Thursday, September 30, 2010

Don't Cry Over Spilt Milk




It has been one of those weeks. A week filled with inconveniences and minor upsets that add up and kind of make a person wish the week was over.

It started when somehow the key to our new car with all the fancy little buttons for different functions was dropped in the bottom of my purse (or if you are from the south "pocket book"). That's a good place for a key, right? It made sense to me. However, it turned out NOT to be the best place for the key.

When we got home from running to Lowes to pick up a few items, a share member was getting some items out of the garage. We waved, spoke, and I ran in the house to deposit my things and get the milker so that I could take care of the cows. I wasn't in the barn more than a couple of minutes when I heard Mike saying something about the garage door not opening. "That's weird", I shouted back to him. It worked fine when we first got home because so-in-so was in there and we saw the garage door shut when they left."

I ran back to see what the problem was but the door would only raise a few inches off the ground and stop. Back and forth we worked the door, up and down trying to get it to open. Finally I volunteered to crawl under the door but Mike was already on the ground looking underneath. What he said next just made me sick to my stomach. The only thing we can figure out is that the key in my purse somehow was activated causing the automatic hatch to engage and open about the same time that the garage door was closing earlier. The hatch and the garage door were scraping up against each other. The garage door would not open and with each time we tried to get it to open, we were just adding insult to injury. We used the remote to shut the hatch and then opened the door successfully only to find a very obvious and ugly perpendicular scratch on the hatch. It's not something that can be easily covered up and will have to go to the shop to be fixed. The car is less than a week old.

Already pretty bummed about that but trying to make myself feel better in light of the fact that it was just a material possession and did not involve any injury to a person or animal, I tried to put my best foot forward and go on with the week.

There were some other incidents that were inconvenient and aggravating like the fact the pigs got out (again) and this time would not be lured back to their pen with food. They were having too much fun rooting up the cow's pasture and running around like 200+ pound idiots. They would not come back through the electric wire even though it was off, because they had been shocked by it going through. So, we had to entice them all the way up the hill, through three gates, back down the hill, and into their pen. The pigs thought it was the best game they had ever played. Needless to say, we were not impressed.

Then, poor Mike was trying to help me with Butter who decided to poop. It's bad enough that she decided to poop in the stanchion, but she had been eating lots of grass and alfalfa hay and her manure was quite "liquid" at this point. I walked around the corner to find Mike with manure from head to foot and the whole milking shed covered in manure including the walls and the feed box.

I discovered later in the week that I had mis-calculated the amount of milk needed to get us through the week with the share program. I had dried one of the cows off (ButterCupp) who is due with a calf in November and had not taken into consideration how much milk I would need to get me through the rest of the week. After frantically trying to figure out a way to make things work, I finally had to contact some gracious share members who volunteered to wait until later in the week to pick up their milk.

Finally, last night I began to breathe easy as I put three gallons of milk in the freezer to bring the temp down quickly before transferring it over to the refrigerator. The weekend was on it's way and I had somehow managed to squeeze enough milk out of the cows to get us through! With thoughts of peace in my head I went to bed and slept soundly only to waken this morning in horror! The milk! I had left the milk all night in the freezer! Sure enough, the milk was frozen solid and the jars were busted.

The common phrase "There is no sense crying over spilt milk" keeps coming to my mind today. Wiktionary defines this common saying to mean "It is no use worrying about unfortunate events which have already happened and which cannot be changed."

So here I go, chin up, off to milk my cows for the evening. I refuse to cry over spilt milk, frozen milk or any of the other inconveniences of this past week!

Note: The phrase "don't cry over spilt milk" originated in America during the Great Depression because the price of milk as a commodity had fallen so low due to its overabundance relative to demand, that dairy farmers were subsidized by the state to destroy their surplus in order to bring prices back up to a profitable level.

The destruction of a commodity in order to alleviate the crisis of overproduction would be, in any system other than capitalist enterprise, utterly absurd. Hence the need for propaganda and a cute, memorable idiom like this one.

From Answers.com