Couple of embarrassing guffaws from here this last week.
Last night Blackie, our steer, got out of his pen at the farm. He was feasting down in the garden, had been in Wendell & Carole’s garage, and around and about. Carole called and Cybil & I headed out to get him back in. We never lived on the farm ourselves, and with added kids, it became harder and harder to spend time with everyone at the farm helping out. Some of the kids would go out and help, but it’s been years since I really helped. I did some milking when Brian was suffering with a migraine and I was 6 months pregnant, but that’s probably the last time I really did much out there-quite a few years ago. So I am a pretty good pretender-I know what to do, but only pretend that I can do it. I really am a wimp about this stuff now. I didn’t know much about this steer, so I pretty much ended up spooking myself about him. He really is pretty tame, and Cybil has no fear of him, but I just couldn’t get a good read on if he was getting mad or not. Well, anyway we got him in. We walked the fence a couple times looking to see if we could see the problem. Both Carole and I had heard the fence cracking over the weekend, mistakenly thinking that was good-we could hear it working. I was trying to remember if it was okay for metal to touch metal, then the plastic, blah, blah-I was never good at science! Carol noticed the line from the fencer to the fence itself wasn’t touching. Well, after 2 calls to Tim wondering why we couldn’t hear the cracking we got it figured out, or so we thought. First off, the cracking was bad-that meant it was shorting out. Secondly, we had the fence hooked up right-but in the wrong spot. About 34 minutes after Cybil & I got home, Carole called-Blackie was out again. It was starting to get dark and we couldn’t figure out what we did wrong, so she called Brian’s cousin Galen who dairy farms and lives down the road. He and his wife Beckie came and helped get Blackie in again (it wouldn’t have taken so long if I wasn’t still spooking myself-aren’t we often our own worst enemy!). Galen checked the fence for us-seems I connected it on the WRONG side of the insulator, so it wasn’t working at all! Galen checked the fence with the ole wooden-handled screwdriver to the fence and you would not have believed the spark we saw! That cow touches that fence now, and she’ll be running the other way!
I won’t tell the whole story on this one, but one night Carole showed up at the door wondering if I had a key to her house-she was locked out!
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