Of mud, hay, trucks, and wonderful people...

The other night was an evening that will go down as one of the funnest redneck comedies of errors ever (query: was that good grammar?). I knew as soon as I arrived at the horse lot with Lydia, Jemma, K.C., and Carley that things were going to be interesting. Nelson's Beagles were everywhere "hunting" (a hunting Beagle sounds like it is being tortured) and the horses were all at the gate watching something in the driveway... The something was a stuck pickup truck. Very stuck in lots of mud, blocking the road. Nelson's, to be exact.

As darkness fell, we all started digging; some of the kids started putting handfuls of straw under the wheels while others looked for boards. Then someone realized that the chassis was bottomed out, which explained why we weren't making any progress . We got under the truck and started digging out the compacted mud, making jokes about digging out wagons on the Oregon Trail. While we were giving ourselves mud-makeovers under the truck, some of the kids rummaged around in the tack shed looking for ropes to attach to Steve's Durango to try to extract the truck that way. After pulling and failing with Steve's Durango, we decided to wait for a tougher truck to do the job.

We then started moving round bales into pasture number one, which consists of rolling them onto tarps, wrapping them up and strapping them up with bungee cords, then rolling them to the far reaches of the universe. This was a very muddy job, which sometimes included laying down additional tarps like Sir Walter Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth. When we finished this, we headed back to the driveway to find John, Steve's younger brother, starting to work on getting the big truck unstuck. John has a very dandy and sophisticated (Lydia's words) little truck. He hooked up chains to the tow bar (we had been using wimpy little ropes which had very predictably snapped), gave one good haul and it was out.

We all let a a cheer and said things about it looking so easy. Then to make things more convenient to roll the last bale, Steve's other brother moved Steve's Durango out of the way and... locked the keys in the car. All of us learned the proper way to unscrew the antenna off the hood and use it to jimmy the power locks to open the door. Now that Lydia knows how to do this she has plans for stealing John's amazing and spiffy little truck next time she gets the opportunity.

So there. We had fun. How do people with boring lives stand it?