tochter aus elysium

On today’s episode of “Shit that Happens at the Barn,” my friend Sam and I discovered that about 95% of our horses’ water barrels were full of hay, dust, dirt, gunk, and (get ready for it) fucking mosquito larvae. It then fell to the two of us to:

1. Bail out about 95% of the utterly disgusting water in each barrel (depending on where each stall is located, you have to bail once, trundle on over to a plant/grassy patch, dump the water, go back to the stall, and repeat the process until the water is at the right level)
2. Take a scrub brush and scrub the film/muck off the bottom and sides of the barrel
3. Dump the last bit of fucking filthy week-old aquarium water out of the barrel
4. Wipe the barrel down with a rag to make sure any nasty remnants are gone
5. Fill the barrel back up halfway so they can be dumped and cleaned every other day without using too much water
6. Repeat fourteen times.

Due to impacted drainage routes and my own frantic haste, I ended up halfway-drenched in this motherfucking bog water, but my main concern was that horses had been drinking that swill for more than a week. Mosquitos don’t just show up and spawn overnight. That means they’d only been drinking when truly desperate, and the average temperature for the past two weeks has been 95 F. We did a dehydration check on one of the horses whose water was the worst, and his skin seriously didn’t snap back for a few seconds. The whole situation was just atrocious and utterly unacceptable.

My friend Debbie and I alternate cleaning out Reggie’s water because he’s a messy pig who gets hay and slobber in his water the second you change it. We’ve been doing this for a couple years, so his water is always relatively clean. This is the only reason I hadn’t noticed this shit until now - you bet I would’ve raised hell otherwise. A few other boarders (the most conscientious ones) clean their own water barrels regularly, so this would explain why they would not have noticed. I am left wondering how other owners who are not so diligent about checking/cleaning their horses’ water didn’t notice fucking baby mosquitos. In the end, though, the most important question is why in the FUCK have the waters not been cleaned for a significant amount of time?

After a chat with Eva and our “barn manager” (title in quotes because he can barely manage his own ass) Sergio, we discovered that he was leaving the important task of checking and changing waters to his wife, who is utterly incompetent and simply fills the barrels to the top instead of dumping them out and SCRUBBING THEM LIKE YOU’RE FUCKING SUPPOSED TO.

I wanted to ask for money out of Sergio’s paycheck for both Sam and myself for all the fucking work (HIS work that he had been subbing out to his idiot wife) we had just done, but elected to just get the fuck out and into the shower as soon as possible. My car now smells like a fucking swamp. Wondrous.

I want Pollo back. This shit did not happen on his watch. Our waters were always fucking pristine because he skimmed them every day and dumped and scrubbed each bucket once or twice a week depending on the conditions.

My only comfort is that the next time I see his wife, I will go ballistic on her in Spanish. I speak my best Spanish when drunk or angry.