What A Time!

Warning: This blog post contains a LOT of complaining. If you don't want to hear about all my woes, I suggest you skip this post.


So here it goes...

Thursday my NY parents left for Florida leaving me in charge of the farm. Not a big deal, I've done it all before and don't usually have any major problems. Except this time I was going to have to muck stalls everyday and empty the poop wagon whenever it got full. Andrew showed me how to hook the wagon up to the mower and how to empty it out in the pasture. He had also thrown down a bunch of hay to get me started and even brought the grain into the barn and put it away the night before they left. Andrew and Kim had both given me a couple tips on opening the barn doors when it gets frozen shut.

And that's where the trouble all began... the frozen door. I tried and tried and tried and tried to open that stupid door and nothing seemed to be working. I body slammed it, wedged the shovel under it to jar it loose, tried squeezing a pole in between the doors, used the sledge hammer across the entire bottom and the part where the doors meet (it was open a few inches from before), tried kicking it, squeezing my limbs between the doors and pushing, body slamming some more, yanked on it A LOT between jamming it with stuff. I finally got it open after what seemed like forever. And got to do a lot of the same stuff the next couple times I went out for chores. Luckily now it's warmed up quite a bit and just a little body slam works and this morning I barely had to ram it and it opened and I even got the other door open which I wasn't able to budge before when I was trying to take the wagon out.

The last time I took the wagon out to dump I had to move it across the aisle and up to the door so I could hook it up because of the stupid door. It worked fine I just had to be careful not to hit anything. This morning was much easier because I got the other door open. I even got to go all the way around the pile instead of backing up a couple times and then hook the trailer on. I just unhooked it to empty it and then hooked it back up and was on my way. Of course it's a little slippery out there since it rained last night and I almost slid into the fence and had to do some maneuvering before I could get back to the path. But I made it with no damage done... well, there might be a couple of bare patches in the pasture now.

This morning I decided to open the new bag of sweet feed since the bin was almost empty. The bag was in the wheelbarrow so I sat it up right, nearly knocked the whole thing over, and dumped it right into the bin. Then I went to grab the can we use to scoop out of the other bin and it wasn't there so I checked the bag of hay stretcher and it wasn't in there either. I checked the milking stand feeder but to no avail. So the only other place it could've been was in the BOTTOM of the bin I just poured 50Ilbs of grain into. Yay me. It actually wasn't too bad to get out. I just tipped the bin a bit and scooped towards me until I found it.

I've had pretty bad back pain since Thursday because of yanking on the door so much I think. Standing for 6 plus hours straight at work just seemed to irritate it more. I ended up working almost 4 hours extra one day this weekend and Saturday night I didn't get out until 11:30 or so. I still had to come home and finish setting up horse stalls and bring them in. I got stalls set up, hay thrown in, and water done so went out to get the horses. I came in behind them and couldn't figure out why they weren't going into their stalls... usually its just Bullet that walks around for a minute and then goes in. Then I realized I'd never done up their grain and put it in the stalls. So I filled them up quick while the Charlie and Bullet were still wandering around and was finally able to convince them to get into the stalls with the grain.

Yesterday I worked 11 to close. When I went to write down my schedule for this week I found out that today is my ONLY day off until after Sunday. I'm so NOT looking forward to this week! I'm happy for today off since I'm pretty tired, still sore, and now sick. And I'm happy I don't have to go in until 2 tomorrow and 3 on Wednesday but it's still going to be a long week. So, I think I'm going to spend the rest of the day lounging on the couch watching some tv online, play some wii/wii fit, hopefully make something really yummy with tofu and veggies since I found some veggie egg-rolls at Wegmans (super excited), and get the house picked up a little... should probably do some laundry too.

Thanks for listening to all my complaining :)