OK, so life has been rather hectic lately, yeah, like that’s any different from normal, but I’m using it as my excuse for not blogging for the past month. Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to catalogue several things about myself that I never would have guessed could ever be possible when I started college. We’re not going to mention how many years ago it was that I was in college, that would be a bit too revealing, and perhaps a little depressing.

In no particular order: 1) I have birds in my back yard. Now, I’m not referring to black birds, pigeons or sparrows, though I do get all of those in and out. No, I’m referring to farm animals: chickens, ducks and geese.

Yeah, I never, not in a million years, would have expected to own farm animals, and to be vexed that my chickens (I’m positive I have hens, several in fact) seem to be refusing to lay any eggs. What do they think I raised them up for anyway? According to all of the official calendars, I should have been getting eggs for the past couple weeks, at least hit and miss. Have I come across a single one? No. So I guess I need to find that power timer thingie I bought a few weeks back and add a little more light to the situation.

Did you know hens lay best when they have fourteen hours of light each day? Well, considering the time of year, I suppose a little supplemental light wouldn’t go amiss. And maybe I can stop making forty-dollar shopping trips because I ran out of eggs.

2) Sitting on my sofa, right this very moment, are CPR practice dummies. What are they doing there, you might ask? They’re not for my husband to practice on. Oh no, his being married to an EMT-Intermediate seems to have rubbed off on me. I’m starting an EMT training course in a couple weeks. In the meantime I’m taking HIPPA classes, CPR classes, and earlier this evening I was learning how to do intubations on toddlers in a training Primary Children’s Medical Center organizes. Not that I’ll be doing them as an EMT-Basic, but that’s beside the point.

3) Speaking of farm animals, no I don’t live on a farm, I live in town. My home town. The one I grew up in and graduated high school from. Never would I have thought I could possibly end up back here. And even in my wildest dreams, I wouldn’t have thought that I would love being back in my home town. But I do. Granted, it would be nice to be able to go to a play more than three times a year. And the local theater only does shows Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Monday nights. One show each week. That’s it. But then again, who has time to go to the movies?

4) Over the course of my marriage, I have become a landscape designer. Er, well, I design my own landscape, anyway. And do the vast majority of the grunt work. We bought a new house last winter and I put in garden beds in the spring, which have grown a profusion of flowers and the biggest monster tomato plants in history.

Right now we have two trenches in the back yard that I need to run pipe and wire through before I back fill them, then lay my flagstone patio. When that’s done I have more garden beds to build, along with a pond to complete planning and put in, a pergola, a zillions trees . . . . I guess you get the picture. And that’s all before I stat dealing with sprinkling systems and grassing my bare ground. Oh, and don’t get me started on fencing. I could write whole novels about my fencing woes, but that’s best saved for another blog.

5) Last, but not least, there’s writing. If I had any clue back when I started college that I might want to write books some day, I would have taken a few more creative writing courses. As it is, I took only the bare minimum writing courses in college—only what I had to have for my lit major. But when I started college, I didn’t think I was doing English at all, so I suppose I couldn’t have been prepared for my eventual career direction. Now if I can just come up with a story idea using a EMT who moves back to their home town to raise stubborn chickens and take over a weed-infested yard, I can take advantage of all the directions my crazy world has led me in.