This weekend was promising to be a busy one! Friday included work, pick up the young ‘un, grab some dinner to go, pick up our grocery pick up order, home to feed animals, eat dinner, bake some cupcakes, and relax a wee bit before an even busier Saturday.
Things went mostly as planned and then I started wearing out a little. So I sat on my butt after dinner and didn’t put the chickens away when it got dark. Around 8:20 I finally went out to lock up their door and collect the eggs. As I rounded the corner of the building I shone my flashlight in the door to the chicken coop. Low and behold, there’s a stinking opossum in there! Just standing there eating chicken feed from the hanging feeder. For those of you who don’t know, opossums will eat your eggs and kill your chickens (I’ve heard it can be rather graphic). I move over to grab a shovel so that I can at the very least scare him out the little chicken door and check on my girls. That’s when I hear a rustling behind me in the corner. I look over expecting another opossum and there, out from behind the chicken crate and live traps (ironically), pokes a little skunk nose! A SKUNK!!
I didn’t know what else to do except to quietly and quickly slip through the door into the chicken coop with the opossum. So now I’m trapped in a 5′ by 10′ room in the dark WITH a opossum BY a skunk! A slow and nerve-wracking scan of the area assured me that the opossum snuck out the little back door while I was coming in the front. Wheewww! But then I’m still stuck in there not sure how to get out alerting my skunk friend to my presence. I was regretting leaving my cell phone in the house. Ed was at work but if it came down to it then I could have texted him to come save me. I stood in there behind the wall for a good five minutes, scanning the outside with my flashlight until I thought that maybe he was gone. I hoped he had slipped out into the night unseen. (The end of the building is one big open doorway.) So I went out, chained the door behind me, released the rope to close the tiny chicken door (it’s similar to a doggy door but with a drop down door that is controlled with a rope that comes up and over the rafters) and stood there looking around with my flashlight. Wouldn’t you know- our sneaky little friend skunk walks around a straw bale and right up to me and then saunters behind me. He didn’t seem to even notice me, or my flashlight. I didn’t know if I was about to be sprayed or if he was going to suddenly turn and lunge at my calves like the bunny with the big nawshing teeth from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I took a step forward. And then another and another. Then I ran! I ran all the way back to the house! Of course I couldn’t leave well enough alone so I went inside and got a better flashlight and then made wide circles around the front of the chicken shed to see if I could spot him again. It’s been a long time since I’ve come that close to peeing my pants!
That’s when I decided I needed to just slow down and bake my cupcakes so they’d be cool to decorate in the morning. I was making poop emoji cupcakes for a 40th birthday party. I had gone overboard at the grocery store for St Patty’s Day and bought a box of Guinness cupcakes that I knew I wouldn’t have time to bake that weekend. I figured this was the perfect audience for some chocolate stout cupcakes since I still magically had a can of Guiness in the frig. Pull the box out of the cabinet only to see that one box makes eight cupcakes. I needed 24. It was 8:45. A quick call to The Pit Stop (gas station/convenience store/lunch hangout) revealed that they had one box of milk chocolate cake mix and I had 15 minutes to get there.
I baked my cupcakes and called it a night. I was done!
P.S. My poop emoji cupcakes turned out awesome!
