You're probably wondering: just what would happen if I hooked up a bunch of balloons to a chicken. I mean wondering if it might fly, or would it not fly and simply float away with a bunch of balloons attached to it? Well, I can save you any further wondering, because someone here just launched a chicken attached to a bunch of balloons. I wouldn't exactly call it flying, at least not in the traditional sense, but it did float up a ways before being tangled in some powerlines. After the firemen and police came, they decided the only safe way to get the chicken down was to shut the power, which left 1,800 people with no power while they untangled the chicken. The whole thing took about five hours, but the chicken was fine. The chicken incident is about the biggest news around, and some local people are now lining up to adopt the chicken. Not counting the fact that my dad just got a poem published in the Christian Science Monitor, which is a pretty big deal for him, on account of it being his first big published poem, the chicken is about the biggest news around.

On the home front, not much has been happening, other than my teeth hurting. It's probably a coincidence, but I just happened to have my teeth worked on, and now they keep me up at night, hurting. I did fall asleep for a few minutes, long enough to dream that I swallowed one of my teeth. It's not that relaxing to be awake either, since the downstairs neighbor came up and complained that walking on the floor was bothering her. It's not like we can't hear the people upstairs walking around, or that we don't have a rug, but somehow having her come and say something makes me a little self conscious every time I need to cross the floor. So mostly I just try and lay low, staying awake as long as my teeth pain will sustain me.

The other big news is that theo, who has been living up at the farm nearly got eaten by a bear. And the next day, after shooting a few rounds of the shotgun at it, he was treated to a parade of a rabbit, and then 11 wild turkeys, followed by two foxes, followed by two turtles. He's a regular dr. doolittle. Only then the neighbor said a big brown bear came and ate birdseed earlier that week, plus stole some salmon off the barbeque. So the next night theo had to have some more firepower, since the .22 was strictly for hunting squirrels, and the buckshot hardly fazed the bear, and he replaced the buckshot with slugs. Tune in for the story of how he gets mauled, or arrested, since I'm told shooting a bear out of season is a 10,000 dollar fine.