First splice, Sweet baby Lola

My 200 feet of bury rated ethernet cable showed up yesterday.  I wanted to see if I would be able to pull up the cable from the unused jack in our bedroom.  I was up in the hot and itchy attic while Cindy was in the bedroom.  I had her tapping on the ceiling so I could home in on which cable I was looking for.

Once I found the wire, which was smack underneath some AC ducts, I gave it a tug to see if it would be possible to pull the wire up the wall.  There was no give at all in the wire.  I recalled when we wired the house we secured the CAT 5 to the metal studs so I wasn’t surprised I couldn’t pull it up.

Plan B was to cut the wire in the attic and put a new cat 5 connector on it, something I haven’t had to do for many many years.  I dusted off my old metal tool case that had all of my cabling tools and printed out a diagram as a reference for 568B wiring since the pin out order is something I forgot long ago.  After some tedious work I was able to get the wires into the connector and crimped in place.  I brought one of my timing boxes out to the garage, connected it to the wire and was able to ping it through the network meaning my surgery had been successful.  The next steps will be this weekend where I hopefully can snake the wire out the side of the house and all the way to the coop in the backyard.

So when I got home from work yesterday Cindy told me that Lola was not doing well.  She said she stayed in the coop all day and did not want to eat.  When Cindy told me she didn’t even eat a blueberry when it was offered to her I knew it was serious.  When I went out to see her it was obvious things were not good.  She had her eyes closed mostly and she periodically was moving her neck around and making noises that almost were like coughing.  The dramatic downturn was surprising, especially since on Wednesday Cindy said Lola was doing well (for her), eating and drinking quite a bit.  Hell Lola had a starring role in a video Cindy shot about cleaning chickens with dirty butts that same day.

Obviously Cindy was very upset and so was I although I told Cindy that I think we both knew this outcome was coming.  Lola first started acting sick at the end of April when she no longer was able to hop up to the nesting boxes or onto a perch.  When the symptoms persisted we took her to the vet when we were afraid she may have had Mareks disease.  We never found out definitively if she had it but we did find out she had parasites in her poop which we treated. After she was dewormed she had some mild improvement but never came close to returning to normal.  Despite her weighing less than a pound and a half she walked like she weighed much more.  Each step looked deliberate, labored, and slow.

So anyway I carried the nesting box Lola was sitting in outside, telling Cindy I think she would like that.  I gently petted her head as I carried her out.  I told Cindy we should keep her inside with us last night since it seemed like the end was near.  Cindy agreed we could bring her in after we ate dinner.  More storms were starting to roll in so we put Lola back in the coop before we went in to eat.

The storm was quite strong, dumping large amounts of rain in a short amount of time.  After it subsided I went outside to get the chickens settled into the coop for bed and to bring Lola inside.  When I opened the door to the coop I saw Lola had her head tucked down out of view.  I knelt down and touched her back while gently while saying her name.  She felt still and did not respond at all to my touch.  I moved her a little bit and still had no response.  When I picked her up the cold realization came over me that Lola had died in the brief time period we were inside.  Feelings of guilt and sorrow rushed in.

I held her in my arms, petting her while I walked out of the coop as Cindy was coming out to join me.  I gave her the sad news which of course devastated Cindy, who has spent countless hours and endless energy trying to nurse Lola back to health.  I cried not only over the loss of Lola but because of the pain I knew this was causing Cindy.  Lola was literally like her little feathered baby.

We decided to bury her right away.  We did so in the orchard at the base of the black raspberry bush, whose fruit Lola loved so much.  It was a somber evening as you can imagine and recalling these moments has made me grab the tissues once again.