Friends

Unsocial Networking

Posted on June 16, 2009 by Debora

Now and then one of my friends will send me an email that says something like, “Check out the great pics of my new puppy! (You’ll need a MySpace account to view them.)” Or, “I never use ICQ anymore but I’m on Twitter all the time, come follow me!” Or, “Be my friend on Facebook, it’ll be a great way for us to keep in touch!”

So, I’ll join Facebook or Twitter or MySpace or whatever. I have several social networking accounts in various corners of the internet.

I don’t use them.

I mean, I’ll go and look at the puppy pics, or if there’s a friend I haven’t heard from in a while I might wander over to their Twitter page to see what they’re up to, and every now and then I’ll get an email that someone has written something on my Facebook wall or somesuch, but for the most part I tend to forget that those sites exist.

It’s not because I don’t like my friends. I LOVE my friends. If you’re one of my friends and you’re reading this, I love that you take the time to visit my blog even though I’ve probably never written anything on your Facebook wall or Twittered you or…done…whatever people do on MySpace. If you’re my friend and you wrote one of the aging stack of messages that I just discovered this morning on my Facebook page and you’re wondering why I never responded, it’s not because I don’t like you — I just haven’t BEEN to my Facebook site in ages.

Eventually I may join the growing throng of Twitterers and such. Until then…if there’s some thing you need to tell me, send me an email. Text me. Or I suppose you could call me, although I’ve never been a big fan of talking on the phone. But Facebook and Twitter are NOT good methods of getting information to me, if it’s something you need me to see within, say, three months or less.

This concludes this Public Service Announcement. Thank you for your understanding.

Categories: Friends, Life | 5 Comments

Roundup Part 2: Short And Sweet

Posted on June 6, 2009 by Debora

When you have a roundup to work a total of three calves, the preparation takes longer than the actual job.

Brooke hauled Stormy and Mahogany to Trinity for me in Doc’s rig, since I haven’t driven a truck in over fifteen years (Steve never let me drive any of his), and I don’t think I’ve EVER driven a truck that was pulling anything. Doc and his two cowboy friends had just finished setting up the corral when we got there. Then Brooke took my car to her house just up the road to pick up two of her kids, and got back around the same time John and Raeanna arrived.

Bringing in the herd took the longest. They were Resistant to being corralled, and we only had five horses, and Mahogany hasn’t had much practice with cows so she wasn’t terribly helpful.

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But eventually we got ’em in.

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Turned out we actually had four calves, but the newest one was only a few days old and too little to really torment yet, so we’ll brand and castrate him next time. He was just the right size to help John get a feel for calf-handling, though.

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I love the smell of burning cowhide in the morning!

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Castrating turned out to be messier yet less nauseating than I’d expected. OF COURSE I had my first effort thoroughly recorded for posterity. Here’s one of the less-gruesome pics:

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When we were all done one of Doc’s friends entertained us with rope tricks.

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Then we loaded up the steer and the horses and headed home, where Brooke and I got the steer ensconced in his fattening pen. Poor guy misses his buddies.

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And that was my very first roundup as Sole-Herd-Owner-Person. I could not have done it alone, and my heartfelt thanks go out to the folks who helped make it happen. Everyone seemed to have a good time, and they all said they wanted to come back for the next one, so I think this cow business thing is looking absolutely doable. I want to buy my own corral panels so I don’t have to keep borrowing Doc’s, and I need to practice driving a truck and trailer rig so I can haul my own horses, but those things are also doable. I mean, if I’ve learned nothing else this past year I’ve learned that with God ALL things are possible.

Life feels pretty good right now.

And now I need a shower.

Categories: Animals, Christianity, Friends, Horses, Life, Ranching | 3 Comments

Roundup Part 1: Amazing Grace

Posted on June 6, 2009 by Debora

A cattle roundup is a fairly simple thing to organize, if you have the manpower and resources and skills available. You set a date, tell your friends, and when the day arrives you usually end up with more help than you need: riders, ropers, sorters, muggers, castraters, branders, cowboys, people who like to play cowboy…it’s almost more of a social get-together than a job, and everyone mostly shows up for the fun.

Of course, if you have just spend the past year of your life starting over almost from scratch, and none of your new friends have ever thrown a rope or castrated a calf — and neither have you — then a cattle roundup becomes not such a simple thing to organize. In fact it becomes A Tad Complicated.

