sheep at the airport

[mitchmaine]

hey jason, had a great time. gotta say i wouldn’t have minded tagging along on some of your trip, too. next time, were goin’ to scotland. judging by the speed it took getting through customs when we told them we’d been on farms, getting your colt into the country can’t be that easy. are you going to canada first? hope all goes well with the volcano. they canceled two flights just ahead of us to scotland and let us go.
the woman, frankie, i mentioned earlier, she and her husband have been in the business for about 15 years now and have some connection with simon, and give him high marks. it was a great time for me. i spoke with john (jac) by phone 3 times while we were there, and new what he was saying inspite of the scottish accent, so maybe horse is a language in and of itself. best wishes, and maybe see you over there sometime. mitch

[Gabe Ayers]

Hey Mitch,

Simon is the real deal for sure.

This is an email I got from a friend recently, funny story by a non farmer type that was using electric fence for “home security”…. copy and paste below:

Rumor has it this is true. It was sent by a retired dentist, probably living somewhere in Kentucky… 🙂

We have the standard 6 ft. fence in the backyard, and a few months ago, I heard about burglaries increasing dramatically in the entire city. To make sure this never happened to me, I got an electric fence and ran a single wire along the top of the fence.
Actually, I got the biggest cattle charger Tractor Supply had, made for 26 miles of fence. I then used an 8 ft. long ground rod, and drove it 7.5 feet into the ground. The ground rod is the key, with the more you have in the ground, the better the fence works.
One day I’m mowing the back yard with my cheapo Wal-Mart 6 hp big wheel push mower. The hot wire is broken and laying out in the yard. I knew for a fact that I unplugged the charger. I pushed the mower around the wire and reached down to grab it, to throw it out of the way. It seems as though I hadn’t remembered to unplug it after all.
Now I’m standing there, I’ve got the running lawnmower in my right hand and the 1.7 giga-volt fence wire in the other hand. Keep in mind the charger is about the size of a marine battery and has a picture of an upside down cow on fire on the cover.
Time stood still.
The first thing I notice is my pecker trying to climb up the front side of my body. My ears curled downwards and I could feel the lawnmower ignition firing in the backside of my brain. Every time that Briggs & Stratton rolled over, I could feel the spark in my head. I was literally at one with the engine.
It seems as though the fence charger and the piece of shit lawnmower were fighting over who would control my electrical impulses.
Science says you cannot crap, pee, and vomit at the same time. I beg to differ. Not only did I do all three at once, but my bowels emptied 3 different times in less than half of a second. It was a Matrix kind of bowel movement, where time is creeping along and you’re all leaned back and BAM BAM BAM you just crap your pants 3 times. It seemed like there were minutes in between but in reality it was so close together it was like exhaust pulses from a big block Chevy turning 8 grand.
At this point I’m about 30 minutes (maybe 2 seconds) into holding onto the fence wire. My hand is wrapped around the wire palm down so I can’t let go. I grew up on a farm so I know all about electric fences… but Dad always had those piece of shit chargers made by International or whoever that were like 9 volts and just kinda tickled.
This one I could not let go of. The 8 foot long ground rod is now accepting signals from me through the permadamp Ark-La-Tex river bottom soil. At this point I’m thinking I’m going to have to just man up and take it, until the lawnmower runs out of gas. ‘Damn!,’ I think, as I remember I just filled the tank!
Now the lawnmower is starting to run rough. It has settled into a loping run pattern as if it had some kind of big lawnmower race cam in it. Covered in poop, pee, and with my vomit on my chest I think ‘Oh God please die …. Pleeeeaze die’. But nooooo, it settles into the rough lumpy cam idle nicely and remains there, like a big bore roller cam EFI motor waiting for the go command from its owner’s right foot.
So here I am in the middle of July, 104 degrees, 80% humidity, standing in my own backyard, begging God to kill me. God did not take me that day …. he left me there covered in my own fluids to writhe in the misery my own stupidity had created.
I honestly don’t know how I got loose from the wire …. I woke up laying on the ground hours later. The lawnmower was beside me, out of gas. It was later on in the day and I was sunburned.
There were two large dead grass spots where I had been standing, and then another long skinny dead spot where the wire had laid while I was on the ground still holding on to it. I assume I finally had a seizure and in the resulting thrashing had somehow let go of the wire.
Upon waking from my electrically induced sleep I realized a few things:
1 – Three of my teeth seem to have melted.
2 – I now have cramps in the bottoms of my feet and my right butt cheek (not the left, just the right).
3 – Poop, pee, and vomit when all mixed together, do not smell as bad as you might think.
4 – My left eye will not open.
5 – My right eye will not close.
6 – The lawnmower runs like a sumbitch now. Seriously! I think our little session cleared out some carbon fouling or something, because it was better than new after that.
7 – My nuts are still smaller than average yet they are almost a foot long.
8 – I can turn on the TV in the game room by farting while thinking of the number 4 (still don’t understand this???).
That day changed my life. I now have a newfound respect for things. I appreciate the little things more, and now I always triple check to make sure the fence is unplugged before I mow.
The good news, is that if a burglar does try to come over the fence, I can clearly visualize what my security system will do to him, and THAT gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling all over, which also reminds me to triple check before I mow.

