{"id":674,"date":"2010-03-17T10:23:10","date_gmt":"2010-03-17T17:23:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/?p=674"},"modified":"2010-03-18T11:37:36","modified_gmt":"2010-03-18T18:37:36","slug":"blood-sweat-and-tears","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/?p=674","title":{"rendered":"Blood, Sweat, and Tears"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Some people say the phrase “Blood, sweat, and tears” originated with Winston Churchill.\u00a0 That may be true because it certainly wasn’t stated by a farmer.\u00a0 Any farmer worth her vegetable patch would have defined her tasks as “Blood, curses, sweat, and tears.”\u00a0 Statesmen may have to be politically correct, but out here in the country, in front of the cows and the corn, we let ‘er rip.\u00a0 And if you haven’t dropped the F bomb in a while then you haven’t had a tractor stall over a yellow jacket nest.\u00a0 Or watched the neighbor’s dog exit the chicken coop with your favorite laying hen in his teeth.\u00a0 Or had a wind storm topple the tomato cages, snapping those luscious plants off at the base.\u00a0 I could go on and on but I just noticed that the damn goats have flipped over their fricking water trough, making one hell of a mud pit in front of the barn.\u00a0 I’ll be back as soon as I kick their mischievous little asses.\u00a0 (See how that happens?)<\/p>\n

Anyhoo….<\/p>\n

While installing the fence last week, we bled every time the barbed wire caught in our hands.\u00a0 Then we bled some more as we worked our way through the briars and wild blackberry along the treeline.\u00a0 We cried every time we missed the poultry staple and mashed our fingers with the hammer.\u00a0 Then again when the the field fencing ran out, requiring us to wrestle a new 2 ton roll of fencing through the thickest part of the underbrush.\u00a0 (OK, I cried.\u00a0 The kids just stood over me, patting my shoulder and giving each other “the glance” over my head.\u00a0 “The glance” indicates that they recognize no one else’s mother weeps over poultry staples and field fencing and that they’re sure to discuss this matter as adults in therapy.)<\/p>\n

We sweated because, well, wouldn’t you sweat if you had to alternate between picking thorns from your flesh and hammering your own digits?\u00a0 I would think so.\u00a0 And, of course, I cursed sporadically throughout the entire process.\u00a0 It was actually a bit like “Blood, curse, tears, curse, sweat, blood, curse, curse, tears, blood, and sweat.”\u00a0 I’m an original like that.\u00a0 Not everyone can be me (and aren’t you glad!).<\/p>\n

When the fence was finished, we lay, exhausted, on the pond dam and began the twisted but oddly cathartic process of comparing injuries.\u00a0 It was hard to beat Middle’s black eye which he got from the golf ball he found in the leaves and bounced off tree trunks until he eventually caught it with his eye socket instead of his hand.\u00a0 However, since bouncing golf balls off tree trunks is not an integral part of fence building we decided he was disqualified.\u00a0 Sometimes flashy just isn’t the way to go.\u00a0 Pretty had a 3 inch thorn buried in her calf like a scythe that would require tweezers for extraction.\u00a0 I had a decent puncture wound in my tricep from falling against the pointed end of a broken cedar limb.\u00a0 Big, alas, had nothing to show.\u00a0 He spread his arms and twisted his body from side to side.\u00a0 “Look”, he cried, “I don’t have single scratch on me!”\u00a0 What a shame.\u00a0 Now he was stuck with only the satisfaction of a job well done.\u00a0 A pathetic prize compared to scabs and scars.<\/p>\n

Of course, we shouldn’t have underestimated him.\u00a0 Big hates to lose.\u00a0 So the next morning he awoke with a poison ivy rash all over his face and his, um, nether regions.\u00a0\u00a0 Although the rest of us started scratching our own poison ivy break outs a few days later, we couldn’t compete with his emergency trip to the dermatologist and need for prescription medicine.\u00a0 Jeez.\u00a0 There’s wining and then there’s just plain showing off.\u00a0 Maybe it should be “Blood, curses, sweat, tears, and a $30 co-pay.”<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a9 Stevie Taylor 2010. All Rights Reserved. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some people say the phrase “Blood, sweat, and tears” originated with Winston Churchill.\u00a0 That may be true because it certainly wasn’t stated by a farmer.\u00a0 Any farmer worth her vegetable patch would have defined her tasks as “Blood, curses, sweat, and tears.”\u00a0 Statesmen may have to be politically correct, but out here in the country, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[43],"class_list":["post-674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-fence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=674"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":703,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674\/revisions\/703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}