This morning our largest, blackest, boofiest chicken Georgia came inside and pooped on the carpet. Our displeasure was compounded by the fact that Georgia has lately ceased contributing to the family omelettes.An unproductive chicken is bad enough; an unproductive carpet-pooping chicken is distinctly worse.
This afternoon, while I was fossicking about under the bushes by the house for the tap, I came across a clutch of three Georgian eggs. (Arial’s are smaller, and Lucida and Wingdings lay green ones, so the forensics weren’t hard to figure out.)
“Aha!” thunk I. “Sneaky beast.”
And then I looked a little further under the bushes, and found a further clutch of twenty-five.
Cheered by the thought that virtue had been its own reward (I had been trying to turn on the hose to hoosh cobwebs off a broom), I gathered them up in a pleasingly Anne-of-Green-Gablesy bowl and brought them inside for inspection. The floating test proved satisfactory - several of their blunt ends bobbed up, but not far enough to cause alarm, according to the internet, and none of them floated.
The internet also recommended the slosh test, however. Sloshy egg bad, silent egg good. So I tried that. Smeg. Several sloshes.
Ach well, I thought, I’ll test them all now and make up a big ol’ smegload of ice creams and custards, and we shall Feast Like Kings.
Which was all very well till an egg exploded.
It was quite interesting, really. Someone online had described rotting eggs as “the worst smell you’ve ever smelt”, and initially I thought she was overstating it a bit. I’ve been on field trips to Rotorua, I can deal with sulfur. But no. The smell sort of… seeps. It is insidious, like the gradual adoption of secular humanism as an unofficial state religion. And the egg was green. I didn’t realise that was an actual thing.
Anyway, after a heroic battle with my glottis, I persevered. Several more of the eggs had half-congealed into a clotted, opaque mass - and they weren’t all in the “iffy” pile either, which just goes to show the float test isn’t worth the pixels it’s displayed with - but none had managed to attain the heights of festering putrescence as Explodey Egg. (Or our love.)
In the end we salvaged eight edible yolks. It might have been more - the smell of rotting egg was still lingering in the air, disrupting my sensors - but it didn’t seem like the time to be daring. So we can make one batch of ice cream. I think I’ll make it chocolate and give it all to Helpdesk Man. Because I’m Noble.
As we finished sorting the eggs, Tiny Miles pooped. It is noteworthy that the smell was comparatively pleasant.
In other news, if anyone should come visit and just happen to tread heavily on Georgia’s neck, it would not be taken amiss.
rbjaneite Says:
Mara Says: