Shape Up!

I see all these commercials for gyms and personal trainers, and people jogging and biking, just to get or stay in shape.  Instead of a B&B, I should open the Farview Fitness Farm.  We could offer a mile-a-day (total) walk down to the barn and back (more, if Sheila is playing Ring-Around-the-Rosy).  Plenty of waist twists, bending and lifting, while raking and shoveling goat poop out of the stalls.  Over a thousand reps to develop hand strength while squeezing teats for four goats.  The morning hike back up the hill from the barn includes carrying two buckets of milk.  The barn itself is a sauna in summer, guaranteed to sweat all impurities from the skin.  Today, for a special treat, there are four fifty-pound bags of chicken and bird feed and two seventy-five-pound bags of goat chow to unload from the truck.  One bag of chow will have to be trundled on the handcart down to the barn, lifted and emptied into the mouse-proof barrel.

Yesterday afternoon, there was a ruckus out by the chicken pens, with one prolonged, strange-sounding clucking going on.  A coyote was moving slowly off down the slope to the woods.  Leaving an anxious Bess in the house, I stepped out on the deck with the gun and fired a shot for effect.  The coyote took off, but I could still hear that clucking, now coming from down the hill.  Nothing for it but to go see if I could find the injured fowl.  Going down wasn't too bad.  I could hear the bird, now from here, now from there, as I went back and forth, but couldn't see any movement anywhere.  Finally I looked up and there was a turkey hen high up in an oak.  She appeared surprisingly unharmed, for which I was glad, but I still had to get back up to the house and that's a very steep slope; steeper in the heat of the day.  If I were running the fitness farm, that would be an added benefit to offer my clients.  They, too, could "go for the burn."

Hmmm.  I'll have to give this idea more thought.