How To Ruin A Perfectly Good Blog Post Before Typing A Single Word

My wife has been talking about chickens for I don’t even remember how long. And I don’t mean “Damn, I could sure go for some of that Top Notch fried chicken action about now.” No, I’m talking more like “Oh dear sweet husband, wouldn’t it be wonderful to have our very own chickens bok-bok-bokking about our back yard? Don’t you want to build me a chicken coop in which our chickens may live? What should our chicken coop look like? What kind of chickens should we get? Don’t you love the idea of a fridge full of freshly laid eggs? Aren’t chickens the best? Can we get them this weekend? Do you like this chicken coop design? What about this one? Yes, I’ll have the chicken enchiladas with verde sauce, please.”

Actually, that last one was just her order at Chuy’s a while back.

I don’t mean to make my wife sound like she was nagging me about it, except, reading that first paragraph up there, it seems like I sorta did. Sorry babe. I mean yeah, there was a lot of chicken chatter going on around our place (oooo baby, speak hen to me), but that was just a result of her excitement. I did offer up one design for a chicken coop, but in my zeal to provide privacy for up to four hens, it kind of ended up looking like a swastika. Ultimately, I left all the research and design up to her, as I simply was not as into it as she was. This was her project, but I would be available for any grunt work that needed doing.

Nice typo, loser

Finally this past weekend, we commenced with coop construction. I had not exactly been looking forward to it, but there really was no reason to put it off any longer. Things got off to a fantastic start. The day brought us gorgeous working weather, and before too long, we had the walls of the henhouse constructed. Now chickens are not what you would call high-needs creatures when it comes to their habitat. They need an outdoor area, an indoor area, a roost, a place to lay eggs, and protection from predators. They don’t necessarily need every corner to fit together perfectly or for every angle to be a perfect 90.0 degrees. And it’s a good thing too since most of my education in the art of construction occurred in a theatrical scene shop where it’s common to hear exchanges such as:

“These ends aren’t square at all.”
“That’s cool, that part doesn’t face the audience.”

Or

“This board’s a little weak, should we reenforce it?”
“Nah, the only person that stands on it is that anorexic chick in the first act.”

So while my work wasn’t 100% perfect, I still strove to do a halfway decent job. I was enjoying the work of bringing wood and hardware together to create a recognizable and functional form. Plus, you know, power tools. Fuckin’ A. 
 
I’m going to write about this, I thought. How I wasn’t all that excited to build this damn coop, but then I got started and I began enjoying myself and getting into the satisfaction of a job done well or at least mostly pretty much okay and what a great day it was and how nice the boys played together while I worked and look how badass I am and here’s a picture of me with a circular saw. It’s gonna be positive and wonderful and I bet five whole people will read it.

All this wonderfulness? It did not last. 

This is where we get to the part about blog post ruination, because you see, the key to ruining a post like this lies in your ability to ruin your day. Somewhere in the afternoon, stuff started going wrong. We figured out that, surprise surprise, we didn’t have everything we needed and that a trip to Home Depot was inevitable. The boys stopped playing so nicely. Frustrations mounted. Alone, these things are not enough to ruin your day. In order to do that, you have to respond to them by losing your patience in the grass. You have to toss your sense of humor over the fence into the neighbor's yard like a toy dumptruck. You have to take every little setback far too seriously so you can get yourself good and pissed off. You have to yell at your kids. You have to let your entire mood go sour, and then you have to carry that shit with you on into the evening. That’s how you do it.

Guess I won’t be writing that happy chicken coop post after all, I thought.

All is not lost, however. The coop stands in the yard unfinished, not due to abandonment but simply because we ran out of weekend. We got as far as painting it with a color that I like to call taco stand yellow. We’ll finish the coop soon and we’ll name it something clever like the Henhouse de la Holmes or the Coop de Ville or Jurassic BOK! We’ll stand back and admire our work and hope that it’s up to the task. We will acquire our hens and bring them home to live in the lovely new home that we’ve built for them, and they will show us their gratitude by bokking out fresh eggs for us.

And it will all be okay.