen minutes changing a tire in the pouring down rain, and, at that point, had exactly 20 minutes to get back to work before my next meeting.

I did what any reasonable person would do at a time like this: called my mother.

She got a heating pad warmed up while I drove as fast as I could on my little doughnut tire to her house, we did a baby-bird hand off like we were running some kind of relay race, and she delivered them to the wildlife center while I ran back to work.

Mom saved the day, and all this ordeal cost me was the price of a new tire and one really bad hair day. As far as I know the babies are doing just fine.

Well played, Universe.

This morning when I woke up I just laid there for a minute and reveled in the fact that there was not currently a crisis that needed my attention. The Nugs are all safe, the cat is sunning himself on the floor, the donkeys are napping outside the window…

(I really need to add “scraping old paint of the windows” to my list.)

My car has four working tires. The tractor has fuel in it. I’ve got fresh produce galore.

And I don’t need to leave the farm today.

Yes, off the top of my head I could list a hundred projects that need to be done on this property, but for just a few days I’m going to focus on the work and not the feeling that there’s something else I should be doing, or that I’m not doing enough. That’s enough of a vacation for me.