Hay delivery and bike rides...

Friday, August 21, 2015

I’d received a note that morning about the hay delivery, but somehow it had slipped my mind until I saw a fully loaded trailer pulling on the lot. 

“Shit!  Looks like we’ve got some work to do,” I said to Justin.  He was sitting on the tractor waiting for the dump trailer to be filled by the excavators digging our trench.

“I’ve got to move this dirt,” he said, indicating with his thumb in a backward motion to the trailer being filled.

“I’m pretty sure that dirt will still be in the trailer when we’re done with the hay.  You don’t want to miss the fun, do you?”

And how much fun it was.  We had almost 300 bales at sixty pounds a piece, which meant I’d be stacking around eight tons of hay.  It was cool, at least.

“Hey John, how’s your love life goin’,” Eli called as he loaded the first bale onto the conveyor rigged up to deposit it at my feet in the loft.  I’d made the mistake of telling him I’d put my profile on a dating site and that I’d actually had a couple of dates as a result.  He’d warned me that he’d heard men dressed as women put their information out there and I was likely to get one of those, ugly as I was.

“She was a girl as it turns out.  Thanks for asking,” I said.  He was pleased to hear that, at age sixty, men still had an interest in women. 

“Ya know, there’s this site called ‘lonelyfarmers.com’ that maybe you should check out.  I think girls really dig farm boys especially old, wrinkly ones like you,” he said.

“Send me that hay as fast as you can, we’ll see who’s old,” I said…and wished I hadn’t.

It turned out that I was old as the last one climbed the conveyor.  I was soaked to the bone; even my socks and shoes were wet from my sweat.  It had taken 45 minutes, but we’d managed it.  I returned to the shop and collapsed in a chair. 

“I’m beat,” I said.

“You’re getting soft,” Justin replied, grinning.  He knew better, but liked to razz me.

It took me most of the day to start feeling like myself again.  Losing so much water from sweat drains me, but I drank copiously all day.  I knew I had to go to the park for a hike though, because I had Copper at the house for the weekend and she would need some exercise if there was any hope of keeping her from driving me crazy.  I got home, loaded her and Dakota in the car and drove to the park.  Once there, I struggled with the decision to strap on the pack…I was still feeling the hay.  I again imagined Kathy in Oregon bagging another peak while carrying a small truck and figured I could handle the pack.  I did decide not to stop for step-ups because that would only make Copper crazy if she had to wait.

We went an hour and I felt good the entire time.  My heel was sore naturally, but that was just how it was and there seemed to be little I could do about it.  I came home, showered, and drove to Geneva on the Lake to visit Kristen at ‘The Loft’, a bar/restaurant she worked that served a good fish fry.  I ate my fried haddock thinking that a block of wood deep fried and dipped in tartar sauce would likely taste good.  I watched the Indians trounce the Yankees before heading home, exhausted.

Hike Duration: One hour

Training Heart Rate: 110 bpm.

Calories burned:  600.