My Life According to Cole: I'M OUTTA HERE!

Mack was released from the vet school on Monday. The vets are 'cautiously optimistic'. Translation: no surgery required, yet.

Here's the trouble-maker

During the three mile drive back from the vet school, Tommy broke the chain that tethered him, raced up and down the length of the 38' trailer, caused trouble resulting in Mack breaking his chain too. I suppose I need to invest in heavier duty snaps and chain links!?

Oops

With two lard butts snorting and acting silly in the trailer, it was dangerous to get in to crank down the tailgate. Besides, in their attempt to destroy the trailer, they moved the interior side door latch and locked themselves in. The only access door... Dr. P answered my distress call in two minutes flat.
We brainstormed while Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee treated my trailer as their trampoline. Against better judgement, I got a ladder up to the opening at the top of the back drop panel. I dropped myself into the trailer and used a stall divider to force them to the front of the trailer. Nice words were quickly replaced with threats of slaughterhouse trips when I saw the window Tommy busted out. They behaved long enough for me to grab the tailgate crank to lower it. The tailgate weighs a few hundred pounds and I was worried that I was about to reenact the scene from Looney Tunes where Bugs Bunny drops the draw bridge on Yosemite Sam. But, Dr. P's sense of self-preservation had him standing off to the side.
Tommy and Mack charged out, then Tommy turned and tried to get back in. Moron. For two hours, I had to fight off those ninnies. 100 acres around them and they preferred to stay around the rig while I cleaned it. The five rubber mats weigh 100 lbs apiece and require dragging out to wash. In their play, the boys had covered every surface below 6' in manure.
If they weren't sneaking back into the trailer, they were standing on my hose or tooling around with their horns on my truck. When it began to rain heavily around 9 PM, they finally left. I still had to haul all the mats and the farm equipment back into the trailer. Last year, I mounted the 400 lb plow on a platform with casters to ease moving. Sort of works. Rolling it down the tailgate is a matter of controlling the drop. Shoving it up an incline involves pulling entire muscle groups and the potential for it to roll back on top of you is high.
The silver lining to this ordeal is the survival of the baby birds born in the trailer. A kingbird had made her nest inside the trailer and I didn't expect her young to survive the two trips to the vet school and the pressure washing. When I had driven the trailer off the farm, I had tried to cover the nest with warm towels. As soon as I returned to the farm, the mother zoomed in and returned to her nest. During the cleaning, she hunkered down and didn't move. The kingbird's Latin name is Tyrannus tyrannus, very fitting for such a fierce little bird.