I tried to get them to put it off…

D&L have traded a cold, and I’ve been ducking them. I really don’t know what all these years of isolation have done to my resistance, which was never all that great anyway when it came to respiratory ailments. Like, if there was a flu bug going around I always caught it early and hard. Took a long month to fully recover. So I don’t want what D&L got, is all I’m saying.

But they restock their hayroom the very moment one side is empty, come rain, hail or plague. And that came today. It’s not so bad when they do it that way, of course, half the hayroom is only 25 bales. Last year when D got sick, L let the horses eat it down and then we had to schlep 40 bales without D, and that was a memorable job. So I’m not complaining about the work. 25 bales is just enough to work up a good sweat, when everybody’s healthy.

But everybody wasn’t healthy, and I really don’t think putting it off a week would have hurt anything. The way this used to work is that L hauls the bales down from the trailer and lines them up for me at the rear – I hook on to them and handcart them into the hayroom one at a time – D piles them, very neatly and five high. But D’s seventy years old, got very sick last year and while his recovery was remarkable it wasn’t 100%. I’m just happy he’s as healthy as he is, but when you’re 70 and you have a life-threatening illness you’re not going to come all the way back. So now he piles the first three and then we both heave up the last two in each row.

And with them both hacking and coughing, this just wasn’t a good day to be schlepping hay, is all. I sometimes deliberately slowed down just so they’d slow down a little.

I wasn’t going to go to town with them at all, just meet them at their place to unload the trailer, but Landlady is coming up this evening with the new chicks and it turned out I was nearly out of starter feed. So I had to tag along, and that was rather more of a chunk out of my day than I’d really planned and frankly I didn’t want to be in the truck with two people hacking and coughing. Still, it’s out of the way now till next time.