Ranching

Ripples

Posted on January 31, 2009 by Debora

I think part of the reason I haven’t been blogging as much lately is because somehow along the way I’ve become reluctant to share the beginnings of things without knowing where they’re going. I don’t necessarily want to talk about some new direction my path has taken until I know whether it’s an onramp or just a cul-de-sac.

But that kind of defeats the whole purpose of personal blogging, doesn’t it? Journaling is ABOUT the path. It’s not like anyone ever really ARRIVES anywhere anyway. I think a blog should celebrate — or at least document — all the little steps that lead from Point A to Point Q and beyond.

Back in August when the new school year began, I was kind of foundering emotionally. You may have noticed. Steve and I had just had our final not-even-attempting-to-be-friends-anymore break, all of my close old friends lived in other states that joint-child-custody rules prevent me from moving to, and I was beginning to realize that the group of local friends I’d been reconnecting with were basically all part of the same…culture, social strata, lifestyle, etc…as Steve, and deep down they really saw nothing particularly shocking or even unusual in his behavior.

I desperately wanted to move forward, but I was at a loss as to how or where to go.

On a whim, I volunteered to help out with a school fundraising project. That led to meeting a woman who invited me to join her walking group. And that led to meeting other women and hearing about a church they were sure I’d like.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that school fundraising projects aren’t really my cup of tea, and I had to let the walking group go when I added up how much I was spending on gas driving to and from the meeting-place every morning. But the church was definitely a keeper, and I would never have gotten there if I hadn’t taken all those other steps that led me to it. Everything is relevant, is what I’m getting at.

I have more to say about the church and what a wonderfully healing thing it’s been for me, but I think I’ll give that its own post later.

*****

On the ranch front, Steve has hauled all of his cows and calves out of the Trinity pasture and will soon be taking the corral panels out as well. Right now his cattle are in his home arena; some of them will be going to the sale and the rest he will be putting in with his dad’s herd across the street. In other words, he’s not so much “getting out of the business” as “cutting me loose to sink or swim on my own.” And that suits me fine, now that I’ve sat down and planned out most of the logistics. I’m actually pretty excited about the whole thing.

*****

I haven’t written much about Mahogany this winter, mostly because the things I’ve been working on with her aren’t really edge-of-your-seat material. But we’ve made huge progress in that simple but crucial ability to pull a bridle over her ears without the whole rodeo thing going on. Anyone who’s worked with horses knows what a big deal that is. At the risk of totally jinxing myself, I will venture to say that Mahogany’s INTENSE ear-handling issues might be completely a thing of the past by the end of this summer. That would be pretty sweet.

*****

My quest to grow as much of my own food as possible is expanding this year with the addition of several new crops and edible landscape plants, but I think that merits another post all its own too. It’s a pretty big subject, and one that I have a lot to say about.

*****

So I guess this post is about small beginnings that may or may not grow into big changes. You make a decision to put an oar into the water and the ripples begin to spread out in unpredictable ways.

I love that life is like that.

And now I see some sunshine outside that needs to be soaked up. I’d better go take care of that….

Categories: Christianity, Family, Friends, Gardening, Horses, Life, Ranching, Self-Sufficiency | 3 Comments

Resolved

Posted on January 12, 2009 by Debora

At long last, Steve has finally gotten around to refinancing his truck loan in his own name and getting my name off that account. He’s been assuring me that “it’s all taken care of” since mid-November, but — just imagine! — that was actually a winding string of bullshit. I feel so disillusioned.

A couple of weeks ago I stopped trying to appeal to his sense of decency and started making ugly threats, and suddenly all the red tape miraculously sorted itself out and got handled. I called our credit union this morning and they confirmed that the refinancing is now in progress and my name should be off the Dodge loan within three or four days.

I feel a bit soiled and petty for having sunk to that level, but I comfort myself with knowing that my savings and credit rating won’t be fireballing into nonexistence along with Steve’s.

