Ranch Tour: The feed room

I need to get a handle on how much hay I have left today, so it’s time to get out the calculator. While I’m at it, I think I’ll begin a little tour of the 7MSN ranch for you, starting with the feed room.

The feed room is at the south south side of the barn and is 12 feet by 6 feet – large enough to store a week’s worth of hay and the various supplements and potions I feed the boys, but not so large that I’m tempted to use it for non-barn-appropriate stuff. Granted there are a few things in the category of “stuff I just can’t part with,” like the broken purple manure fork, but you never know when that might come in handy...say for snake relocation or dead varmint removal.

I use the horizontal beam to hang my cowgirl calculator. Since every time I try to count the bales in the hay barn (next stop on the tour) I get a wildly different number, I had to come up with a better way of knowing how much hay I have left. So every time I cut open a new bale, I hang one string on the beam and throw the other one away. Theoretically, this simple equation should give me the answer:

bales stored - orange strings = number of remaining bales

Except for all these variables, and this is where it gets tricky:

+ x (number of times I forgot to hang up the string)
- y (number of times I hung up both strings)
+ d (number of strings Deets stole and hauled off to play with)
+ b (number of times I had to borrow a string because Hank wouldn’t go in his stall and I didn’t want to bother putting his halter on)
+ t (number of strings I used to braid into twine for my cowgirl Christmas tree)

My cowgirl calculator doesn’t do algebra.