As you know I've been volunteering with my wife, Julie, on a horse ranch that's part of a non-profit organization that uses horses as part of a therapy program to help special needs children. My job has mostly been to help around the ranch fixing and cleaning up things. One of the things we discovered during our clean up was a collection of what was believed to be petrified, or harmless, eggs. Harmless in the sense that they were just eggs, maybe duck or goose, that over time had just solidified into hard, rock-like objects. Apparently they'd been there for a number of years. Forgive me and my ignorance. Not sure why I thought they were petrified. A better word would be putridified. In the process of shoveling out these archeological finds one of them EXPLODED! Like a frickin' grenade it sprayed, not shrapnel, but a toxic fume that could've downed an elephant. I thought a liter box or my gym bag was bad but the stench coming from these eggs could be classified as a weapon of mass destruction. Hey, George Dub, think we found your WMDs. Well, that was one egg, the first one. We had at least a dozen more that needed to be removed. I tried asking Siri for "HazMat removal" but all that electronic vixen could do was ask "Do you want Happy Approval?" So the task was left to us to extricate these deadly deposits on our own. I braced the metal shovel near the base of the egg pile while the other ranch hand, Jay, gently brushed a few onto the shovel. It was like finding and removing an unexploded WWII bomb. I was trying desperately not to shake all the while thinking it was going to explode any moment, leaving nothing more then the sulfur coated remains of two unfortunate ranch hands. Once we had two or three loaded, it was my job to carefully walk them out of the barn to a nearby fence and give them a good heave. Instinctively I yelled "FIRE IN THE HOLE!", and away they went. With a load POP! they exploded on impact. The blistering fumes instantly filled the air as I made a bee-line for the barn. This was the only time in my life I wish I had my old Army MOPP gear. Who knew working on a ranch would be such hazardous duty. Here I was all afraid of horses and the one thing that would do me in would be bird eggs.
"The horror......the horror..."
No comments:
Post a Comment