Chickens!

Some of you know about the chicken situation in Hawaii. For those of you who don't, let me enlighten you. There are feral chickens all over Hawaii. They wander the streets and perch on fences. They act like they own the place. They crow at all hours of the day and night. Sunrise means nothing to them. The first few weeks we were here, when we lived with the Ramas, we got very little sleep because there were chickens living underneath the house. When we moved to Hauula we nearly forgot about the problem because our apartment was basically a sound chamber. Lucky us. But our apartment in Laie is the antithesis of a sound chamber. A coconut drops outside and we shudder as if it just put a hole in our floor. When the rain falls we look up to find out why we aren't getting wet (oh, right . . . the ceiling). And when the roosters crow and chase each other around the yard, we wonder if maybe they haven't found a secret entrance into our house. There really isn't much to do about it except get used to it. It took a few weeks, but they no longer wake us up at night (although they do sometimes keep us from getting back to sleep). The really weird thing, in our opinion, is that some people actually seem to like the chickens. They feed them. They keep them in their yards. They provide shelter for them. And in return, the chickens are loud, dirty, and obnoxious. Micah has taken to chasing them out of our yard whenever they get noisy. I can only hope that they don't disrupt our sanity even more when the baby is born. Maybe he will learn to fall asleep to the comforting sounds of a crowing contest between two roosters. We can only hope.