They make me crazy. *Explicit*

Last night I went a little crazy.

A few years ago I was with my friend V at a bar in Florida. We had been talking, drinking, and having a good ole' time when one of the guys we were chatting with did the unthinkable. He made V's cousin cry. As soon as she found out my hands were thrust full of a purse and I was watching, mesmerized slightly confused and definitely a little bit mortified, her run/hop down the boardwalk removing her heels as she went. She got in the guy's face about not making her cousin cry and I was pretty sure she was going to stab him with her stiletto. For the record, V is half Mexican, and we frequently joke about her going "Mexican chick crazy" on the guy. Also for the record, she didn't actually beat him to death with a high heel. He backed down and apologized. I have always been a little in awe of her passionate side.

I tell you this story so that you understand where I'm coming from on this one. Last night I went "Mexican chick crazy." On a cow.

For the last three feedings the cows have gotten out when I have begun moving them hay. The first time they banged against the gate and it came open accidentally. The second time I noticed that the tractor had a flat and they escaped while I was backing it up to try to fix the tire. I swear, there was nary a cow in sight, but as soon as the gate was unattended it was like a Goddamn military attack. "Alpha team: go, go, go!" "Beta squad, flank! Now! Go! We've rehearsed this people!" I hopped off the tractor to see a stream of black pouring out of the gate. Both of those times I kept my cool. After all one was an accident and the other was my fault. Plus, they both happened on Saturday mornings when I had help to put them back in.

Oh, but last night. Last night they ran out of the gate while I was trying to get the tractor through it. Note, they still have had hay in their feeders. They are just (rightly) convinced that there is a smidgen of grass in the yard (since, you know, eating it Saturday morning). They would rather have that than the icky old alfalfa and grass bales. Also, they are a bunch of jerks and just kinda suck.

So last night I decided to use the tractor with a cab because I mistakenly thought it had better headlights. Turns out that it has headlights that point directly on the hood of the tractor, producing glare the likes of which you cannot even imagine. Add to that a dusty tractor windshield and I already am cranky because I can't see worth a damn. By the way, the cows are black. So it is perhaps the worst combination ever for not running them over.

Anyway, I open the gate and run back to the tractor to lift the bale, put it in gear and move forward, which admittedly takes longer than it does with the cabless tractor by a few seconds, when like a bunch of ninjas the freaking strike force pours out of the gate. Ten cows run out before I can block the opening with the tractor. I wedge the gate closed on one side, blocking the rest of the herd between it and the tractor so cows can come in, but not out - hopefully. Then I run around the barn and start screaming like a drunken sailor banshee.

I am certain that if anyone had heard me I would have been committed. I always joke about farmer's cursing, but this, this was the pinnacle. I wasn't being clever and calling them "line breeders." BTW, that is when you breed a son to a mother, thus making him a...I think you get it. Or shouting "Son of a Brisket!" I was shouting something along the lines of: "WhatTheFuckAreYouDoingOut?! YouStupidSonsOfBitchingCows! GetYourAssesBackInTheGoddamnFence! RightNow!" and  running at them. Note that at this point I am just pissed. I haven't crossed the line to crazy yet. Then Twoface's daughter turned and stopped. She looked right at me like, "Yeah? What are you going to do about it?" I charged her and pulled the knife out of my pocket that I use to cut off the bale strings while shouting, "You wanna go? I will fucking cut you, heifer!" She turned and fled, but that right there is when I went "Mexican chick crazy." I'm pretty sure I leapt at her with a knife. Yup. That happened.

That's right, V. I'm not always a passionate person, but when I am I contemplate shanking a cow with a bale spear. Boom. Mic drop.

In other news, they didn't get out again and the rest of my feeding went very smoothly. Perhaps cows respect the crazy?

Made my morning

Captain America got me a new camera for my birthday. This morning illustrated to me that I need to get in the habit of carrying it absolutely everywhere with me. May I reintroduce you to Jessica, our neighborhood albino deer.

These photos are not the best, taken with my phone, but she is so cool that I have to share anyway. That will teach me! Cameras, never leave home without them! 

We watched her graze for about twenty minutes weekend before last, again without a camera present, while we were out deer hunting. Don't worry! It is illegal to kill white deer here. Even if it wasn't I would shoot CA before he could take aim on this lovely lady. Her potential beaus however... well they're fair game and destined for deliciousness. 

The interesting thing is that when she stood and ran over the hill it became apparent that she had three regular colored friends with her. They blended in so well that I had no clue!

