Bubba and Bobo

"If a donkey bray at you, don't bray at him."

-George Herbert

A short post today after losing my Monday between flying the Columbia to Tallahassee to fix a radio (it turns out the volume was turned all the way down by the crew that worked on it last month--I'm truly losing it), and sitting at Lowe's giving the nice young man my phone number half a dozen times as P and I ordered new countertops to replace the ones that were shattered when we had a new sink installed. It's always something.

This weekend we arrived back at KFPY after an uneventful two-hop from New York in the Columbia. We drove onto Wyldswood, and were walking out to the barn to check on George's progress when we heard braying from the middle pasture. There looking back at us were not one, but TWO of the biggest donkeys I've ever seen.

Turns out George had a surprise planned for P, after a couple years of all of us discussing her desire to find a couple donkeys for the property. The want became a need with the arrival of four new calves--coyotes are a constant threat to baby animals in general, and we've had coyote problems for as long as we've had critters living at the farm. But a coyote won't come near a farm with donkeys, which have a natural antipathy for anything canine, and will attack a coyote on sight.

And these two are a little more aggressive than the Jennies Peg raised on the farm years ago. They're both Jacks, and both have swaying manhood to prove it. Hell, I'm a little afraid of them.

So, what to name these two? We pondered great duos of the past: Abbott and Costello, Spahn and Sain (and pray for rain--I guess you'd have to be a baseball guy to get that one), Stonewall and Bobby (Lee), Romulus and Remus, Prometheus and Bob (one of my favorite stop-action animation shorts my kids loved when they were little--Peg watched one with me and didn't laugh, so that suggestion was discarded). Finally we thought closer to home of my first boss in fighters and my longtime squadron-mate, Bubba and Bobo. The latter was a natural fit, given his constant stand-up comedian routine that reminds one of Eddie Murphy as the donkey in Shrek.

So Bubba and Bobo it is, the vigilant guardians of Wyldswood's little herd.