Having the loan issue resolved should also make it easier to keep my New Year’s resolution, which is to work harder at treating everyone with whom I interact with universal grace, respect and compassion, regardless of where they’re at in their own personal journey. I’ve been doing okay so far, with the glaring exception of my conversations with Steve. It doesn’t help that I’ve got a month’s worth of child-support checks sitting in my purse that Steve has warned me not to try to deposit because they’ll only bounce. It doesn’t help that my savings account balance is now hovering just above empty. It certainly hasn’t helped that for the past seven or eight weeks he’s been soothingly promising that the truck loan issue is “all taken care of,” in exactly the same tone of voice he used to use to assure me that the reason he came home covered in perfume every day was because little old ladies loved to hug him everywhere he went. Just that voice alone is enough to make my head explode anymore, resolution or not. For the past month and a half I’d pick up the phone, determined that no amount of his weaselly weaseling would anger me this time, and yet within five minutes there would be a smoky blue haze of profanity hanging in the air over my side of the conversation as he wove his pretty tapestry of lies.

But all that is past, my friends.

At least, I hope it’s past. Steve’s cows are still ensconced in the pasture and yesterday he made a passing comment about hoping for more rain to keep the grass growing, so maybe he was — gasp! — lying about selling out of the business too. I don’t know why he’d make that up, but then I long ago gave up trying to understand anything Steve says or does. It’s annoying though, because he has NO CLUE about managing resources and sooner or later that pasture will be so overgrazed for so long that it won’t be able to recover no matter how much rain it gets.

Anyway, where was I? Right, universal Christian love for all. Funny how easy that is in the abstract, and how difficult it becomes when you’re dealing with someone who has profoundly and unrepentantly hurt you, and continues to screw with your forward progress. But I guess that’s the point, isn’t it? Personal growth and whatnot. All part of the journey.

I’m working on it.

Categories: Christianity, Life, Love, Ranching | 5 Comments

Ranching v2.0

Posted on December 12, 2008 by Debora

Steve appears to be slowly but surely self-destructing before my very eyes. His last child-support check bounced. Despite his earnest assurances two weeks ago that he had refinanced his truck loan in his own name and it was all taken care of, when I asked someone at my credit union to confirm that for me yesterday she said that no, the loan is unchanged and mine is still the primary name on the account. Steve has also mentioned several thousand dollars in credit card debt, and I suspect that when he has maxed out his current card he will simply acquire another one and keep going. Three out of the past four days he has not gotten home early enough for the kids to go see him, and I don’t think it’s work that’s keeping him out late.

And the big one…yesterday he told me that after the first of the year he will be selling all his cows and getting out of the cattle business. If it’s true, this is mind-boggling. The whole time we were married Steve saw himself as first and foremost a cattleman; even in the dry years when it made no sense to run a large herd and we were losing thousands of dollars hay-feeding them, getting Steve to sell a single head of breeding stock was next to impossible. And the cows have always been His Thing; despite all his lip service to the contrary I never had any real say in how the business was run. It all had to be done his way, because he was The Cowboy and I was just a girl.

Well. In all honesty, this will complicate things for me, maybe a lot. Steve has the truck and the stock trailer and all the cowboy friends who know how to rope calves for branding and castrating, and he always handled finding a fresh bull every few years so the herd doesn’t become inbred, and there’s probably a dozen other crucial details that he never troubled my pretty little head with.

To remain in the cattle business without him I will have to completely restructure the way we’ve been doing it, is what I’m saying. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, if I can pull it off; I’ve thought all along that Steve was running a mighty inefficient system based on hundred-year-old traditions that don’t make much sense in this day and age.

Right now, between the global food shortages, the skyrocketing cost of corn (that puts a heavy squeeze on big commercial feedlots), and the surging interest in organic, locally-grown food, I think this is an IDEAL time to be raising natural grassfed hormone-free beef. If I can find enough local buyers I can even bypass the (very far away) livestock auctions completely and do my part for the environment while I’m at it. And with Steve apparently in full crash-and-burn mode I will absolutely need to have a backup income and the sooner the better.

