Our homegrown diet is working nicely, but the chickens are threatening to derail it. Just as soon as we temporarily swore off of grocery shopping, the chickens stopped laying eggs (in the nests anyway). There goes breakfast! As happy as I am that our garden is cranking out green beans and squash at an ever increasing rate, I'm not ready to start having stir-fry for breakfast. We've had to ammend the diet rules just a little bit to allow the utilization of the oats we already had on hand as a breakfast stand in until we either convince the chickens to return to laying in the coop or find their secret stash. I spent all morning yesterday on a chicken stake out, listening intently for the sound of the "egg song", but all was quiet. I think they're on to me. Today I've switched tactics from stakeout to lockdown to determine whether or not they've stopped laying altogether or just been hiding the eggs. I'm hoping it's the latter as I don't know how to fix the former.

The chickens aren't the only creatures I've been having to work hard to be smarter than these days. We recently had a dognapping on our street which makes me even more nervous about the fact that Wilson sits up by the main road awaiting our return whenever we leave him (which is hardly ever!!), that is if he's not roaming the neighborhood looking for us. In an effort to protect him and give ourselves some peace of mind, we put Wilson in a wire dog crate on the porch the other day so we could take a short moped excursion. We returned in less than two hours to find him running across the yard to greet us. That lousy little beagle had busted out!! He somehow managed to squeeze through a space of less than two inches (of course his squeezing enlarged the space and warped the crate). That crate has housed goats, chickens and a rabbit, been trod upon by Banjo and mauled by a bear, and yet a little beagle managed to do more damage than all of them! And to top it all off, he chewed the bed inside the crate all up before escaping. Lily's appetite is her only downfall, and Wilson's is his obsessive need to be with us at all times. Like Joe said, how do you fault a dog for loving you too much? Well, fault him I won't, but I still have a need for his safety and my peace of mind. As much as I've always said that nothing makes me sadder than a dog on a chain, it looks like that's the only option we're left with - a very strong, chew proof chain. If he finds a way to escape from THAT, we will rename him Houdini and become very rich.