Bad British Word X ? =

Sometimes My Loving Spouse accidentally utters a ‘Bad British Word’. Tonight he might have done it a few times…  Now that it stays light out later, we can get a lot of work get into a lot of trouble after work.  When I got home, I began to drag the driveway.  (Yes, Southern California this is a real thing, which I will explain another day).  I was just getting into a good dragging mode on the quad, when our neighbor The Fire Captain came over.

“Would you like some help burning your ditch?”  Burning ditches is a spring time farm thing, kind of like ‘weeding on steroids’.  Instead of pulling all the dead brush and tumble weeds out of the long, long ditches, you can just set them on fire…and it is legal…even if you are not The Fire Captain.  It is a quick and easy way to tidy up the ditches prior to running the irrigation water in them this summer.  I was happy to stop dragging and go burn the ditch, because believe it or not, but sometimes ditch burning gets out of control and starts a fire and then the Fire Department has to come out.  I am a bit intimidated about the whole ditch burning thing, so having a trained professional there setting them on fire was kind of a relief.  Also, I wouldn’t be the one embarrassed, if the Fire Department had to come out.  My Loving Spouse came home from work and he could see the smoke from a way down the road.  He knew I was home and he knew ‘sometimes’ I don’t wait for his help before starting a project and he saw me and he saw the fire, but he missed seeing the Fire Captain…so he said a ‘Bad British word’….like I would be crazy enough to do something like that!

With the ditches safely burned we turned our attention to the project of the evening.  There is a small strip of land that borders our field that was not originally sold to us, but now has been and there is a long involved legal reason why for all of this, that has nothing to do with my tale.  The strip of land will square up our property and offer more feed for the herd.  It had become a tiny bit of a junk yard.  The old dry weeds have grown up high, and you cannot just set them on fire, so cleaning it out must be done carefully, to prevent running over old farm equipment.  We intended to let the herd clean up the field.  Step one was to begin fencing in a small portion for the herd to graze down.  My Loving Spouse had a plan and he assured me, it would be easy.

Step 1 was to haul an old heavy gate to the field using Blue and her front end loader.  This did go quite well.  That front end loader can lift and carry all kinds of stuff, so all he had to do was drive out of our field, over the ditch, then up into the strip of land.  Except…Blue went into the ditch and the blade on back of Blue dug into the ground and they were very stuck, very stuck actually, going no where…not forward..not backward…’Bad British Word’.  This is the kind of thing I usually do, so I was very understanding, mostly thinking to myself, (I am glad it is not me).  The blade was successfully removed and momentarily abandoned at the end of the field.  Back to gate installation, which went quite quickly and exactly as planned.

My Loving Spouse then decided to try to do a small careful bit of clean up in the strip, not part of the plan.  Their first discovery was an abandoned 12 foot chain harrow, which got drug out of the strip.  Then they found that they had a flat tire…’Bad British Word’.  Not wanting to leave Blue in the strip, My Loving Spouse drove it back to our field, where it got stuck in the ditch again…’Bad British Word’, possibly said more than once.  My trusty tractor Jubal was called to the rescue.  Jubal and I dragged Blue back into the field, carefully maneuvering around our blade, which we’d left on the first ditch mishap.

Once all tractors and farm equipment were back into our field I decided that it was time to plan dinner and call it a night…and the flat tire will be removed and fixed another day…’Bad British Word’.