Sequences

If you are a loyal Patrick McManus fan, you will know what sequences are. If you don't know who Patrick McManus is then you need to do more serious reading. Go to Amazon.com and buy some Patrick McManus books, he is a very famous author to some of us. Sequences are the things that happen to you along the way when you start out to do something simple. One thing leads to another and you get caught in a tangled web of sequences.

Most of the time sequences are very bad things. But every once in a great while, good sequences come along and that is what happened to us on Monday. My chicken obsessed cousin was still wanting more chickens and especially if they were free. So we planned to go back to the place where I got my new chickens for free, they also had a pair of peacocks just the color that his mother had been wanting. We planned to leave here for the long 50 mile trip on Monday evening.

At some point during the day on Monday someone called us looking for a big AQHA horse that was broke to ride. My Husband took the call and told him about Joe, who is a large 4 yr. old palomino gelding who we had broke last winter by Mark Burnette. Mark had said that he never bucked or did anything wrong but he had only put 30 days of riding on him and we had never been on him since we brought him home. My Husband told the man that we were coming right down to the area where he lived and if he wanted to see him and try him out, we could bring him with us.

It all happened so quickly that we were a little bit in shock, we needed the money to pay for this year's hay and hadn't been having much luck selling horses this year. So we met the man just a few miles from where the chickens were located and he tried him out, then bought him. We then proceeded to the peacocks and hens.

None of us had ever handled peacocks before and we had no clue how to go about it. Needless to say the poor peacock hen lost a few feathers and we discovered that peacocks can be very nervous and flighty. We then caught 8 Barred Rock hens for my cousin and he decided that he also wanted the very large, stately looking Barred Rock Rooster.

At some point on the trip home my cousin started worrying about the rooster. He already has several roosters and his Dad has roosters too. So he started lamenting about how his Dad was going to kill him. Being the wonderful person that I am, I told him that I would take the rooster, to which my Husband said a flat, NO!

My cousin only had one large cage that would fit in the back of his Jeep, to take all of the hens and peacocks home in. So I had told him that he could leave whatever wouldn't fit here and he could pick them up whenever he got a chance. I quietly told him that the rooster wouldn't fit.

All of the chickens that we got had bad cases of leg mites, so I gave my cousin a syringe of Eprinex and told him to put 1/2 mL on the skin on the back of each hen between their wings, then to coat their legs with some type of oil or salve, Vicks Vaporub is the best but vasoline will work, I used Avon Skin-So-Soft on my new hens and on the big rooster who we put in a dog cage for the night, right outside the door that goes into our house.

My DH told my cousin before he left to make sure to come back and get the rooster as soon as possible. The next morning at 5:00, we were awakened by a man with a deep, gravelly voice imitating a rooster's crow. That is what my new rooster sounds like, it isn't a pleasant sound, but I suppose that I will get used to it.