Her Side Funnies

Of course, I’m speaking of Heidi. In the last column I mentioned that she had shown up with a new boyfriend who got initiated to our clan by way of Ken’s chicken pen…er…cathedral. Jayde, as I must now call him—instead of buggar, eraser head and hey you—is a great guy. Just the kind of prospect we had hoped to pester through a Bible-length torrent of “boyfriend-break-in-pranks.”

Perhaps sensing we were up to no good, Heidi flipped the table on us mid-December by announcing she and Jayde intended to marry.

No surprise there. They were in love. It was written all over them. I was picturing three years out. Maybe we could host the reception in Ken’s chicken pen….

Then, Heidi—using logic only Heidi would use—said, “We’ve thought about this and feel that our education will be compromised if we have to attend to wedding details during our college semester.”

Good, I thought. Put this wedding talk to rest. Get a puppy instead. (more…)

I repeatedly mention that my husband is from Denver. It explains his innocence and gullibility and his resistance to accepting my core Redneck values.

Last spring we bought some chicks from the farm store. Buff Orpingtons. Golden Rolls Royce’s of the chicken world. They were cute. They were fuzzy. They quickly morphed into flapping balls of feathers coating the interior of the house with more dust than my liberal housekeeping policy allows.

A chicken house needed to be constructed, which brought the first of many misunderstandings between Ken and myself.

Ken believed that the chickens needed a far more “sturdy” home than I recognized from my childhood. My family’s chicken coop consisted of patchy chicken wire, baling string, a German Shepherd dog, and a door with a tricky latch that allowed cousins to be locked in the chicken coop for games of cowboys, Indians, robbers and jail until their mothers played squawk-n-swat, an unpopular farm game involving yelling and spanking. But, I digress. (more…)