Feast to Famine

First we had flooding. Too much water in the barn. We water flowing in the mangers, sopping cow beds, endless sweeping and shoveling and running of the gutter chain.

Then last night we had none. I was watering pen calves while milking; Becky was watering indoor babies, when it just died out without a whimper. We had heard sirens. We wondered.

Shortly after the water went off the lights did too. Milkers stopped, instant darkness, even the cows jumped. And of course we still haven't been able to replace the generator cables.

After we got the machines taken off the cows and hung up and everything shut off (I just happened to have a little flashlight in my pocket and the kids had cell phones, which serve in a pinch) Alan went down street to find that this had happened. (I feel so bad for the poor folks involved, to have such a thing occur so close to Christmas...or any time really. Such a sad thing for them.)

Thanks to the wonders of those cell phones and Alan having friends on other farms around the Town of Glen, we soon knew that it was a widespread outage.

We went inside and sat in the house in the dark, talking and debating what to do. Most of the cows were milked already because Liz needed to get some rest, having been up all night Monday taking her boyfriend to the emergency room (he is out of danger, but pretty uncomfortable). She had finished most of the boss's cows too, so there were only about thirteen head left to milk. It was tanker day though and the tank had not yet been turned on, so if the outage went on for more than a couple of hours we were going to have to dump the milk.

We heard through the grapevine that ten PM was the earliest power would be restored...this was at about seven-twenty.

So we decided to go to the barn, feed out some hay (grain is moved into the barn with an auger...electric of course...and the girls hadn't had their evening feeding) and start hand-milking the high producers. We would have to throw away the milk, but we didn't want them to be uncomfortable for any longer than was necessary.

I was standing there in the dark in the kitchen, fishing around for a wool sock under a chair, getting ready to do all that, when, squeaky-squeaky, flash-bang, the furnace fan began to rotate, the lights blinked on and all the clocks in the kitchen began flashing the wrong time.

There was no need for a food court. The four of us (we sent Liz to get that sleep when we saw that it was going to be a late night) burst into the farmer version of the Hallelujah Chorus.

We could milk. We could feed. We could cool the milk and wash the pipeline. We could eat dinner, only an hour or so late and get our own sleep.

There was plenty to be joyful about and we were. With all the machines on my line, we finished milking the cows in about twenty minutes, fed them some extra just because and came indoors to computers and warmth and glowing light bulbs, which we purely do not appreciate enough.