Kat Dancing

So I've been quiet lately. I'd like to say this is because I'm experiencing the wonder of married life, but actually, not so much. Dan and I had been living together, managing finances together, and having married-people fights for quite some time before we actually got around to the marriage bit. So basically, being married is just like not being married, only we are temporarily experiencing Happy Cash Flow and I get to wear a ring.

Oh, and the US government will have a hard time taking Dan away, which is a good thing.

So we're more or less pottering along happily arguing about who has to do the dishes, and that's not why I'm quiet. The quiet thing has more to do with the advent of Unlucky Fridays.

I am not sure what god my family pissed off to get us Unlucky Fridays, but they've become the bane of our existence. It started a few weeks ago -- right before the wedding, as I recall -- when I went up the milking system. The milking system is a high-tech, automated, electronic wonder foisted on us by the company, which works about as well as you'd expect a high-tech device to work in real-world circumstances. We used to call it the Bitch, but we've got a very nice Mennonite girl working for us now, so we've switched over to calling it the Brain. Out loud, at least.

Anyway, I pushed the button to start the system, and nothing happened. The Mennonite girl was standing right there, so I did not say bad words. But I thought them.

There followed about ten minutes of fiddling in which I determined, miserably, that I couldn't fix the Bitch and was going to have to call my dad -- miserably, because my parents had been planning to go to a party that night, their first time off the farm in weeks and some much-needed relaxation for them both, and I strongly suspected that whatever was wrong with the Bitch wouldn't fix easy.

I was right. It took two hours to get the Bitch running... and then, when we did and had finally gotten started milking, the compressor blew on the milk tank.

On both milk tanks.

We were beyond even tears at that point. We finished milking, grimly, because even if you're just going to throw the milk away the damned cows have to be milked, and luckily (if you can call it that) my dad jiggered the tank until it worked, and we didn't have to throw anything away. They missed their party, of course, and nobody got home until 10 pm.

The next incident I can remember was arriving at work on Saturday morning to discover that one of the tanks had kicked the bucket in a more permanent way during the night, loosing us the tank (it's not legal to sell if it goes over 50 degrees; a tank's about a thousand pounds of milk). After that? The disasters began arriving regularly -- dare I say, on a schedule. The next Friday, it was the milk pump that blew -- in the middle of milking -- necessitating an immediate milk-bathed repair job that took several hours while the cows expressed their displeasure at being penned by crapping all over everyone. The next, it was the belated discovery that the pipe sealant was not healthy for our type of pipe, via five pipe joints blowing, all over the farm, one at a time, while my father went crazy trying to find out what went wrong and get water to the cows, who had of course developed an almighty thirst the minute the water stopped working.

Then there was last Friday. Last Friday seemed to take the cake. The cows got out, with no one there but my parents, leaving them to chase happy (and speedy) beasties up and down the hills until ten pm; then the much needed (and not scorned! Honest! *looks anxiously at sky*) rain arrived in the form of a tearing thunderstorm which took with it, in no particular order, the fence charger, the temperature regulator on one of the cheese coolers, the phone's surge protector, and the Bitch.

Did I mention everyone was either sick or getting over a cold? Everyone was either sick or getting over a cold.

And, y'know, the fence was out, so the cows escaped. Again.

We weren't dumb enough to think it couldn't get worse. But we were hoping the godly wrath had worn itself out.

And then, there was today. Friday.

When I got a panicked phone call from my mother -- panicked and furious, because she'd called multiple times at that point, which I hadn't heard because our upstairs phone was still unplugged from the weekend before when we'd thought the lightning had fried the phone -- a call from the Urgent Care Center.

The dogs had been fighting, which they do depressingly often, and my father, having seperated them, had tried to put Shep into the pen. And Shep had bit him. And now they were in the Center and Dad was getting twelve stitches put in his hand, and Mom was there with him because he couldn't drive, and at the farm was a vat full of milk waiting to be made into cheese, three guests who had shown up semi-unexpectedly the night before, a cow needing to be bred, milk lines needing to be washed, and the milk inspector come to observe us making cheese.

Yes. Scream now. I did.

There's a point at which this kind of thing becomes funny. We are well past that point.

So Friday's over, for now, at least, and I'm already cringing in anticipation of the next one. It's not like life is calm otherwise: we're heading into a major drought, the milk prices are at rock bottom, we can't move into the new cheeseroom because we haven't been able to get the plumber to show up for work for six weeks, and in the cellars I am fighting the war of Good Mold against Bad Mold, and loosing, to the tune of a thousand dollars worth of cheese thrown away so far. But that's the *normal* stress. I think we could make it through if it weren't for Unlucky Fridays.

... whoever invented the phrase "bucolic farm life"? You were smoking crack, man. Just sayin'.