This is my favorite chicken, whom I call Chicken Lady. She used to belong to my neighbor, but she eventually moved into my carport instead. She has a lot of moxie; she will come in through the front door or the cat door given any chance at all. This video I took yesterday shows about 2 minutes in our relationship.

I like her a lot, but every night at twilight she was settling in atop my air conditioner, you know how they stick out the window. It turns out that air conditioners have vents in the top, and also that chickens have a “vent” called the “cloaca,” which has two channels: one for eggs to come out and one for everything else to come out. Now, Lady Chicken is laying eggs in the big doghouse, so no worries there, relatively speaking. But the “everything else” just tends to come out wherever a chicken is, for instance atop my air conditioner.

So she had to stop sleeping there. But—and this is the main problem with living on Earth—if I move her, I could cause disaster for my chicken friend. I mean, she picked the air conditioner as a nighttime spot because she thought it was safe. Who am I to figure out what is safe for a chicken outdoors at night? She could die because I don’t want chicken shit in my air conditioner. I make a ton of decisions like this every day, like do I rescue the big bug that three cats are poised to tear apart? Who knows.

So anyway, I cleaned up the carport (and my yard!) the other day, and rearranged some shelves to try to make an appealing area for Chicken Lady next to but not on the air conditioner. And then I put heavy stuff atop the air conditioner to crowd Chicken Lady out. She spent the first couple nights successfully knocking some of the heavy stuff off, and settling into a smaller air conditioner space, so I had to escalate and pile a bunch more stuff. She finally gave up; last night she settled in the carport atop a small ice chest I had arranged atop a shelf; I don’t know if she’ll be safe or raccoon-food. And meanwhile where’s my order of Chicken Nuggets?