This morning Bob and I went to secure another 20 bales of hay. What else can you do when the daytime high is like 11 degrees? Baby, it's cold! Yet another delightful effect of this "polar vortex" fun is that a horse (or cow or dog or human) has to eat more to maintain body temperature. We buy our winter hay from a beautiful farm in Middlebury and pick it up twenty bales at a time. (They store it in a huge barn, as we have limited storage.) The only trick is timing it so that the weather cooperates, work schedules permits and you don't run out. We were down to a single bale...
The next excitement is getting the hay from the driveway to the horse barn. What with snow cover, we have to be clever in our methods as you can't drive the truck to the barn.
I swear, Bob and I sometimes resemble peasants in a Breughel painting. We're swaddled in hats and scarves and gloves and boots and dragging pieces of plywood secured with ropes across the tundra- very Middle Ages, indeed! I'm supposing this kind of activity keeps us fit for the demanding enterprise of making art. Who needs aerobics or pilates when you can drag several forty pound bales around?
Here's Bob's transport device of choice:
Bob, being a clever welder, fabricated this extended arm wheelie cart out of an old hand truck. It worked surprisingly well on the snow, despite small wheels. Between the two of us, it only took ten minutes or so to move the hay from driveway to barn. Such fun!
Then it was in to the house for warmer pursuits, huddled around the wood stove and computer. I managed to get moving on a few art projects. My brain may be processing more slowly due to the cold, but something seems to be firing correctly!
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