Except perhaps for the The Dude and the fact that the Academy Award for Best Director finally went to a woman, the Oscars last night were just plain boring. We watched because it’s a ritual of long standing at our place, in recent years most probably because we both welcome any excuse to nibble on hors d’oeuvres and drink champagne. Despite a connection to the film industry and the fact that we love movies, we are not really into the Hollywood thing anymore.

Sasha, dead beat from a long cold week on set, crashed at eleven thirty but I made it through to the bitter end, finding myself wishing in the cold light of day that I hadn’t wasted my time. I have a very real life to contend with and need all the sleep I can get.

.Just before Christmas last year, our friend Jo-Anne asked us to adopt her chickens as she was planning to spend the winter months elsewhere. This addition to our menagerie consisted of a rooster with five hens, a second rooster with three hens, and a little bantam named Rufus who, in order to escape the aggression of the other males, needed to be housed on his own.

Since there’s simply nothing better than a farm fresh egg, we entered the adoption joyfully and proceeded to house the two groups in separate locations, giving little Rufus the run of the barn. Because the days of winter were then so short, the man of the house hooked up light bulbs on a timer to augment the limitations of nature and provide fourteen hours of light every day.

Suddenly, the single egg that Jo-Anne had collected every morning became two, then three, then four. As the hours of daylight continue to lengthen, the count has now risen to six large beautiful brown eggs every single day. Spelled out a bit differently, this means that while I’ve been living here on my own five days a week, no fewer than forty-two of these treasures laid by our happy hens have needed to be dealt with by me every seven days. 

The problem is obvious: a person can’t eat eggs at every meal. Since others in the area sell their overflow to passers-by, there isn’t much of a market out there either. I am up to my eyebrows in eggs.

Long ago having mastered the creamy scrambled eggs cooked over a double boiler as favoured by the French, we have by now added the perfect omelette, the quiche and the souffle to our household repertoire. We have used eggs to make pie shells and challah and their whites to make Pavlovas and lovely light meringues. We have shirred eggs, devilled eggs, coddled eggs, fried eggs and baked eggs but the hens just keep bringing them on.

Yesterday in a kind of crazy ovo-desperation, I turned to the Internet, where I discovered that eggs can indeed be frozen if they are removed from the shell and beaten slightly with a little bit of salt. I put the dozen most recently produced into the freezer with glee in little containers marked with the date and the number of eggs contained within. Four more were used to make 24 mini-quiches, some of which became Oscar fare and some of which were headed for the freezer too. One I had in a sandwich for lunch. But this morning there are already five more.

When city folks hurl themselves headlong into the romance of country life, there is no existing manual for the truths that lie behind the wonders they initially behold. Nobody tells you, for example, that the roosters who greet every day with the crowing sounds you absolutely love, will kill one another (or at the very least peck out each others eyes) if not managed carefully by you. It is a job like any other.

Chickens, fed well and left to range,  lay healthy eggs, reduce parasites and add wonderful fertilizer to the soil, it’s all true. With the lacy patterns on their feathers and their soothing clucking sounds, a few chickens really should be part of anybody’s rural dream.  

But alone or as a couple, being inundated by three and a half dozen eggs every week? Maybe "dream" isn't the right word.