Monday, May 24, 2010

Absolved and Yet Another Rooster..

Hi all,

This morning we discovered that the car keys are missing. And guess who used them last on Saturday? Yup. So I spent good random chunks of my day scouring throughout the house for them. I used the spare set to unlock (which confused me, because I swear that I left it unlocked...) the van and searched through that...twice. It was really starting to drive me nuts, and we finally had to tell the neighbors to be on the lookout for a set of keys. As I was headed down to the play tonight, I ran into a neighbor co-worker who informed me that: they were hanging in their house. Um, ok?

So I went and got it for my little adventure with the roosters, only to find out that I'd certainly not been the last one to drive it! And because we have one very small housemother in the neighborhood, I know exactly who it was. So I am thus "absolved" as deemed by my housemother. Although she apparently checked the other house twice. I'm guessing that the other housemom used it, forgot to put it back and sent them up with someone who put it in the wrong house. At any rate, it was good to get them back.

At any rate: the rooster. Now the interloper rooster is still long gone, but we still had 2. The non-dominant rooster is an unhappy guy, and has been getting more and more vocal about it. Housemom finally placed an ad for giving him and the one hen who likes him away. She got a response last week, and they were supposed to tag along to school today. However, housemom tried to be nice and put some food in with them in the carrier (caught last night), and they made a run for it. So I volunteered to drive them out to the new home. Obviously in my own self-interest, although the dehumidifier in my room drowned it out at 3:30 this morning...

So I found myself leaving at 9 with some mapquested directions that looked complicated. I figured out the way until the very end, trying to find the house. I turned around at one point and went back to the last lit house that I thought it was. It wasn't. But the owner knew exactly who I was talking about: "OH! The animal lady...". This was promising to get interesting. Luckily I was very close. I pulled up a steep driveway, home to 7 cars in various conditions and was met by "Nemo".

"Nemo" is a great pyrenees, and thus scary as fuck. I high-tailed it back to the car. I mean, honestly, someone has a wicked sense of humor. There's no way in heck that a dog that size (probably close to weighing more than me and up past my waist!) could EVER get lost. Ever. Luckily, he was reined in by a girl who couldn't have been more than 10, her little sister (8?) and little brother (6? and naked...). They swooped in to grab the pet carrier, lugging it off between the cars up the driveway. The older girl instructing her sister. They were ready to send me off when I mentioned that I'd need the carrier back. My comment on the rooster's bedraggled condition (the other rooster beat him up when he ran out of the carrier...) was met with a dismissive air. She told her sister to grab them out, and as no screams or crows ensued, she must've had some luck.

Very strange though. I never saw an adult and those kids were up late, although they're apparently homeschooled.

Anyhow, the rest of my day wasn't nearly as strange. We had to eat breakfast early for a hall event, which was a bit rough as Sam overslept. I spent at good chunk of the morning running errands but got back in time to get things ready for lunch. We left with the orientation group at noon, and it took us about 1.5 hours to get to Mechanicsville. We found the White Rose exhibition and it was very well done. Most of the Germans didn't read through the exhibit, although if that's due to a lack of interest or unease - I couldn't tell. There were also a bunch of drawings done by children from 30 countries of a white rose. Some of them were amazingly well done. In reading about the history of the group (the random or not-so-randomly chosen name), it struck me that most of them involved were my age or younger - especially those guillotined. What a horrendous end to meet. The students showed a whole new level of awareness for the German public.

The male students had all been on the Russian front and many had also seen what had happened to the Jews in Poland and France. Though not all the public had access to the forbidden materials that they did, the claim of complete ignorance is much harder to ignore. But conditioning and the need to survive with your sanity can be powerful elements in intentional ignorance. And I'm not one to judge since it's beyond my realm of imagination.

Definitely some food for thought.

Hope all is well,
Steph

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