The Cow Ate My Homework

15. I Try for an Out, To No Avail

Early evening comes, and I'm back at my attempts to salvage the project and video situation, in the little bit of spare time I can scrape together around the extra farm work I need to help with.

The model itself is about half done. If were only a matter of finishing the thing myself in a way that would be worthy of a passing grade, I would totally just stay up as late as necessary to be done with the thing.

But the video is where I am completely stuck.

I try all the editing tricks I know, and several I don't know that I've found online. I try to insert an animated Rodney (fail). I try to blur the whole thing so severely that you can't tell Sarah is Sarah dressed up like Rodney (double fail). I try to change the color on the snippet from the library and insert little cutaways into my garage video to make it look like he's here (triple fail, since I've already tried this twice but was still inexplicably hopeful that I could get somewhere with it).

I decide instead to make a list of ideas for ways to fix this impossible problem. The whole thing feels so very daunting, like why even try to make a list of ideas. But I tell myself that there's no such thing as a bad idea, that nothing is too stupid or unrealistic to add to this list, and that maybe a good old-fashioned brainstorm was all I really needed this whole time.

Here is what I come up with:

1. Fake my death.

2. Fake Rodney's death.

3. Actually facilitate Rodney's death.

4. Make Rodney think I am capable of bringing about his death.

5. Hire a professional video-maker-person.

6. Report Rodney to the police and then enter the witness protection program.

7. Get my parents to homeschool me for the last two days of school.

8. Kidnap Rodney, drug him, and get someone strong to lift him up to make it look like he's helping me.

9. Hire someone who is better at ideas than I am to help me out with this.

10. Tell Mrs. M the whole story and pray she has pity on me.

Obviously, only option number ten has any merit. But I fear that even if I tell her that Rodney is illiterate there will still be some way for her to blame me for not following directions and doing the project like she wanted me to.

My unpleasant idea-generating sesh is interrupted by my phone ringing. It's my dad. "Hello?"

He says, "Hey, someone calved out in the dry cow pen." And what he doesn't say is that it will be totally impossible for him to get the calf to the barn and this cow that calved into the milking area, alone on his cumbersome knee scooter. He needs my help.

"On my way," I say, already trotting out in that direction.

Bringing in cows that have just calved isn't always a difficult task, but it certainly can be. Cows who have just calved, or "fresh cows" as we farmers would say, can be a little crazy. There are probably a bunch of postpartum hormones are flowing around, and these cows certainly don't always seem to have a clue that they need to be milked and brought in and checked out so they don't end up with mastitis infections or other health problems. Heck, sometimes older cows are actually on the verge of collapsing from something called "Milk Fever" because their bodies need more calcium, and yet they'd still sometimes rather try to run away than let us corner them to give them an I.V.