On My Way Home

I got an e-mail yesterday at work from Rich, the director of the Refuge. He is a cop and was on duty for 36 hours straight, so he asked me to stop by the Refuge – which is actually his house – to shut the place down for the night.

Mostly, this involves making sure everyone is in their place, no one is bleeding (which can happen if a feather breaks awkwardly, or the bird plucks its feathers) and cover them up for the night.

I have told Rich that he should ask for help more often. He is worried about asking to much of volunteers. So when he actually asks, I do my best to be responsive. But yesterday, I really wanted to do my homework. And it was my turn to make dinner. So I compromised and told him that I would stop by on my way home from work, which meant it would still be light out when the birds were put to “bed”. He said it was ok – he would be home by the time the sun came up. How does he ever get to sleep?

So I got there about 4:15. The last set of volunteers had managed to load the dishwasher once. Because water dishes are changed out each day, this means it had to be unloaded and reloaded, and clean dishes set up for the next day’s volunteers. I sometimes feel like the only person that cares about handling this properly - our adoptions director has called me the “dish nazi”. But she wasn’t around back in the day when one load of dirty dishes meant that we had to wait around for the dishwasher just to give a bird fresh water. At 9pm, because there were only two of us and the senior volunteer didn’t get there until 6:30 on a good night.

I did the dishes and set up the trays for the next day. I checked the medication chart and saw that the two birds that get evening medications didn’t get the morning dose until 11am. Too early. Then I gave each bird an almond and covered them up. I got home shortly after 5pm, started dinner and got straight to the homework.

Compromise.