All I Want For Christmas Is 600 Bales Of Hay.. NOT

First off, before I get to being my good ole' negative self, I hope everyone had a great holiday season and made great memories together with their friends and family! I sure know I did. There is nothing quite like the anticipation of Santa's arrival or the joy of dodging crazy relatives visiting from afar. This year, I had a new kind of anticipation unfortunately sprung upon me. It all started on one cold and rainy Christmas Eve...
Let me set the story for you so you have a great visual in your mind. The Right Turn Feed Store is where it all began.. My father owns a drive through feed store as some of you are aware of. Of course, being the AWESOME daughter I am, I volunteered to help work at the store on Christmas Eve (again, I'm awesome). What my dad failed to mention was that there was a load of hay coming in at 10:30 AM and that I needed to be able to help unload. Not a big deal, right? Just a little hay is all.. WRONG. I need to get three more paragraphs out of this story, so I'm not going to jump to the exciting part just yet..
So where was I.. Aha.. at the store, 10:30 am, starving with a side of sleep deprivation, and left with no hay. I called my father at 11, 12, and again at 1:30 and still so sign of hay. I'm a bit distraught at this point because the hay delivery running late meant that Ellen's plans for the day were instantly chucked out the window. My dad assures me that the hay will arrive promptly at 2:30 pm, and boy did it. Now when my dad said "some hay", I thought for sure I could handle it. I'm a strong girl, right? Well "some hay" turned out to be 600 bails of uncovered, sopping-wet, weed filled hay (remember, it was MAYBE ten degrees and raining that day). It didn't help that the semi-driver HAD to be special needs and could not, for the life of him, back the semi up into the loading dock. So being the nice Scott family we are, we trudged out through the snow and slush to begin our Christmas Eve bonding.
We started by fork lifting my brother and his friend to the top on the eight, wet layers of hay. I hope you are imagining this as completely miserable, because it was. Anyways, they began by rolling off hay bales one by one and each hay bale landed one by one in a large puddle that had formed in the road. Yay. I thought semi- wet bales were hard to lift and strategically place on to old, rickety palettes, but turns out the jobs is TEN times harder when you are forced to fish the bale from a lake-like puddle. To top things off, my dad has a worker who mumbles under his breath and talks to himself. I, of course, was NOT informed of this and was talking back to him thinking we were having some sort of conversation. He then turns to me and states quite mockingly, "You talkin to your lil self girl??". Ha! Merry Christmas to you too crazy, old, mumbling man.
It was clearly not a good day for me but despite the frozen fingers, wet clothes, and blistered hands, I made a memory with my family that I will never forget. The most important realization was that I HAD a loving family to share this miserable experience with and that I HAVE a loving family to laugh with today about our Christmas Eve adventure. So thank you, Santa.. for ALL 600 bales of joy. :)