A truly shitty day
There are days, when everything turns out to be shit - in the purest sense of the word. On a ranch, that happens more often than you would think.
It started with our (now ex-)neighbours, who had spotted a moose in one of our fields in the morning. With the husband being a hunter and me not having seen a moose in the wild before, they invited me to come along on their search for the animal.
The field the moose was seen on includes a small forest, which in turn offers home to a few bears during the summer and autumn months. There were signs of them everywhere, mostly in form of piles of poop that would have managed to made a big dog proud. One of the piles even looked like it was from a grizzly! Leah later confirmed to me that there is a grizzly living in that forest, and that I should never, ever go there completely alone - which I don’t plan to do anyway, I have too much respect for the local wildlife for that.
We searched the forest for manure that might have come from a moose, but “only” found a few of its hoof prints. After a few hours we had to cancel our search because it was still a weekday and my neighbour had to start working at some point.
The move of our neighbours was coming closer as well and I was not yet needed back on the ranch, so I continued my day with helping to take down and clean out their duck pen, which included a small plastic pond full of duck shit - and don’t even get me started on the cesspool in the duck house.
We had just finished that and enjoyed a small snack and a hot spiced apple drink to warm up, when John called and told me he had the most wonderful task for me: Cleaning the cattle transport we had used when moving the cows from the summer pasture to the ranch.
Thusly, I got a short lesson on how to use a pressure washer, put on two pairs of working gloves, zipped close every zipper on my jacket that I could find and went to work.
Believe me, ankle deep cow manure soup sprays impressively far when you try moving it towards an opening with a pressure washer. And in an impressive amount of directions. After some time I had found a technique that worked well in moving the shit slowly but surely towards the trailer without getting too much manure on my face, but getting out completely clean was still an impossibility - and in the end, it was sort of funny how much shit managed to find its way onto my clothing.
Still, the first thing I did after finishing the work was taking a hot shower and doing a heavy duty wash for all the clothes I had worn during my pressure washing.
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