Chickens + Keller = spooked

Our friend Bob has a friend who has Urban Chickens. He lives in MPLS and has chickens in his back yard. I hadn't seen this around here (meaning, Rochester) until the other day.

Keller and I are were out on a jaunt on the trail that goes up the hill on 50th Ave NW and then after about 1/5 of a mile on 65th ST NW, goes back down the hill, through a nice residential neighborhood. By the way (tangent): it's one of my favorite trails in town because on the east side it's houses, but on the west side of the trail, it's all open, rolling fields. Dave first discovered it last year and Keller loves it - he'd usually come home and take Keller "up the hill" to run off some energy. In the winter, it was a double workout, because you'd have to punch through snow up to your knees to move up there. There's a small mountain that Dave nicknamed "The Ant Hill" that Keller likes to run up and you can look over the city from. It's pretty cool.

Anyway, we usually let her off her leash and let her go hog wild on that trail, so that's what I did as usual the other day. Keller runs up to this one house's small looking shed that backs up right to the trail, sniffs around it, and all of a sudden, MAJOR MOHAWK and LUNGE backwards. The mohawk gets bigger and she advances, in trepidation, back toward the shed. More scuttling backwards. Just when I think the mohawk can't get any bigger, it does. Here to find out, the small shed is a chicken coup, and there's about a dozen chickens inside clucking around. Keller is freaked. I nearly died laughing. It reminded me of the movie "Homeward Bound" where the dog Chance or whatever his name was finds the porcupine or something, or skunk. Just hilarious.

Yesterday we went out for a run, post Hoff canceling our run due to allergies. Keller had been lagging most of it, tired from a play date with Santi the day before. We were about 3 miles into it and I wasn't quite sure how much further she'd go, but I pushed her a little more up the hill to go home. On 50th Ave, I see Dave's car go by, and he waves. I say to Keller, "Where's dad? Is that daddy?" and those magical words never fail. She perked right up and bolted the rest of the way home.

Never fail to get a laugh out of Keller's crazy antics. :)