~

Jason

[mitchmaine]

good one, jason. that one will get alot of mileage.

simon’s coming here. good news, but we could all save him some trouble if we just went there. i’m still stuck pretty good on that place. but also glad for him. we could all use another good horseman. thanks again for the good laugh, mitch

[jac]

Mitch I recon you’d find a bigger que of folks trying to get out of here than you guys trying to get in..:D me included !..
John

[mitchmaine]

if my roots are stuck here as hard as they seem, yours must be wrapped around a rock by now. i’m not expecting to pass you in the mid-atlantic. it’s always fun to dream. let me know when you guys are headed over. we’d like to meet up. mitch and penny

[OldKat]

Not exactly on track with this thread, but it got me thinking about community and the electric fence story conjured up an experience from about 30 years ago from a community where I lived at the time.

Here goes:
I think most of us have probably experienced getting zapped by an electric fence now and then. However when you pull a wire up off of the ground & it turns out that the charger is in fact NOT off, it doesn’t take long to realize that you have a monster in your hand. When I was much younger, and didn’t know better, I taught what was then called “Vocational Agriculture” for a few years. NOTE: We can’t use the term “vocational’ anymore, because that might imply that we would be training someone to actually work and we can’t have any of that going on in our public schools!

Anyway, one day I was taking a bus load of rural and small town kids to the city on a field trip to the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo . As we passed one of the two school owned farms I saw cows out on the highway. We stopped and put them up and I found that the electric fence that reinforced the dilapidated barbed wire fence was down and well, the grazing is always better on the other side of the fence … so that is where the cows went.

We had a mega DC fence charger run off deep charge batteries that were charged by a solar charger. I unplugged the pulser, laid it on top of the unit and went out to pull the wire up while some of the kids put it back in the insulators. As it cleared the ground I had an experience somewhat like that guy in the story did. Fortunately I was able to drop it back down to the ground and get away from it real quick. Not one kid smirked or laughed, so I knew some little %!#*$^&!!! had done me in! I went up to the barn where the charger was and sure enough it was plugged in. Knowing that if I asked who did this dirty deed to me I would get no response; I said “Hmmm, I thought for sure that I had unplugged that pulser!” Several of the kids nearby were about to bust, but to their credit they did not rat out their fellow perpetrator, I mean student. We got the wire back up and hot and were on our way in just a few minutes.

Several days passed without anyone so much as breathing a word about who the guilty party may have been, but slowly the tide started to turn … I kept hearing “Travis W”. Travis was a good looking, fun loving and extremely likeable boy who was a Junior that year and who happened to be the oldest son of my horseshoer. I never acted like I believed this story and kept telling the kids; “Oh no, Travis wouldn’t do that. I just forgot to unplug the pulser, so it was my own fault that I got zapped”. Pretty soon the trickle of informants was a flood. I started watching Travis … real close. I noticed that he was doing everything he could to distance himself from me, so I knew I had my culprit. After a few weeks he would walk by my classroom door without watching my every move and I knew payback was gonna be sweet!

