Christmas Catastrophe

Who is this sunny, cheerful boy? Well the shot was supposed to be of the tree, but jokster here, who can never mind his own business stepped in just in time. Fortunatly for him it turned out to be one of the best shots I've ever gotten of him, so I kept it.

He didn't look quite so happy later in the day. Here's the scoop...

Christmas Eve, Malcolm and his dad went down to our former residence to work on the well. It had frozen, or something like that, and since we had the Willey's coming for Christmas and staying over, they wanted to get the well working so there would be water to use down there. Let me take a pause here to say that I might get a few of the details confused here, so ignore my mis-representations of the technicalities if your reading this and know the story better than me.
Ok, so the way I understand it to have happened is that they put a propane torch in the bottom of the well pit to thaw it out, but the flame went out and filled the pit with propane gas. When they discovered this little problem, Malcolm tryed to climb down into the pit to set up a heat lamp, but the gas was over powering and he had to climb back out.
Christmas morning they tryed again with the propane torch, but again it went out and filled the pit with gas. So, they attached a rope or something to torch, lit it, and slowly lowered it into the well pit. And waited and waited slowly lowering away, but nothing happened. So, Malcolm looked over the side of the well, and slowly lowered it just a bit more....and WHAM! The propane ignited. He keeps telling me how beautiful and neat it was! Of course he doesn't remember much after seeing the gas ignite. What his Dad was was Malcolm's ball cap blast off into the air and it didnt' come back to earth until Malcolm had had time to move 20-30 yards away from the well.
As it turns out, he was lucky. Apparently he had leaned back just in time. Not in time to keep from having his hat blasted off his head and all...ALL....the hair on his head singed as well as his coat collar and cuffs, but in time to keep his head from being blown off or loosing his eye sight or worse. Unforunatly he didn't pull his hand out of the well pit in time, and so he is now nursing second and third degree burns on his hand. He had quarter and half dollar size places with no skin left. Its lovely, let me tell you. Several of my readers can vouch for how pretty it is as they saw it first hand, no pun intended.
So the rest of Christmas day he looked less sunny like earlier and more like this.

(notice the hair. Click on the picture to blow it up for a closer look.)
A little birdy told us that there's a prescription cream that is for severe burns, and that we could possibly get some from a vet. So a few days ago we found a vet, whom shalll remain nameless to protect their identity, who ordered some for us and its working quite well. His hand, though still ugly, looks much better, and he will have full use of all his fingers, though they will always have scars I'm sure.
Ahhh.....Christmas memories.
Malcolm wanted me to post a picture of his hand on the blog, but I'm thinking I'll spare you the vision. If you really want to see it, email me and I'll email you a picture.

Now the other little catastrophe....
Rachelle got four peacocks back in the spring. In fact you've seen them because I posted a picture this summer of one of the males strutting his stuff in front of my house. Anyway, they had babies this summer that were so cute...until something got them, which was sad, but life. And so it was back to the adults again. And we enjoy watching them around the yards and roosting in the trees down there at her place. Well Rachelle hadn't seen them in a while. In fact it had been a couple of weeks since she'd seen them, right around the time when it got so cold. And then Christmas Eve she was down in the barn doing something, and she found them. The poor things were huddled up in the corner, frozen to death. I was, and am, so sad over it. I got a lot of delight from those birds.

So those were our two Christmas tragedies. Other than those two events, the rest of the holiday was delightful!