my life as an insanity magnet...

That I could have two crazy stories to go in one post is evidence that my life calls out for crazy to happen. Well, maybe my family's life. But here is how things can go around here:

Yesterday my little brother ran into the house with "come on, come on! it's an emergency!" Rarely does this mean that there is actually an emergency, so we ask, "what is it?" His response: "there's a chicken in the backyard!" Let me say, I live in the suburbs of Chicago. In a nice little neighborhood that does not resemble a farm in any way. And we have 6-ft high stockade fence around the whole yard. So, a chicken?

But in fact, there was a chicken. A baby chick that our neighbor is tending for a school project had wandered under the fence, and was now hiding. So the hunt began. It felt like being in a sitcom, searching and poking leaves and trying to find a baby chicken in one's backyard. A long sitcom, because we looked for about an hour before finding it. But at last, he (or she) is back with their friends.

But then today brought another crazy event.

We have a room with very high ceilings. Which puts the ceiling fans at about 20 feet. This makes cleaning them and changing light bulbs a challenge. It's why we have remote controls to change the settings. But recently the remote wasn't working, and we really wanted to turn a fan on. This led to something that Lucy herself would have been proud of. Me. On a ladder. With a broom that had duct tape on the end. Which stuck to the pull chain. Leaving a broom hanging from the ceiling fan.

Thankfully I didn't laugh myself off of the ladder, and thankfully the mop got the broom down. (I kept picturing the scene from the movie I.Q., where they throw things into a tree in order to get a badminton birdie unstuck.)

The duct tape remains 20 feet up.