March 31, 2009

Country Gal by Vanita Blundell
The weather man was right about the snow- he missed on how much we were to get- the last I heard on Thursday was 8 to 12 inches- not 24 to 28 inches- I must admit I thought that he was way off base and that the snow would be minimal. I was really wrong- Since we had the snow- Jim and I have had a lot of time together- During this time I have decided that Jim really is trying to kill me and when he does it will look like an accident. No one will ever be able to prove him guilty.
I have found out that I am in horrible physical shape. It is bad when the wife makes deeper tracks in the snow than her husband. We had to do things quite differently than our every day chores. We feed alfalfa round bales to our cows- which is wonderful when you can get to the bales. We have another group of cattle that we care for that gets cake (protein pellets) everyday. That is never a problem as we have an over head dispenser and it works wonderful as long as you can get under it to fill your caker or buckets. Well, we could not get to the bale pile and to get to the cake dispenser was a little tricky and impossible for the truck to get to and the tractor just did not work for this particular task- this is the part where I know that Jim is out to get me. In order to fill our buckets you must be able to turn the pipe that opens and shuts the cake dispenser. Since I am a weenie arm I cannot turn it while hanging on the ladder. Jim said that he can turn it off and on if I could stand underneath and catch the cake- Since it is quite a distance; and the cake falls at a high rate of speed and tends to fall in a scattered fashion and it is difficult-no impossible to catch each and every pellet. So I needed to be up closer to the opening- Jim put two empty buckets upside down on the ground and told me to hop there and hold another empty bucket over my head to catch the falling pellets. After seeing that the buckets were a little wobbly and I was still a little too far away from where I needed to be- he decided that he could ‘help’ me even farther by placing a 4x 6 wooden block on top of the buckets. Then he told me that this would be much better and would take to wobbly out of the buckets plus it made me that much higher. Yeah- higher to break my neck- and taking the wobble out was not entirely true. After filling a couple of buckets he said that maybe I should take the block of wood off the buckets. I thought removing the block was the best idea he had all day. We did get to all of the cows and they seemed happy to see us- even happier to have some dry food to eat. Everything worked out- the cows are happy and we could go home and rest well after a hard days work.
All I can say it was wonderful to have all of the moisture of the snow and the beautiful weather that followed after the storm. For all of this I am especially grateful.