From Excited To Mad

 In less than a minute.  I went from excited, when I spied out of the corner of my eye while moving a tractor bucket load of shavings bales from DH's shop to the aisleway of my barn, a round white object under the tree near the chicken coop that from that distance (on the tractor) looked like it could maybe be a puffball mushroom that had developed since the day before's rain.

To mad, when I hopped down off the tractor seat and walked over to the (eagerly anticipated as a dinner ingredient) potential baseball sized edible delicacy, and saw that it was really this:

Not a mushroom at all.  And definitely not anything edible for man or beast.  Which was why this mostly deflated former helium ballon with about a foot-long tail of plastic ribbon invoked such wrath within me.

Stupid frickin' balloons!  Farmers hate these things.  Horse people hate finding these things in their pastures.  Livestock owners hate it when their inquisitive livestock try to sample a bite (or two) of these things and end up with it stuck in their animal's digestive tract.  Even if it makes it all the way in, rather than the string/ribbon/tail getting caught up in the craw or throat (poultry vs sheep/cow/goat/horse/pig) and choking the animal, it isn't digestible and gets stuck somewhere enroute between stomach, intestines and the anus.  Which casues impaction and potential livestock death that way.

In the last ten-ish years I have found more and more balloons that have floated their way onto my property.  Be it in the woods, in the pasture, in the hayfield, or in the yard, be it mylar or latex, the damn things are not welcome here.  I wish people would stop releasing the things.  What goes up must, eventually, come down.  They don't go to heaven where your loved one receives them.  Sorry, they just don't.  They end up in some farmer's field or pasture where, if the farmer doesn't find it before the livestock do, they can (and do) cause an animal death.  And if they don't end up in a farmer's field, they end up in a more remote, less humanly patrolled area where wildlife too try to ingest them and die from the attempt.

So it wasn't so much the realization that the round white thing wasn't a harmless mushroom that made me instantly mad.  It was the fact that it was a balloon that someone, somewhere, previously and most likely on purpose let fly away.  And that finding one on my property isn't a rare occurance like it once was.  This is the fourth one (or remains of one) I've found in 2026.  The year isn't even half over.  How many are out there that we don't find but an animal does?