Egg Squeeze Me?

"Gloria!" The farmer yelled to his wife who had run back into the house to get a light bulb.

Dayo, the farmer's son, asked him what the matter was.

"The light's burned out in the incubator and the eggs won't be warm enough without it."

The poultry farm had suffered in recent years. In fact, the six geese were the last to go. He missed the hens and Gloria liked the doves but the swans were mean and the partridge was sickly anyway. They'd built an incubator to keep the goose eggs in hopes they would hatch and they could rebuild their business. Holidays Are For The Birds.

"Gloria!" he shouted louder, elongating the first syllable.

He had been teaching his son how to take care of the eggs. Every day for the last month, they went to the barn to take temperature readings and to turn the eggs. The incubator was simple and did not have a fan so it wasn't enough to take the internal temperature of the incubator. They had to measure the temperature at the top of each egg.

Dayo would hold the thermometer above each egg and report the reading to his father. "One oh one point five," he'd say, to which his father would reply sternly, "Celsius, Dayo. Celsius." His father, a Canadian, felt it was important for his son to be acquainted with the metric system and insisted the measurements be in Centigrade.

"And, in-egg?" his father would prompt. The temperature inside the egg had to remain below 40.5 C. Again, he would have to remind his son, "Celsius, Dayo. Celsius."

Twenty-seven days had passed and it was nearly time for them to hatch. They had increased the humidity in the incubator from 55 to 75 percent in anticipation of the goslings' arrival and they no longer rotated the eggs. The goslings were positioning themselves for hatching and rotating them would confuse them.

But today, when they went to check the eggs, they found the bulb had burned out. Everything could be lost.

"Hurry, Dayo! Give me a reading!"

"One hundred, Father!" Dayo shouted.

He did not reprimand his son because there was no time. They would lose everything if they couldn't save the eggs.

He barked, "In-egg. Celsius, Dayo!"

And then it started. The eggs began to hatch. They needed that light bulb now. Both of them began to shout, "GLOOOOOORIA."