It’s a “mystery”!
Some of you will have heard me grizzle earlier this week about the little turds from across the street coming onto our property when we weren’t there, playing silly-buggers in the pool area and chicken coop, and allegedly stealing the eggs. Well, it got worse before it got better.
On Wednesday night, when Rusty went to lock the chookies in for the night, he came back to the house for a torch, because he couldn’t find one of the girls. She has been really broody, a side-effect of which is that she is very docile, and easy to pick up. We feared then that she had been stolen (chooknapped?), but unfortunately had no proof. This didn’t stop R from marching over the road in a contained fury and confronting the turds about Monday’s trespass, to which they blithely claimed that that they were not guilty. This was, of course, patently untrue, because they had been seen and identified by our next-door-neighbour (who we like), and they shut up pretty quickly when presented with this information. So, without resorting to trespass ourselves in search of evidence, we assumed the inevitable – we had lost another chook.
When I got home from work on Thursday night, however, R tells me that the broody chook is back. Apparently, she had been found next door, in the garden of the Nice Neighbour. Now, there’s no way on god’s green earth that she could have got over there under her own steam, and given that she rarely ventures out of the chook house these days, there’s no way she would have tried. This is interesting, though, because we had locked or wired shut the gates down the side and along the front of the carport, so there’s no way that anyone could get into our backyard without a) making a lot of noise and b) being really obvious about it. So, we are thinking that the Great Chicken Bandits (aka turds) took the next best option of returning our property (now that they knew they were under extreme suspicion) was to sneak it into the unlocked backyard of the people next-door.
So, in the end, no real harm was done. Nonetheless, this is still a real betrayal. We have been pretty good to those kids – we have lent them tools and household articles pretty much whenever they have asked, I gave them a bicycle that was given to me that I was never going to ride, R has helped them with projects on occasion – and our repayment was trespass and petty theft (it makes me wonder about a bunch of other things that seem to have gone “missing”, including one of the new passionfruit seedlings that was at the bottom of the driveway). It’s pretty sad, isn’t it? You think you’re building trust and respect, but instead you’re just making yourself into a chump to be taken advantage of. Fucking people.
On an interesting note - I wrote the text of this blog at work using Outlook (it was a ghost town there today) and I was a bit surprised at what spellcheck picked up, as well as what it didn’t. Turds, which is a word in use in pretty much all of the English speaking countries in the world, got a squiggly red underline. Chooks, on the other hand, which I’m pretty sure is an Australianism* unrecognised anywhere offshore (with perhaps the exception of New Zealand) did not. Weird.
*Australianism, which is a real word, in the same way that Americanism is a real and recognised word, also fails the MS spellcheck test. The first suggested alternative is Australianise, which, as far as I am concerned, is not a real word, and is something that someone in the spellcheck office merely pulled out of their arse...
