It seems that all I think about nowadays is either blue food for Sasha’s film gig or his pending appearance in Small Claims Court where he is being frivolously sued by the photographer, Sherman Hines. Both played a part in our weekend because it was the only time that Sasha could be here at home and that we’d have any chance at all to get caught up on anything. So, while dipping cold cuts and cheese slices in blue food dye, we reviewed the legal situation while toasting our nephew’s twenty seventh birthday with pink champagne. I guess you could say that we got a lot of bang out of the weekend buck.

In my own small world, my maiden effort at blogging, Sherman’s Behind,  apparently got itself noticed by another blogger last week, someone who writes about marketing and communication, who has suggested he’d like to include it in an article about “how the internet makes the David and Goliath story obsolete.” His readership, he tells me, is about five thousand people, but so far nothing further has happened on that front. 

In the particular situation detailed in my blog, David has yet to score a victory and Goliath keeps coming on strong, so I’m not sure I can agree with the premise anyway just yet. In the meanwhile Sasha has started a  new Facebook group called People Supporting Sasha in his Claim against Sherman Hines, so the saga continues in that universe as well. As fascinated as I am by social networking and the power of the internet to disseminate information rapidly, I am beginning to find the entire thing quite fatiguing intellectually and would far rather focus my own attentions elsewhere. If I didn’t believe so strongly in this particular struggle, I’d have packed it in a long time ago. 

When I’m not reflecting on the vagaries of the legal system. I am still enjoying myself quite a lot these days. One bit of happy news is that yet another broody hen in another habitat entirely, seems to be sitting on another clutch of eggs. This time I had the wit to turn to my friend and mentor, Ron Rogerson, of Oaklawn Farm Zoo, for some advice on how to achieve a happier outcome this time around. According to Ron, it is likely that the previous hen had, at some point in the past, eaten an egg or two and that the behaviour just resurfaced again in the barn. Cannibalism can apparently lie dormant sometimes .

With a new opportunity before us, this time we are planning to take Ron’s suggestions and handle the situation a bit differently. We will, by night, remove the broody hen and her eggs  to an apple box or bushel basket which we will then cover with a small blanket or a towel. This we will remove again to a secure and private habitat in which no other birds will be present and the hen and eggs will be left in peace. Apparently, once uncovered, the hen will hop in and out of the box (or basket) for food and water and the eggs should be quite secure until they hatch. Unless she’s another cannibal, that is. 

If that happens, we are definitely giving up.

I realized today that I haven’t posted anything here in quite awhile. Time has been flying past and my efforts at writing have been confined almost exclusively to my first blog, Sherman’s Behind, which (somewhat satirically) follows the tedious tale of Sasha’s thus far futile attempts to collect some money owed to him by the photographer, Sherman Hines. With Sasha’s claim for back salary soon coming before the Labour Standards Tribunal because of a frivolous appeal by Mr. Hines, and a forthcoming lawsuit against him in the Small Claims Court maliciously filed by Mr. Hines, we’ve been busy. Not to mention the fact that Sasha is away again working on another film. 

In the meanwhile, here in my real life, nothing worthy of a blog post has been going on although the rhythm of my days has been pleasant enough. The arrival of the dreaded black flies has also been accompanied by a number of real delights. Last week-end, using a recipe posted by a friend (and avid Martha Stewart fan) on Facebook, we enjoyed an incredibly delicious pie made from the rhubarb growing in abundance in our garden. Just outside the door we have fresh fragrant herbs to cook with, the magnolia is in bloom, the barn swallows have returned to make their nest in our hayloft, and the animals are all happy to be grazing in fields that are actually green.

In the barn for the past few weeks a broody hen sat faithfully atop a clutch of eggs, a sign to us that there would soon be fledgling chicks to wonder at and care for. But the day after I returned excitedly from the Farmers Coop with a bag of chick starter and the shallow little waterer needed to keep the little birds from drowning, we discovered the mother hen smashing and eating the eggs on which she once so patiently sat. While we know that cannibalism is not uncommon among chickens, we still have no idea why this happened when it did. In any case, there will be no little chicks born here and that is sad.

There have been other poignant notes too as I watch some of our geriatric animals sinking very slowly into their ultimate decline. Especially when I’m alone here, it’s hard not to think about these things constantly and I do. Scully, one of the four old cats, has become incontinent, howling madly in the middle of the night for reasons only she can discern. Thalia, one of our original sheep, is now so arthritic that she spends most of her time lying down. Kacha, at twenty-one the oldest of the llamas, is terribly thin despite a ravenous appetite and spends her days apart from the others in a strange quiet world of her own. It is only a matter of time.

On the personal front, I’ve renewed (encore une fois) my resolution to become a regular at our local gym and for the last several weeks have made frequent appearances there. Usually I go with a friend, which by definition, suggests kinship of spirit and often likeness of thought. This morning, however, while the two of us were torturing ourselves on the treadmill, we were joined by three ladies from the small community in which the gym resides and I recognized all over again how very different I am from the indigenous inhabitants of this place. Slightly smug in demeanour, more comfortable in their tanned and toned skins than we are, much farther to the right politically, and entirely too interested in the business of others, they scared the pair of us half to death. 

Disinclined to speculate on the sex lives of our neighbours and disagreeing (as we both do) that all the people incarcerated in Canadian prisons should be deployed to die in Afghanistan so that “decent” people don’t have to, my friend and I resolved to try for a different time slot next time. There’ll be iPods and ear buds involved too -  just in case.

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.