It’s starting to become an annual tradition: For the past three years, I have gone to D.C. for a week of business and end up racing get home before the roads became completely impassable.  The first year, American Airlines didn’t do me the courtesy of telling me my connecting flight through St. Louis to a regional airport had been canceled until AFTER my flight departed Dulles.  I was rescued by an intrepid driver from Beeline Express, and have used them exclusively ever since.  After Thursday night’s 4 hour safari through freezing rain, though, I think my driver may have turned in his resignation.

He got me home about 9:30 pm — this is what it looked like when we got up the next morning:

We got about 3/4 of an inch of ice.  One of our trees in the backyard has lost nearly all of its medium size limbs, and today’s winds may finish off the job:

Regardless of how nasty it gets….no, scratch that, ESPECIALLY when it gets nasty, the livestock must be fed.  Hay is what keeps digestive systems rumbling and generating body heat.  The hay comes from the pastures that were mown this past summer.

To recap from a previous post, 3 men and two teenagers moved about 120 tons of hay into the barns this summer.  To do that, each bale of hay, which weighs about 60 lbs, has to be picked up at least twice (three, if the accumulator is broken) — from field to hay rack, from hayrack to hayloft elevator, from elevator to stack.  Sometime, you can substitute a teenager for an elevator.  So really, they lifted/shifted/tossed/cursed 360 tons worth of hay this summer.  My math may be a little off; Farm Daddy went ahead and rolled more of it than usual this summer.

Now that it’s winter, that same hay has to be moved, twice, back out into the fields for consumption: from barn to truck, from truck to field.  Neither rain, nor snow, nor ice can keep Farm Daddy and Studmuffin from their appointed rounds.  I would have helped, but I had a trip report to write.  Really, I do help.  Sometimes.