Harvesting Hay -now with Poor Planning!

Have you ever had one of those times when you can see a problem looming on the horizon, brewing up like a dark and unpleasant thunderstorm? And you just completely ignore it because you wore yourself out and then spent an entire day drinking because the pain in your arms was so bad you felt like the time you broke your finger was a fucking joy ride?

No?

Just me?

So yesterday we harvested the hay. At about 4 pm. Why so late you ask? Because I wanted to give the hay the maximum time to dry out before putting it somewhere. Also, it was super angry hot outside. Of course this meant that we were now in a race against the dew. And of course it was supposed to rain shit barrels the next day because none of my projects would be complete without some sort of weather imposed deadline.

The problem? The bunny barn, also known as the only place to store hay on this entire fucking farm, is not a barn, it's a shed. An ancient narrow shed. With a slim, tiny place to store hay. That I was now trying to cram full of hay from a meadow that was almost over my head when I harvested it.

Needless to say it didn't work.

Also, we had two more meadows to go. I looked at Scott, and he looked at me. “Where the hell are we going to put all this?” I asked. The thought of leaving it in the meadows to rot was unthinkable. Not after what I had gone through to get it. We tried several other ideas, such as putting it on the ground and tarping it, shoving it into the other mobile home, or maybe running it through the chipper shredder.

Then Scott said “I know, how about the roof?”

The roof. The upside down laying in the field roof to the old barn that neither one of us could move or indeed get apart because those people had built this motherfucker out of oak and by god this roof was going to stay together. The wonderful metal roof that was the perfect distance and location from both the bunny barn and the chicken coup.

So that is what we did. We piled hay on it. Except that, even with the roof, we vastly, VASTLY underestimated the mountain of hay that we had. We continued to collect the lower meadow hay, and pile it onto our new hay storage area. Except that we had almost filled up the foot print of the roof, which wasn't really that big to began with (it was a small, small barn.)

So we did what we always do in these situations, ignored the problem and kept on getting hay. We took the truck to the upper meadow and started to fill it. At one point I was standing in the truck bed stomping up and down on the hay trying to smash it down so we could cram some more on, and I realized that we were going to bury that roof under an avalanche of hay.

Which is exactly what ended up happening.

It was late in the evening, when the last rays of the sun were gone, and it could just be seen hovering over the end of the valley while the sky turned into those watercolor shades of pink and blue. I shoved the last pitchfork full on hay onto the stack and stopped to admire our handy work. Then I turned to Scott and said those fateful words. “Wait, do we even have a tarp?”

Motherfucker.

We looked everywhere. We had two choices, we could forgo dinner since it was about nine at night and drive to Walmart, or we could do it in the morning. We chose morning, although it didn't fucking help that I hadn't eating anything since about two in the after noon and the neighbors were grilling steak out and I could fucking smell that shit.

Assholes.

So this morning we got up and checked the weather. We had a two hour window. So Scott threw breakfast in his face and jumped in the car and drove to town to buy a humongous tarp. But of course this is the country and you can't go to town just for a tarp because we also needed things like chicken feed and bread and shit.

So I was just milling around the house mobile home waiting for him to return. It was getting late. I sat down to write this entry and looked up. It was starting to rain. That light almost not raining but it is kinda mist raining. It was too late. The tarp had not arrived in time.

It was then I heard the crunch of gravel. He was back! With a tarp! I shoved my feet into my shoes and ran outside, where I promptly learned that trying to open a tarp while running with it means you will drop the tarp.

So we unfolded that bitch and shoved it onto the pile and weighted it down with whatever the hell we could fucking find at the time and then retreated back into the house knowing our hay was safe from the weather that keeps trying to fuck up our plans. Bitch ass weather.

We won this round sky.

We won this round like champions.