I had offers of help from my friends, and I deeply appreciate that, but how do you catch and hold down a calf without ropers? Well, you can buy a calf table, unless your car happens to suddenly die and require over $900 worth of resuscitation. Yarg. Also, if you understand the process of calf castration but have never actually done it yourself, how do you know for sure that you won’t throw up and/or pass out halfway through the procedure? And, oh yeah, how do you even get your horses to the event if you don’t own a trailer or a truck that will pull one? Then there’s the matter of a corral. You can’t have a cattle roundup without a corral to round them up into, and Steve had taken most of the livestock panels with him, and I couldn’t find anyone with used panels to sell, and new ones cost $140 for a ten or twelve foot section. That would add up to roughly a gazillion dollars, which I didn’t have (see: car repair bill, above).

If I let myself think too much about all this stuff I might have started worrying that it wasn’t going to work out at all, but fretting about that sort of thing is a total waste of energy. All I could do was commend the whole matter into God’s hands and trust that things would happen the way He wanted them to. I was just AWARE of the issues, is all I’m saying.

In mid-May I approached a horse vet who goes to my church, an incredibly nice fellow who had come out and treated my horses in the past. I didn’t really know him socially but I figured as a vet he’d at least be able to give me a hands-on tutorial in calf castration, if he were so inclined. So I asked him, if he were theoretically invited to a roundup, would that be just another day at the office for him or would it be something he’d enjoy? His face lit up, he said he LOVED doing that stuff, and that if I needed any other skilled help he could bring some more friends. I said I could really use a header and a heeler (cow jargon for two different kinds of roping skills), and he said they’d be there and what day was the roundup? I told him I’d hoped to wait until all six calves had been born, but that I might not be able to because the firstborn was getting so big. He said no problem, we could have one roundup now and another one later on and that way we could have twice the fun. Also, as it turned out, he had a pile of spare corral panels that he’d be happy to bring over and set up for the day.

I was SO FREAKING GRATEFUL, but he very graciously acted like I was doing him and his friends the favor of having them out, so I couldn’t even feel awkward about accepting all that help.

A few days later I got a message from the Doc’s secretary: he and his friends would be available to come out on June 6th, and did that work for me? It worked perfectly for me, but most of my other friends couldn’t make it that day. I decided that in this particular case I should probably accommodate the doc, and I’d schedule my next roundup far enough in advance that everyone else who wanted to come could be there.

That only left the matter of getting my horses to the roundup site, then getting them AND a steer back to my place afterward (the steer was coming home for fattening and slaughter). This would require the use of a large stock trailer with a center divider: we could put the horses in the front section and the steer in the back. I mentioned this need to a woman from my church who was helping me through the ridiculously complicated process of filing for divorce, and she immediately picked up the phone, called a friend of hers who lives in my general area, then hung up and announced, “Okay, we’ve got the trailer, now we just need a truck.” She was already dialing a new number; this time she was calling Geoff, the new guitarist in our worship group (I’ve been corrected on the spelling of his name). She basically told him that he and his truck would be hauling some livestock for me on June 6th. He had already promised to come and help with the calves if it was on a day he was free, so I wasn’t too awfully horrified by this casual drafting of resources…just mildly taken aback. But when I saw him the next day at a meeting he’d remembered that he had a previous commitment on the 6th. He said we were welcome to use his truck, he just wouldn’t be available to drive it, and while we were working out the logistics of that the Doc mentioned that HE had just the sort of stock trailer I needed, and I was welcome to use it AND his truck since he would be using other vehicles to get his panels and horses to the roundup.

The grace of God and the goodness of people absolutely blow my mind sometimes.

Next: the big day!

Categories: Animals, Christianity, Friends, Horses, Life, Ranching | 4 Comments

A New Song Unto The Lord

Posted on May 25, 2009 by Debora

When I first joined the BackCountry Worship group in February, it was very new and small and still finding itself. We’ve gained a few members since then (and lost a few), and over the past three months it’s sort of taken on a life of its own and become something kind of amazing.

I have to confess, when I first started singing with them the songs themselves didn’t resonate very deeply with me. I’d grown up on the old Baptist hymns, and that had always been my own personal conception of sacred music. The songs I was learning now were different: mostly newish stuff that plays on gospel radio or upbeat versions of hymns I’d never heard before. To me they were just words and melodies to be learned, notes to be mastered.

“Days Of Elijah” was the first ‘church song’ I loved enough to buy from iTunes for my own personal listening pleasure. I think it’s impossible not to respond to that song, I love the energy and power of it. Sometime after that I started buying all the songs our group was practicing, because it was quicker and easier for me to learn them that way and I could practice at home between meetings. Pretty soon some of the worship music was finding its way onto my regular everyday playlists, and these days the songs I sing while doing housework and gardening are more likely to be worship tunes than my old rock or country favorites.

Recently I was singing along with my newly-downloaded mp3 of “Blessed Be Your Name” when the actual spiritual sense of it hit me unexpectedly. Deeply. The profound TRUTH of it sank in: that joyful peace that comes from keeping a faithful and thankful heart no matter where your path has brought you on any given day.

