The cows are enjoying their summer home

As the winter stall was being cleaned for the last time, I couldn't help but think that the classically styled song on the radio was a song from a soundtrack to a movie. The song comes from a part of the movie where something extraordinary is going to happen, but only the viewer can feel that something is coming and the people on screen are oblivious.

Sadly, the cows were not walked up to the other stall. We converted the work truck into an open-air box truck and the cows were loaded up 3-4 at a time and taken to their summer home. It was a big to-do. Since they hadn't seen their newly remodeled sleeping quarters, they started freaking out: probably at what such a good job we did on it. My job was to guard a small opening meant only for the calves to go in and out. I didn't do much. Salome hung out with me for a little while so that kept things interesting for me.

It was weird waking up today and NOT going down the stairs to the stall. That's what I've done almost everyday since I got here in mid-February. Instead, Dirk and I went to another piece of land that they have and we repaired the fence there. The land is a little higher up than the house is and we had a better view of watching the sun brighten the valley. You could hear cowbells echoing as well as the cuckoo call of a bird. Dirk called today a 'summer day' and the high was close to 25-26C (75-80F).

My main job today was to clean out the hay boxes in the winter stall. There are 11 boxes, 4 on one side and 7 on the other. The cows do everything but eat in these boxes: sleep, stand, pee, poop, and lie. When we did the stall, we only removed the poop from the top and added a thin layer of fresh hay to it...and that was twice a day. If you haven't imagined it yet, there was 4-5 months of compressed hay held together by 4-5 months of cow pee. This reddish brown mixture had to be removed by me. It was hard work and I have the callused hands to show for it. I had the side with four finished before lunch and finished the other side after lunch.

Tomorrow we get out the pressure washer and, well, pressure wash the crap out of it. Dirk joked that it will be so clean it will be their new living room. Some Swiss farmers even rent out their clean stalls in the summer time to hikers who sleep on fresh hay, but Dirk doesn't do that.

'til later,
Jon