March 7: Phil's Traumatic Morning Milking

Phil was up until about 4am working on taxes. So when he got up three hours later to do the milking, he was a bit groggy.

An astounding number of things went wrong then. Up until this time, he begins milking Charity first. This time, with two cows to milk, he thought he would try Bianca first. He got the milking machine out (two cows at once is a lot to do by hand), and he had just about finished getting Bianca hooked up when she panicked, kicked off the tubes, and moved away. Phil was fine, but the tubes fell in the mud, while running; the entire system was unusable then, until it was washed. He didn't bother at the time.

Because, perhaps more dangerously, a cow in heat had escaped from downslope, and the bulls with her. A bull mounting a cow is a force of nature, literally, and not something to casually corral. So as the bulls fought to mount right outside our bedroom window, Phil stood about 30 feet away, nothing he could do, with a frantic milk cow.

So he was stressed, both milk cows were stressed. Bianca had bawled through the night, missing her son, separated 12 hours before by a cattle panel corral.

Add to that, it had rained some on the already sodden ground, so Phil was stuck dealing with two inches of mud. I hate wind. Phil hates mud. He hates it even more when he is tired and dealing with stressed, confused cows.

Somehow he got Bianca milked out by hand. He corralled Charity, and I did most of the milking. Neither gave a whole lot. It was, overall, not a happy morning.

And after he got the bulls and cow re-corralled, some cows escaped again!

The boys helped him get the cows out of the orchard, and one of them found where the line had gone down. Then there was a hiatus until it was time for evening milking. Happily, Phil had cleaned the milk machine and it wasn't dirtied again.