Husband bought BabyGirl & #1 Son sheep a year & a half ago. Husband feeds them. Husband cares for them. Husband shears them. For some reason, that's when I'm forced to take over. I was in charge of getting rid of the wool.
BabyGirl's third grade teacher's husband raises sheep, shears them, and sells wool. So I spent three days trying to track down their phone number. In the days of cell phone only families, that's easier said than done.
I finally made contact & arranged to deliver the wool (some of which was left over from the spring shearing in 2009). I was OK with that until it came time to deliver it. Husband had already left for work and I had to load the bags up myself. That wasn't really a big deal either.
So what was the big deal that needed to be blogged about, you might be asking? The Shed. I had to go into Husband's domain. I do not like The Shed. The Shed is dirty. The Shed is full of bugs. The Shed is home to the carcasses of dead arachnids. The Shed is not a lovely place to be.
Husband built The Shed about 6 years ago to house my hens. Yes, it's first life was that of a chicken coop. Since then it has housed lawn mowers, baby chicks, cats with their kittens, guinea pigs, rabbits, bikes, and Great Dane puppies. Now, it mostly houses wood roaches.
Husband keeps his tools in it. The FarmHands' sled is tucked away in there. All of my gardening implements live there. Fishing poles line the walls, and chicken feed is stacked on pallets on the dirt floor.
I try to avoid The Shed when at all possible. The cobwebs look like they belong in an Indiana Jones movie. I fear there may be things living under the piles that could chew through the steal shanked toes of my work boots. It's just.....ewwwww.
But I pulled up my Farm Girl panties and dealt with it. I dug through the bug droppings, spider shells, and other icky stuff to get to the wool and the giant Rubbermaid tub I was using to protect my van from the ick. (For those of you who think, "Oh, sheep! How sweet. They're just white, woolly, walking clouds," have obviously not spent much time around sheep. They're dirty, smelly, and the "lovely white fluffy wool" is dirty and greasy with lanolin.)
Once I was done I nearly spiraled into OCD. I was tempted to spend a few hours in the shower armed with a gallon of Clorox and a box of Brillo pads....but instead, I washed my hands and got on with my day.
Now aren't you proud of me? I am.
2 comments:
I wash that stuff by hand, so I can fully appreciate your experience. :)
Just for fun: word verification was 'stabio'. Is that Fabio's homicidal cousin?
My word verification for Kork's blog today was "cowie". Considering I feel as huge as a cow these days, I'm wondering if cowie is destined to be my new nickname. It's kind of cute, with the "ie" on the end.
Anyway, about the sheep. You need to look up the story of the teenage girl who used her 4-H money to buy a house (paid in full with cash!) that she rents to some distant relatives. Tell Baby Girl that she could have that kind of story if she started taking care of her own sheep. And then her distantly related redheaded first cousin once removed (or whatever I am) will move into the mansion she buys and rent it from her with the money I'm going to make when I become a best selling author. She can paint her mansion pink, and I will help her make curtains. We will sit on the front porch and drink lemonade while we watch the pool guy walk to the backyard to care for the saltwater infinity pool that she will have built back there. And I will wonder why I ever suggested her first words to her grandpa be "Harvard" and "diamonds" when all she needed was a few sheep and a 4H membership. =)
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