Amityville Horror

The Husband is jetting in today, so I’ll be pretty busy this morning trying to get the place looking as if I was busy while he was away for six weeks.

Here’s this morning’s To-Do list, and this is not a joke:
1. Pick up dog feces from driveway
2. Wash car and clean interior of residual dog vomit
3. Try to get smell of dog urine out of entry foyer
4. Pick up pieces of plastic potting containers that dogs chewed to bits and threw all over yard
5. Return, or hide embarrassing things like underwear, that Attila stole from Roger and strewed about the property
6. Return books to library.

Last night at midnight, Attila started barking wildly and wouldn’t stop. I finally had to crawl out of my warm bed and trek downstairs to see what was the matter. He was very agitated.

I was very agitated because my arrival inspired Antoinette to get up and urinate in the entryway.

Attila wanted to go outside, but I wasn’t going to let him out to wake up Therese or Roger whose bedroom windows face the direction of our place. And I wasn’t about to open the door so a visiting American mass-murderer could kill me. (France doesn’t really have mass-murderers, it’s sort of an American phenomenon.)

I went back to my bed. Attila barked until 2am.

This morning, finding it difficult to wake up because someone had woken me during my deepest REM sleep period, I plodded downstairs to find Antoinette eager to go outside, but Attila still sleeping! Usually it’s the other way around, but I guess Attila wore himself out last night.

When I went into the bergerie this morning, Soixante-Douze’s bulge around her eye socket was scraped and bloody! She literally had a black-and-blue eye. I can’t tell you how much this bothers me. 1. Soixante-Douze has this incredibly timid personality . . .even for a sheep she’s unusually timid. She doesn’t like to compete with the other sheep, and prefers to eat out of the feed bucket that I hold for her, instead of eating out of the communal feeders. So I felt very badly that someone is attacking her. Blanche, the pig, deserves any thrashing the sheep give her because of her bullying, but Soixante-Douze is the Mother Theresa of the flock. 2. I’m very bothered that I have no way of figuring out what happened, so that I might try to prevent it from happening again. I interrogated the usual suspects, Blanche and Beau, but neither of them are talking.

I can’t believe that Blanche would turn on Soixante-Douze since they have been bosom-buddies long before the other sheep arrived. However, Blanche’s personality has changed of late, and my suspicion is that Blanche punched Soixante-Douze in the eye in a barroom fight over the affections of Beau.

After Blanche, Soixante-Douze would be Beau’s most logical second choice because she’s older than the other sheep, and like Blanche, she also has an un-cut tail that would be very arousing to Beau.

So now I’m thinking that maybe Attila was barking because he heard the violent altercation taking place in the bergerie.

After that shock of the morning, I went out to feed the chickens, and was horrified to see that one of them had a patch on her side that looked as if she had been plucked! I tell you, I feel as if I’m caught in a Stephen King plot. I ran back to the house, racing past the dog turds dotting my course, the same dog turns that I had scheduled to pick up, arrived at the house panting, and quickly locked the door behind me.

Thank god the Husband is showing up today! I’ll feel safer.