There are really no words to describe how much this group and this music have come to mean to me. I look forward to our twice-a-week meetings not just just as a time to practice music, but as gathering in worship and fellowship with a handful of kindred souls who share a deep and genuine love for the One we come to honor.

The last time I blogged about them we’d just lost one of our guitarists and our male vocalist, but since then we’ve gotten a new guitarist and our prodigal singer has returned to us. I think there was an audible click the first time this new configuration got together to practice. It feels very right.

Here’s a pic Elizabeth took of us during practice before church yesterday:

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My peeps. On the far left is John, a vocalist. If John were to write his autobiography it would probably fall into the horror genre, and yet he is one of the most joyful people I’ve ever met. I get the impression that his walk through the scarier corners of the Valley of the Shadow and back up into the light have left him pretty much afraid of nothing. Next to John is Susan: worship leader, guitar and vocals, and our collective moral compass whenever we lose track of why we’ve come together. Next is Annie, Susan’s teenage daughter, a delightful creature of light and life with the voice of an angel. I am fairly certain that little singing cartoon birds help Annie get dressed in the mornings. Annie occasionally gets into an odd Mood and starts flinging snarkiness in all directions; this is entertainment of the highest order. Behind Annie is Marie (bass guitar), but you can’t really see her from this angle. Marie is the still water that runs deep: she doesn’t talk a lot, but when she does it’s worth listening to. Next is Jeff, our new guitarist. Jeff is actually the one who told me I should join the worship group, way back when, but he wasn’t able to play with us himself until his employment situation changed a couple weeks ago. I don’t know him as well as I do the others, but he seems like a very likable fellow. Next is me (vocals), and heaven knows we’ve already read enough about me on this blog. Moving on we have Other Jeff. He’s not technically a member of the group, but he sat in with us yesterday and rocked the bongo. On the far left is Robert on drums. A man of few words, but his drums speak quite eloquently on his behalf. For such a quiet guy he can seriously get down with his bad self on that drum set.

One of these days I’ll get a CD of our music and post a song or two here. I’m thinking “Blessed Be Your Name” would be an excellent choice.

Categories: Christianity, Friends, Life, Love, Music | 3 Comments

Complications

Posted on May 16, 2009 by Debora

Tuesday afternoon I was on my way to check on The Mighty Herd before going to a worship meeting, when my car suddenly died. I pulled off the road and restarted it. It started right up, then immediately died again. Like I’d run out of gas, except I knew I had half a tankful. I tried four or five more times, and it always started easily and then quit.

I called the Auto Club and told them I needed a tow, then called a member of my worship group who lives in that area and asked her if she could give me a ride to the meeting while my car went to visit the mechanic. She said sure, and pulled up a few minutes later. The tow truck arrived about fifteen minutes after that, and the driver asked me to describe the problem I was having. I offered to show him, and got in my car and started it up.

Of COURSE it fired right up and stayed running this time. I took it for a test ride up and down the road, and it ran perfectly.

So the tow truck went on its way and Marie and I continued on to the meeting in our own respective vehicles. I had hopes that this was going to be like that one time my car’s electrical system went out for several minutes and it wouldn’t even try to start, and then it all suddenly righted itself and never gave me another moment’s trouble.

On Thursday my friend Jenny and I had planned to go see Star Trek in Temecula, but Wednesday afternoon she got a call from March AFB (Jenny’s in the Reserves) requesting a meeting of some sort, so she had to skip the movie. We made plans to meet up later in the day for lunch, after her meeting and my movie were over. Steve said he’d pick up the kids after school, so I only had to get home in time for my Thursday worship meeting at 4:30.

Just for the record…the new Star Trek movie is Made Of Awesome. Go see it, all of you. Yes, you too! Go! This is seriously the best movie I’ve seen since…I can’t even remember the last movie I enjoyed this much. And it’s been a VERY long time since I’ve felt this excited about the future of the Trek franchise. When I met Jenny for lunch she got to listen to me chatter on like a 13-year-old fangirl about how brilliantly the whole series reboot was conceived and executed with broad-spectrum appeal for old-school fans and newcomers alike. I can’t imagine anyone not being entertained by this movie.

After lunch Jenny and I parted ways again to run our various errands, and an hour or two after that I headed back up the hill toward home.

I got four or five miles out of Temec when my car died. I was on a narrow little two-lane highway with no shoulders, but luckily I reached a turnout before I ran out of momentum and was able to pull off the road.

Restart, die, restart, die. I shut it off to let it rest, hoping that would fix it like before.