Ninja Skills

Have you ever felt the feeling that you were being watched? That slow niggling feeling crawling up the back of your neck? You cast your eyes around behind you, willing some shape to form out of the darkness. Something, anything to explain the sensation away. But there is nothing in the black. No sounds alert you to the fact that you are being stalked. Still, your skin crawls and you can't relax. The primitive anticipation of danger is especially intense when you're alone in the country.

What is it out there? A coyote? A bob cat? A cougar? A Sasquatch? A bad case of reading too many Lets Not Meet stories on Reddit and being somewhat convinced that there is a deranged person living in the barn loft that you wouldn't even know about until the jump down and attack you from behind?

Okay, probably not those last two, but Tuesday night I definitely knew something was off. I shrugged it off as my overactive imagination, or perhaps being watched by an opossum. It was dark. I was at my parent's home feeding chickens and playing the ever popular "try to count black cows in the dark" game. I had just started pouring grain for the horses and stepped out of the grain room to grab a bag of sweet feed when I saw her.

She peeked her head out of the inky black and into the light of the horse barn, causing me to scream like a little girl and experience heart palpitations. All that was visible was her white blaze, as my scream caused her to turn tail and run. I ran from the barn to find, nothing. She had vanished again. How 1,200lbs of horse can be COMPLETELY SILENT, and invisible is the mystery of the week.

Meet the creature that stalks you at night, Zippy. The horse ninja. Schrodinger's horse. 

If you put a horse in a fence, but don't see the horse; does the horse cease to exist? 

No, the fence ceases to exist. . .

Screw the cat who walks through walls. She is Zippy, the horse who walks through fences!

Horses are a$$hats.

My life, the horror movie.

It is an overcast day. The air is misty with the first chill of fall. Leaves are beginning to turn. There has been enough rain recently that the ground is slick and muddy beneath the falling leaves and short grass of the pasture. The hike out to check the fences begins easily enough. Squirrels rustle through the treetops, chattering away at each other as they rush to pack away their hoards. Slowly the wind begins to blow colder. The overcast day becomes dreary, dark, foreboding. The lone woman checking the fence hurries her pace, slipping and sliding. She feels watched, but she sees nothing. The constant itch at the back of her neck doesn't lessen as she hurries up the hill towards home as fast as her boots, heavy with mud, will go. Suddenly a twig snaps and she turns. Her eyes widen as she sees what is behind her.

She is surrounded. 

Duh. Duh. Duh. Will she live? Will she die? Will she successfully use the word "Hangry" to describe the herd of unruly bovines? Will she secure a Snickers bar for the bull so that he stops attacking the tractor? (Brisket, you aren't you when you're hungry!)

God, I could work in Hollywood!

'Nam flashbacks, neuroplasticity, and getting right back up on that horse.

I was in a pretty traumatic car crash about two weeks ago. Physically I'm perfectly fine. The car was totaled, but the safety systems did their job perfectly. It was 7:58 a.m., and I was turning onto the road where I work. I don't know if it was the sun in my eyes, or just carelessness, but I didn't see him. I turned directly into the path of an oncoming car. My vehicle, which was my dad's car because I had loaned mine to my boyfriend, was spun 180 degrees.  

When I close my eyes I still feel the weightless sensation of being whipped around, held in place by the thin seat belt and the explosion of dust in the air from the airbags.

This was my second car totaled while I was driving in four months. The first one wasn't my fault, but still it was traumatizing.

The whole experience gave me quite a few panic attacks and a mini-midlife crisis. I still have almost paralyzing anxiety about pulling out onto the highway. I'm positive that there will be a car there that I don't see. I'm struggling to find peace with it, release the guilt and shame of it, and to find a balance of doing what I want when I want (like driving to see CA) and not taking undue risks.

Anyway, so despite what my friends have started referring to as my "'Nam flashbacks" while I have been driving I have still been heading to work. One day I happened across an article in some magazine about PTSD and rewiring the brain through imagination. I found it VERY motivational.

In other words, imagining all of the ways that I was going to wreck a car was actually making my trauma worse. Go figure.  I can't find the exact article in the minefield of my father's desk, but the same point is made on healthyplace.com in their article about neuroplasticity and PTSD.  "Hebb’s entire theory argued that experience can change neuronal structure. What does that mean to you? It means that while trauma can alter your brain – and hence, the repetitive brain processes of PTSD – the basis for this change is experience. Following that philosophy and Hebb’s suggestion, the idea that emerges is that the brain can change again, due to new experience." How awesome is that?

Healing my trauma boils down to wanting to change that experience in my own mind. Talk about getting right back up on the horse that threw you. Obviously it makes sense that the faster that you have a different outcome from your negative one the easier it is to rewire your brain. That was part of the original article that piqued my interest in the subject. Negative pathways haven't had as long to become ingrained behaviors or reactions, so since it has only been two weeks I still have a relatively easy path. This stuff seems common sense, but oh my gosh the implications! Car wrecks, horse bites, bad relationship habits. I'm going to start rewiring myself using positive imagining by golly!