Every day just before lunch he came down the hall where my class was located, on his way to his next class. One day I was waiting with the biggest, baddest, most charged up cattle prod that HotShot made. It had a 36″ fiberglass wand on it and I had it charged up enough to knock bark off a pine tree. When Travis and his girlfriend passed my room he looked up and nodded, saying “Mr. Rogers”, to my nod and “Travis”. As he passed by I pulled my HotShot from behind the door, where I had it hid, slid it up under his right butt check and pressed the let ‘er rip button. Now some of you might think that this is just a little bit odd behavior from a high school teacher, and I know that today I would get fired and probably sued. Maybe because in 1980 I didn’t have anything worth protecting, but for whatever reason I didn’t care. Ol’ Travis did the oddest thing; rather than spinning around to confront his attacker, he just ran. Straight down the hall like Forest Gump on steroids. I was right on his butt, literally. Down past Home Economics (or whatever stupid PC name they use for that now), down past the Biology labs, past the Counselors office on and on he ran with an amped up HotShot arcing blue flames off his butt. As he was approaching the Main Office, I started thinking about those big windows they had so they could watch everything going on out it the hall and decided that his MIGHT be just a little difficult to explain. So I let up on him and came to a winded stop. Immediately he spun around and with the most bewildered look you have ever seen on a kids face asked … no screamed; “WHY DID YOU DO THAT?” I calmly looked at him and said “For the same reason you plugged that fence pulser in on me, just for the Hell of it!” He didn’t say a word, but a big smile came across his face and he mumbled “Oh that …” He went his way and I went mine. I kept thinking I was going to get a call any day to come to the office so they could fill out my dismissal paperwork, but it never came.

A few weeks later his dad, Charles, who was built like an Angus bull … short and powerful, was over at the farm where we lived shoeing horses. He was up under one my mares when I asked; “Charlie, did Travis tell you I lit his butt up with a HotShot?” He dropped her foot and stood up to face me. This guy had arms like the trunks of some of those trees that Jason and Carl fell, and was armed with a big shoeing hammer no less. For a second I thought it was on for sure. Then he slowly said “Uhh, no …he didn’t. Why did you do that?” So I told him the whole thing. He laughed so hard that he had to go get a drink of water to stop the coughing that had started. His face was beet red with laughter. When he finally stopped laughing, he said; “Good by God, I’m proud you done it!” I never tried any stunt like that again. I can’t say for sure that I would have had the same response if someone had done that to one of my kids, but it made an impression on me that I will never forget. I never had so much as a minutes problem with Travis, or his younger brother Glenn after that. Charlie is now 100% disabled and living in an assisted living home in the final stages of Parkinson’s. God bless his soul.

[mitchmaine]

hye oldkat, good story. sounds like you really had a good friend and farrier there. your story came at a good time. penny and i just drove down to philadelphia to our youngest son’s graduation. thru the garden state to the city of brotherly love? what was that guy drinking? sorry, i take that back totally. i must be getting old or something. but i can’t beleive how overwhelmed i get lately by the sheer numbers of cars and roads and people. each running mile of turnpike wastes about 60 acres of good farmland. if each car i passed had 10 gallons of fuel in it’s tank, i must have passed 2 million gallons of fuel stored in fuel tanks. man is an amazing creature with his roads, and buildings and bridges. but i sure am glad to be home on this farm. see if i can stay put for awhile. thank you for your tale. mitch

[davidwillson]

@Carl Russell 17935 wrote:

Mitch, I’m envious. I was in the UK for a short visit about 30 years ago, and it’s nice to see your photos.

Thanks, Carl

carl, they’d love you over there. all you’d have to say is draft horse and i know two places you’d stay for awhile. wonder if it’s changed much in thirty years? probably. i was thinking about our history over here, and somebody from england told me “well, you haven’t been gone all that long, have you?” kinda put it in perspective. like going home to see the folks. erik, do you know anymore about that plow? thanks, mitch

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