Mission Impossible

My husband once wrote me a funny email called "Secret Agent Ranchhand". It started off something like, "Your mission, if you choose to accept, is ..."He continued to give me instructions as if I were a secret agent, but the mission was to put anti-freeze in the bulldozer. This has remained a joke between us whenever he has a chore (mission) for me.

Today my mission is to take the 24' gooseneck trailer to Tecumseh, OK and pick up a trailer load of sheet metal for the roof of our new house (and swing by Ardmore to drop Jesse off to pick up her Honda at the mechanic's). It sounds simple enough, but just like with Tom Cruise, the mission gets a little tougher as you go.

First off, the trailer has to be cleaned out after we hauled cattle to the sale barn last week. For those of you who know cow manure after being on wheat pasture, I am sure you will understand the difficulty. For those of you who don't know cows, you don't want to know. It turns out that we left the good flathead shovel and broom at the new house, but no problem, we can use a hose to get it wet, and then shovel it out. This meant hooking up to the trailer and backing to the barn since one tire has a slow leak (why don't we get that fixed?) to air it up before pulling up close enough to a water hose. Most of these things needed doing anyway. Here is where the mission got impossible. Jesse and I put the special nozel on the water hose to create the pressure needed to wash out the manure, but no water would come out. Jesse unscrewed the nozel and out fell some sort of giant bug. Jesse screamed and dropped the nozel. We got a good laugh out of that, and put the nozel back on. Still no water! We banged around on the nozel, but nothing came out. So I poked a screw driver up in it, and sure enough there was something stuck in the nozel. After I figured out how to take the nozel apart, I saw the bug guts wedged in the whole at the end of the nozel. I poked these out with my screw driver - not so bad. Then I poked the screwdriver back into the nozel - hmm, more bug. It took me quite a while to get the entire bug out of the nozel, and it was gross!

As I worked to get the bug guts out of the nozel, I began to think, "Do other wives do this? I cooked his breakfast, packed his lunch, and I am driving the truck to pick up roofing. Did I sign on for bug gut duty?" I was really working myself into a tizz. With all the bug guts out of the nozel I took it the nozel to Jesse who was waiting with her mud boots and gloves to wash out the trailer (she is a good kid). This time the nozel worked great. I told Jesse I was going to clean the kitchen and get the bug guts off the counter. She responded with, "Are you going to put them on Dad's pillow?" Hmm, not a bad idea!