Less than five minutes later my cell rang. Jenny had passed me on her way home and wanted to know if I was okay. I told her what my car was doing and she came back and pulled in behind me, to wait and see if letting the engine rest would help.

It did. Eventually it started up and stayed running. I decided to try and make it home, and then take it to the shop the next day.

Alas, it was not to be. Maybe a mile farther up the road the engine died again, and again I was lucky to be near a turnout.

This time resting didn’t help. After a while it wouldn’t even turn over.

SO, I called the Auto Club back, and they said a tow truck would be out within 45 minutes. Jenny waited with me, because she’s awesome that way.

As it turned out, we waited for over two hours. FINALLY the tow truck showed up; it was past five by then. No worship meeting for me.

AAA’s Roadside Assistance plan only covers the first seven miles of towing, so I had them take my car to a shop in Temec rather than the 60 or so miles to my regular guy in Idyllwild. Jenny came back to the shop too, knowing I’d almost certainly need a ride home. Which I did, because the garage closed at six and wouldn’t be able to look at my car until the next morning. So we transfered my groceries to her truck and headed back up to Anza.

At some point it occurred to us that if our original plan to see Star Trek together had worked out, the day would have turned out a lot worse. We had wanted to meet up at the local casino in Anza, where she would leave her truck in the parking lot and ride down with me. If we’d done that we’d BOTH have been stranded in Temec.

The fortuitous serendipity didn’t end there: Jenny had forgotten to bring a particular piece of identification with her to the meeting at March, and had to return the following morning to finish that bit of business. SO, I had a ride back down to Temec without putting anyone out. When we got there Friday morning the auto shop said they’d call me on my cell when they knew what the trouble was, whether they had whatever parts it needed on hand, and how long it would take to fix. So I had Jenny drop me off at the movie theater and I watched Star Trek again. And it was even better the second time around. Which is good, because that went a long way toward helping me keep my happy thoughts for the rest of the day.

And that’s saying something, because the rest of the day? Sucked pretty hard.

I learned that my little Saturn had basically suffered the car version of massive coronary failure and needed a new fuel pump, fuel filter and regulator.

I told them to go ahead and check the alignment as long as they were at it. The car had been pulling to the left a little for several weeks.

After the movie I wandered around the mall until Jenny got back, and then we returned to the garage. They said my car would be finished by five — it was a little past two at the time — so Jenny headed back up to Anza and I killed time wandering around other shops.

Steve was getting antsy by now; his band plays at Casa Gamino on Friday nights and he was supposed to be there by six. Parental duties aren’t generally allowed to interfere with his actual life, but in this case there was nothing either of us could do about it. I assured him that I’d rather be home with the kids than waiting around Temec for my car to be fixed, but that I had no influence in the matter and I’d get there as soon as I could.

It was nearly 6:00 by the time my car was done…to the tune of $905.91. Yeowtch. I had the money, but I’d been planning to spend it on corral panels and a bull. Now I’ll almost certainly have to dip into my savings account for those, which theoretically annoys the heck out of me. (It’s only theoretical annoyance because in actual practice I still have my happy thoughts because Star Trek was REALLY THAT GOOD.)

I got back to Anza a little past 6:30, collected the kids from Steve, and went home to discover that I had forgotten to shut off the horses’ water when I left that morning and had created a river through one end of the corral, the driveway and down the road. Yeah, that’s going to be a nice electric bill next month.

Long couple of days. And yet it all could have been so much worse — if Jenny hadn’t been there, if her errands hadn’t dovetailed so neatly with mine, if I hadn’t been able to get off that twisty mountain road both times the car died, if the garage hadn’t been able to get the parts so quickly, or if I hadn’t been able to pay for the repairs — that I can’t seem to feel very grouchy about the rest of it. All I lost was some money and a little time, nothing that truly matters in the grand scheme of things.

I wonder when Star Trek will come out on dvd. There’s a certain turbolift scene I’d like to have on hand to give me the happies whenever I need a lift. (Ha, pun not intended.) I wonder how long it will take them to make a sequel. CLOCK’S TICKING PEOPLE, MAKE IT HAPPEN! I haven’t been this fangeeky about Trek since the glory days of the Dominion War on Deep Space 9, and yes I know how nerdy that sentence sounds, and I don’t even care because the newest incarnation of the Trekverse is FREAKING GENIUS.

The last couple of days? Inconvenient and expensive but not catastrophic, thank Heaven. Downright enjoyable for a few hours here and there.

And now I need to head over to the rummage sale my church is having this weekend, because both kids need summer clothes and it may be a while before I can afford to shop for them at Target again. I’m glad they don’t care about stuff like that yet.

All things considered we’ve got it pretty good that way, you know?

Categories: Friends, kids, Life, Star Trek | 3 Comments