The Big Family Get Together...

Every year, the whole family gets together for a big shin dig. The past two years they shin dig went down at my parents' house but this year my aunt decided to host it at her place in Lancaster. She lives on a farm, and has 270 milking cows. Sometimes I wish I was a cow...

For some reason I agreed to come up with my parents a day before the gathering to spend the night in a modular home located 50 yards from the new barn that was just built this summer. Turns out there is not that much to do in Lancaster, who would have thought. So I was a little bored but it was nice to spend some extra time with the cousin's and meet the newborn.

Spent most of the night watching the Patriots vs. NY Giants game. Too bad the Patriots ended up with a perfect season, the Giants almost had the win but just could not pull it off.

After the game, left the Aunt's house to go to the other house that I would be staying in. Luckily I was at the house earlier and called a bed...so cousin Eric was the only one out of six that had to sleep on the couch. Eric and I tried watching a movie, The Goonies...his choice, but Eric fell asleep 10 minutes into it and I then went to my room and tried to watch The Kingdom but it was skipping and ended up just going to bed. Of course it took me forever to fall asleep and I did not sleep very well.

The next day we had some delicious egg casserole for breakfast and the rest of the family arrived around noon. I guess the biggest surprise was that Brent finally cut his hair. He's had dreads for what seems like over a year and got them all cut off thanks to his girl Adrianne. Now he actually looks like a person.
The family chatted for a bit and we had a lunch/dinner at 1 pm. I ate so much for breakfast I didn't have room for seconds.
After dinner, we cleared the tables off and did our "White Elephant" "Secret Santa" "Polly Anna"...okay, I'm not sure what we call it but I always end up with a ridiculous gift. Plus, when you do get a gift you like someone ends up stealing it from you...and when you're able to steal a gift, you can't get the the one you want because its been 'stolen' three times and you can no longer take it. The one thing I asked for was to not end up with a butter dish or a candle. So the game went on, there were a couple of gift cards which was kind of worth getting but I wasn't really interested in them...I wanted the Beer Mugs, for root beer floats of course, but after about 40 minutes of people opening ridiculous gifts and 'stealing' gifts...i was the last one to unwrap a present...and of course, the last present to pick...ended up being an Old Williamsburg Apple Cinnamon Candle...
Wasn't even a Yankee Candle...because apparently, according to a lovely friend, Yankee Candles burn evenly unlike most candles that just collect wax on the sides letting less light emit from the candle jar...

The whole family then got the tour of the new barn. Not a single barn like it in Lancaster. It has four milking robots that clean and milk the cows and there are a whole bunch of computers keeping track of how much milk each cow gives and a whole bunch of other statistics. There was even a poo pushing machine that went up and down the holding pens sliding the cow poop in an opening in the floor to be pumped out into a 'poo pond'. I need to get one of those machines, because when I poop on the floor...it just sits there and stinks up the whole place.

It was a pretty neat operation. The cows give milk 10 months out of the year, I don't think my utters could take that much milking...The milking machines have lasers on them to pin point the location of the utters and put the milkers on. I thought it would be fun to walk through the machine to see what would happen...but after hearing that the machine mistaken a cows tail for an utter...I passed, plus there was cow poo and pee everywhere.

It was quite an adventure in the barn. The cows have it good...