In other news, that is harder than it sounds. Our brains WANT to make new connections, but our minds/souls/egos whatever that voice in our head is called doesn't like to let go and redefine itself nearly so easily. I'm really struggling with letting go of the idea that I am a bad driver. But even though I am right back up on that ol' car that threw me; it's a hard fight. I can barely imagine how hard changing some of my more ingrained bad habits/reactions/thought processes is going to be. My mini mid-life crisis has given me a lot of them to consider and try to heal. Do you have any bad thought processes that you need to break? I encourage you to join me on this particular crazy adventure!

Along this journey I also had another though, there must be more to those old sayings than what I had ever imagined. Getting right back up on the horse that throws you would limit the amount of time that your brain had to make negative connections. It completely supports Hebb's theory! How cool is that? *Sorry had to nerd out there. So, in addition to getting right back up on that horse that threw me, I'm going to have to start paying attention to not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, or maybe even learn to not eat the cake that I have. Though I still don't understand the concept of having cake and not eating it too. I really think that saying needs to be modified to be something like, "you can't possibly eat all the food on the super buffet", or "you can't eat your cake and stay under your daily calorie limit."  Maybe, "you can have your cake, but if you eat it you won't fit in your skinny jeans." I dunno. Some other analogy about decision making would have to be clearer.

Who in the hell wouldn't eat the damn cake? Seriously.

Barnyard Tales Chapter 9: Bull Ramping

It isn’t every day that your family invents a new sport. In my family it was only once: on a fateful Mother’s day in the 90’s.

I remember it well. We were waiting to go to my grandma’s house. Mom was pissed that dad had taken the four wheeler to go bring down a few bull calves that had broken out and into general pop. I was overly eager. Grandma Dot’s place was my FAVORITE place in the whole wide world, and for some reason my seven or eight year old mind had decided that not only were we going to grandma’s house, since we had time to kill we were gonna go in style.

Screw the fact that I didn’t know how to ride yet. I worked for over an hour lugging a saddle out of the barn only to lose interest in cleaning and oiling it after, oh, about ten seconds. I remember leaving it hanging haphazardly across an old feeder and trotting up to my dad when I saw him slowly walking back to the house. I should have realized something was wrong at that point, but no. I had a one track mind. Grandma’s? Can we go now? How about now? Why aren’t you running to the car? We need to leave, NOW! I left the saddle. It got rained on. Mom was, uhm, displeased.

Dad meanwhile had stumbled up to the porch and kicked the kitchen door until mom came to let him in the house.

I remember coming in a while later and seeing him with bright silver duct tape wrapped around his shirt in a makeshift splint. He couldn’t talk, but mom thought he’d broke a few ribs. To hear her tell the tale of finding the fourwheeler is a thing of beauty.

She wandered high and low around the pastures. With dad’s injuries she searched gullies, and ditches; assuming like most would have that he had flipped the ATV in a ditch rather than by inventing the most extreme animal sport in the good ole U.S. of A.. Much to her surprise she found the four wheeler sitting on all four wheels on a gently sloping curve of a hill. The only oddity was the occasional tuft of black angus hair sticking to grass and wafting on the breeze.

It took two days for my dad to regain the ability to speak. When he did, a legend was born. Dad had been riding after the calf, chasing him high and low. The young bull had zigged and zagged, bolted through brush and ditch without a care; and still my dad and the four wheeler had been on him like a cocklebur. But there on that gentle swell of a hill, when my father was in high gear because there were no ditches in sight, the calf turned the tables. Well, not so much the tables as he turned himself and lowered his head. Dad couldn’t brake or downshift fast enough. The four wheeler flew right up that cow’s neck and dad flew right off of it. He tried to kick away from the four wheeler, but did not succeed. When he came to he was alone, in pain, and only vaguely aware of the four wheeler idling quietly in the distance. He stood up, hurt enough to sit back down, and decided then and there that sitting back down was a bad idea. I’m pretty sure he crawled most of the way back to the house.

Mom discovered later that he had a perfect 2”x2” square on his side. When he kicked off the four wheeler he went the wrong direction. The four wheeler had a square steel tube for a seeder bolted to the back and the full force of the flying machine centered on that tube as it landed upside down on his ribs and bounced off just as pretty as you do please. 

Clearly he should have got 10 points from the Russian judge for the excellent dismount.

