I crossed a black cat's path

When I got home yesterday I fed the orphan as usual. He's up to a full 24 oz bottle of formula every feeding now. As soon as he eats he has to go lay down, he's so stuffed. No eggs at all today. Kristi thinks the chickens have a secret place that they lay from time to time. I think it's just an off day. We'll see. After yesterday's bonanza we thought we'd get something. It rained quite a lot over the last couple of days. I sink into the "soil" of the barnyard about an inch. I emphasize "soil" because what it really is, is sand, poop of various kinds and dirt. In that order. This is why we have shoes stashed in various places. It wouldn't do to wear shoes in the barnyard and then, say, go to dinner wearing the same shoes. People would take notice that their steaks smells a bit off today. You sure wouldn't want to wear outside shoes in the house. Of course that happens sometimes. Anyway, I went into the woods behind the barn to see how the creek looked after all the rain. Our rear property line is in the middle of a branch of Cedar Creek. The same Cedar Creek that the town of Cedar Creek is named after. If you Google "Cedar Creek" you'll get about 869,000 hits. Not a very unique name. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22cedar+creek%22
I found a wet weather pond of about 30 feet in diameter. Our soil percolates so well that I expect the pond will be gone in a day or two. Continuing on I came across a live animal trap that I had re-baited with hot dog pieces a few days ago. We have been having chickens disappear with the most obvious culprit being raccoons. We had captured one in the past and were hoping to vanquish more. Today it was not a raccoon however but a cat that was trapped. We have had a marauding black cat hanging around for months. It was a kitten when we first noticed it. It would always run when it saw us, of course if we saw it we would go get the pellet gun and start firing. Kitty was taking its life in its paws by hanging around. Please don't take this to mean we don't like cats. We certainly do. But you have to draw the line somewhere and our line is drawn on the far side of 3 cats. All precious but destined to remain a group of three. We would see the cat from time to time sneaking into the cat's shed to eat our cat food. It would eat as much as the other 3 put together. This increases our feed costs which are considerable and growing every day. The decision was made to blast it if possible. Of course we didn't have any kind of gun until recently. Now that we have one we REALLY need to practise a bit before we load it for real. So we satisfy ourselves yelling and throwing rocks. But today we caught it in the trap. It had greedily eated all the hot dogs. It's last meal. At least, at our place. I brought the trap out just as Kristi was arriving home. We were pleased to be rid of a pest. After doing a few pressing chores we took the critter about 12 miles from home and turned it loose near a creek. Then we treated ourselves to dinner at the Yacht Club.
I guess because of all the rain we saw a lot of critters in the morning. I very nearly hit a white tail deer just past our property. It was a large multi point buck that had jumped the fence on the right side of the road, ran in front of me, and because I was able to slow down in time, it then jumped the fence on the other side of the road. It was a very near miss. Kristi reported having seen frogs and a coyote that ran in front of her car and then into the brush.