As I mentioned in my last post, we spent the weekend at the lake. The region suffered some SEVERE storms, so the whole way home, Lee and I were checking out down trees and other random damage.
I have blogged before about our "man coop" in our yard. The coop is at the front edge of our property. Directly behind the coop is a large fence. The other side of the fence is our neighbor's back yard. It's kind of a weird setup. Anyway, our neighbor has a shed right there and he keeps some chickens in there. (Yes, we live in Indiana.)
My mom had stopped by our house to feed our cats for us and had texted me to say that the neighbor's shed had some damage from the storm. When I pulled into our driveway, I couldn't believe my eyes! "SOME DAMAGE" was that 3/4 of the shed was completely gone. No trace of any chickens. Rubble everywhere. Our fence was torn down. There was a hole, A HOLE, in the back of the man coop. OMG.
I was still trying to figure it all out. How did the storm do so much damage to just this little space, but nothing around it was touched. As I was pondering this, Lee pulled up and said "I'm pretty sure it was a car." And he was right.
About 5 houses down from our house is a restaurant/bar. It is a pretty high class place. Lee and I went there for my birthday last year and it was definitely not cheap! So, apparently, last night some dude was slightly over served and veered off the road, went through our neighbors yard (as you can see here) and slammed into our other neighbors chicken shed. 
Here is the view that the driver would have seen. Although, I'm guessing the guy was seeing double. He literally made it ONE TENTH of a mile before he wrecked. That's pretty bad! 
I had texted Lee to say that the coop was damaged and he just wrote back "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO". Unfortunately, it is true. 
Look at all this rubble. Geez o pete! The neighbor was out when I was checking things out and I asked about his chickens. He said that he had found two of them, but the other two were missing. He said that he expected they were at the bottom of this pile of stuff. Poor chickens! 
This is from the inside of our coop. We have been storing our new kitchen cabinets in there and I think one of them may have been damaged. This drunk dude is going to pay for that! We have pieced together the story from our various neighbors. Everyone wants to chat about it! Apparently, the guy lives about eight tenths of a mile up the road in his mom's house (cool). As I said above, he didn't make it one tenth of a mile before he was off the road. He went all the way through one yard before smacking into the chicken shed. After the wreck, he ran. On foot. So... He left his car. Our neighbor immediately called the sherriff and gave him the license plate number. They went down and picked him up at his mom's house. Lee has lots of plans and dreams for how much money we might get to fix the coop. I'm guessing we're not going to get much and we're going to have to fight for it. The good news is, half of Lee's family is in the insurance biz, so we do have some good advice.
This evening, I happened to glance out in our yard. I saw something move under one of our big bushes. A CHICKEN! And not just one, but BOTH chickens! They survived! Lee and I went out and tried to catch them to give them back to our neighbor. Those buggers are FAST! So, that was a failure. So, for now, we have two chickens running around our yard. The neighbor thinks they'll head back down to his yard tonight. I guess we'll see... If not, I guess we've got some new pets!