Fun fact: three weeks later he reached for a towel and discovered that his shoulder had been dislocated the entire time. Do NOT try this one at home kiddies. Not only was dad beat up, that poor bull calf went crazy every time he heard an engine. Sheesh. Talk about PTSD.

Barnyard Tales Chapter 8: That time Satan tested me with a disc mower

Sweat poured down my back and I wiped my brow with one grease stained hand. This mower, oh, this mower. I was pretty certain that Satan himself had come to life and went to work for Case IH as a disc mower design engineer. The Case MDX91 is his gift to the world.

A single 3/8" roll pin had snapped on Tuesday causing the whole lift assembly to crash to the ground, popping apart like a can of Pringles and shearing the all thread that held the spring on. The mower was neatly immobilized, a beautiful piece of red and white pasture art popping up against the muted browns and greens of the hayfield.

Captain America texted me when it happened. His succinct text messages said more about his frustration than a dictionary of curse words.

I arrived the next day with some spare parts from the local hardware store and watched him attempt to loose the all thread from the cast iron jaws of the now seized spring assembly. It didn't work, and for the next morning neither did I as I hauled the spring to the repair shop. The little old farmers opened the door for me and did their best to reassure:

"Farming is only 5% farming, and 95% fixing the stuff that breaks."

"I'm gonna try to hire her."

"Me? Oh no, clearly I'm just good at breaking things!"

"That's fine." He motioned to the broken PTO shaft in his calloused grip. "I'm pretty good at that too. I just need someone to blame it on!"

"We have those springs too. They lock up all the time. These guys will get it extracted for you."

Guess what, they didn't. One new spring assembly and three days later CA and I were headed out, convoy style, when he pulled the big blue bulk of the tractor off the road and walked up to the door of the truck full of tools. I turned down the radio. I should have known then that this was the Devil's clever design.

"We don't have the replacement bolt for the roll pin. It's in my car."

"Oh, you want me to run to your house?"

"No. My car. At your house. An hour and a half away."

"F."

But that's fine I thought. Silly me. I believed I could just leave him in the field and run to the closest hardware store, only an hour round trip, and wouldn't even have to get dirty. Oh, I was so sure of my plan as I jammed out in the air conditioned truck. He'd surely have it mostly put together when I got back.

And that was how I found myself sweaty and blackened with grease and hydraulic fluid, repeatedly rocking a cast iron piece of metal over its seat over and over, and over again. We tried to beat it on by hand. We beat it with hammers. We beat it with the front end loader of the tractor. I kicked it. Nothing worked. We took it off, and put it on. I stood up and walked my pretty little head right into the bale spear, slipped on a grease gun and fell flat on my back. I couldn't tell if the water seeping from my eyes was from pain, frustration, shock, or laughter. We took it off, and put it on. Off and on. Our muttered cursing melded with the dull thunk of the hammer into a beautiful song about the human condition. The sonnoffawitchingmothertruckinggoshdanged whatchamadoodle kept jamming for absolutely no reason other than to be contrary.

Which is how I know that Case's signature red color shows their allegiance to the Underworld. Crafty, crafty.

I called for back-up. They couldn't figure it out either. There were no burrs, no reason whatsoever that the one pipe shaped piece would not fit over the other pipe shaped piece. None at all other than this being a test of fortitude. A divinely administered trial designed to plumb the depths of our resolve, break our spirit, drive a wedge in our hearts, and tarnish our souls.

Or not. As Heinlein said, the purpose of laughter is to keep from crying. It also helps keep you from killing your mate as you work towards a seemingly unattainable goal on a 90 plus degree day with about 500% humidity.

"Hammer."

"Hammer."

"Block."

"Block.

"You can call me doctor if you want. Punch."

"Yes, doctor. Punch."

After four hours of repeating the process, the incessant beating with the front end loader worked. The part slipped on like a glove. I cheered. I laughed. I cried. I thanked the Heavens. Hallelujah. There is a God and he answers prayers. The disc mower was my Moby Dick and CA and I had just harpooned the crap out of it. Suck that, Devil-mower.

We didn't stop to question why our relationship had needed to be so rigorously tested through heat and frustration, our love tempered by the fire of both. It wasn't until later that the thought crossed my mind that the Devil-mower was a test. It wasn't my Moby Dick, it was a brief blink of our book of Job.

We merely did a happy dance and went to work inserting other pins and adjusting parts and pieces.

We merely lifted the 30lb spring into place and connected it.

CA merely told me to stand there and depress the hydraulic hose button so that I got a face full of hydraulic fluid, not even a courtesy tap. Seriously. But through laughter we overcame even that, and came out the other side with minimally clogged pores and remarkably silky skin. We freaking persevered.

And that is the story of the time Satan sent a disc mower to test my relationship.