Yesterday

So this is what happened yesterday.

I was outside with the little boys and Hayes was hauling large hay bales with the big blue tractor.  As he was pulling out of the field onto the road, he didn't see our neighbor, Goldie Bosen, approaching in her car.  At the last minute, he saw her and quickly pulled back but the hay bales fell off the tractor fork and smashed into her car.  They broke out her back window and tore the window frame off the car.

She was super nice about it and didn't even get mad.  She said that she's raised three boys of her own and she knows how it is.  Hayes was really shook up and talked about how if he had been just a few seconds faster he could have killed her.

Then, in the afternoon, Craig called me and said that he was up on the caboose field and that the combine was on fire and he needed me to direct the fire department to the field because he didn't think they knew the road to take.  Brigham and I ran to the van and drove up there, meeting the fire trucks at the road turn off.  We could see the smoke billowing from the field.  The fire engine couldn't negotiate the skinny canal road so we waited for the brush trucks to get there.  By the time Brigham and I made it up to the combine, most of the blaze had been put out.  The combine looked like a charred wreck.

Craig said that our employee Shawn had been cutting hay and the combine engine had started on fire and he was unable to put it out and pretty soon the whole combine was ablaze.  It's a pretty old combine.  We bought it ten years ago and it was already maybe thirty years old when we bought it.

Luckily, the grain field didn't catch on fire.  That's something good.  But the combine was a total loss - and it wasn't insured, due to being so old.  So we don't even get any money out of it.

We got home and were sitting exhausted on the grass, when our employee came running out of the barn, yelling that a cow had fallen down on the rotary and couldn't get up.  Craig went in and had to pull the cow out with the tractor.

Sigh.  Some days are bad.  And some days are REALLY, REALLY, REALLY bad.