Everyone in my family knows that when someone gets into a scrape it was usually caused by me, and they are right of course. But I simply can't help it, my imagination and ideas always get the better of me. They always sound like solid, good, ingenious ideas at the time but more often than not I find myself in a predicament. Which brings us to my latest and greatest idea that landed my sister Diane and I into "a heap of trouble."
On March 16th, Wednesday, in the year 2016 another great idea came to mind on a beautifully sunny afternoon in our back yard. While Diane and I were wandering around outside I noticed an old, rusted, hay feeder propped up on a small pile of old logs in our back yard. Well, since I love to put old things to good use, I came up with a brilliant idea for the hay feeder. Why let it rust away all lonely on that pile of logs when Diane and I could just simply hoist it off the logs and roll across the yard on it like a human hamster wheel, have an adventure, and then put it back where we got it.
Well, we did have an adventure all right, a hilariously horrible one. First, moving the feeder off of the logs was a lot harder than I had expected because it was really heavy. Our creek was right behind the feeder so if we weren't careful we were all going to crash right into the creek with the hay feeder on top of us. The whole time while we were heaving and pushing Diane was very busy muttering "all of your crazy ideas" and, "why do I always get dragged into your crazy ideas."
When we finally got the feeder lifted off of the logs we almost met our doom when the feeder decided it would be nice to hurtle towards the creek, Diane and I shrieked and tugged and finally managed to drag it over to a flat spot in our back yard. I climbed into the hay feeder thinking that all of our hard work was just about to be paid off, I grabbed onto the feeder's rungs and started rolling, but instead of the effortless carefree fun I had imagined the feeder insisted on rolling backwards when I wasn't rolling it forward. Diane was quickly behind me propping up the feeder as I rolled and stumbled onto my face in a forward progression.
Even after seeing how my turn had been Diane took a turn too, but this time it was down the hill towards the pile of logs where we were going to hoist the feeder up again after Diane had finished her turn. But goodness! Her turn was horrifying, we went flying down that hill with my heels digging into the grass, leaving ugly marks behind us while Diane screeched at the top of her lungs, all of that time of course, that feeder was intent on rattling along making an exuberant amount of noise as the rusty bolts hit the ground. When I finally stopped the runaway "Hamster wheel" Diane and I slowly turned to face each other, with both of us fearing that Mom would stick her head out of the living room window any minute now to find us trying to casually hide the massive hay feeder behind us.
It was time to put the hay feeder back where we got. Naturally, it was not anywhere near as easy as I had expected, I had forgotten to calculate the tree that was hovering over the log pile in the first place so instead of rolling the hay feeder onto the logs we smacked it into tree branches almost decapitating ourselves. I burst out laughing at the hilarity of the situation while Diane questioned my sanity. Eventually we got it dragged over beside the logs where we decided we should just hoist it side-ways onto the logs and push it on the rest of the way. That impossible hunk of metal was even heavier than we had ever imagined it would be.
After extreme exertion we managed to lift it onto the pile of logs and we hurriedly propped it up and almost collapsed with exhaustion. One thing we had completely forgotten though is that the hay feeder was extremely rusty so when we looked at our hands they were completely covered in thick, crusty, layers of orange filth.
Two things I learned though from this adventure. Number one, rust washes off of hands moderately easy. And number two, A human hamster wheel is never, under no circumstances, a good idea.