It’s kind of scary for me, but in a good way. It will require me to stretch myself in new directions and take some risks, but if I can make it fly it’ll be so worth it. I’ll not only be that much closer to supporting myself and the kids, I’ll be helping others in the local community who want organic, cruelty-free meat. I’ll need to make new, preferably non-Silkotch-related connections: people who have trucks and trailers and bulls and so on. I might even get really ambitious and form some sort of co-op, where several families can pitch in on fattening, butchering and dividing up a single steer. I totally think there’s a local market for that if I can reach it.

This is big and complicated and slightly intimidating, but if I’m up to the challenge I think it could turn out to be a real blessing in disguise.

Wish me luck!

blgrnch

Categories: Animals, environment, Family, food, frugality, Life, Ranching, Self-Sufficiency | 11 Comments

Saturday Summary

Posted on November 29, 2008 by Debora

When Steve and I first separated we split the cow herd 50/50. There was a half-grown steer left over, so we agreed to eventually butcher him and split the meat between us. Which we did, and Sunday Steve brought over my half of the lovely little white packages. I thawed out some steaks right away to test them, because one thing about raising your own beef and having it hung and butchered locally is that each one has its own flavor and every once in a long while you’ll get one that tastes just plain bad. But my concerns were immediately laid to rest, because this guy is tender and yummy. Hooray!

Tuesday I took the kids back to Casa Gamino for lunch and their first official pool lesson. Elizabeth picked it up pretty quickly, but Luke has a tendency to get in a hurry and hit the cueball with the SIDE of the cuestick, which makes me cringe every time, and isn’t healthy for the cuestick either. We’re going to work on that.

After the pool lesson we drove to a local nursery to pick out our Christmas tree. We always buy live trees in pots and I’d planned to get a smallish one this time, so that we could reuse it for at least a couple more Christmases. But pickings are very slim this year. Since the stock market crashed the two local nurseries have done very little business, so one only ordered a few trees (mostly pines that had been topiaried into a cone-shape), and the other didn’t order any at all and only had a handful of blue spruces left over from last Christmas. I don’t care much for the cone-shaped pines, so I ended up getting a slightly-leaning blue spruce that was much bigger than I’d wanted and already outgrowing its pot. It’s pretty though:

I was going to have a friend with a pickup deliver it for me at some point, but the nursery owner very kindly offered to bring it over the next morning. I gratefully agreed, and gave him a couple packages of beef for his trouble. I may be money-poor, but I gots the beef!

Steve has finally moved out of his parents’ place and is renting an old mobile across the street that belongs to the son of an old family friend. This is a good thing, because the property lies up against a mountainside full of rocks and old Cahuilla Indian caves. It’s like Disneyland for Luke and Elizabeth. So now when they visit him they spend an hour or two scrambling up and down the mountainside instead of parked in front of his parents’ tv. They come home exercised and happy, which makes me very happy too.

Tuesday after we’d picked out our tree I dropped the kids off at Steve’s new place and they headed straight up the rocks.

You can’t buy that kind of workout. I love that they get to do this.

Wednesday — rain! And there was much rejoicing!

Thursday — even more rain! And the angels sang!

The kids had Thanksgiving dinner with Steve and his parents like always. My friend Jenny had invited me to spend the day with her and her family, and I was happy to accept.

I need to confess here that I have mixed feelings associated with this holiday. I love the IDEA of Thanksgiving — I love having a day set aside to remember and appreciate our blessings and the good things in our lives. But Thanksgiving wasn’t like that when I was growing up. Every year without exception my mother would inevitably have a screaming meltdown at some point on Thanksgiving Day (and also on Christmas Day, yay!), and when that wasn’t actually in progress there was still the grim micromanagement of every detail of preparing and eating the meal. It was pretty joyless, to put it mildly.

When I married Steve and started spending Thanksgiving Day with his parents, things were…better, but that’s not saying a lot. Steve’s father openly disliked me, his mother and I had nothing in common to talk about, and Steve himself came down on our kids like a crushing ton of bricks if they so much as wriggled in their chairs or accidentally dropped a fork or heaven forbid, made any noise. The prevailing topic of conversation was usually whether or not Steve’s sister was going to show up, and whether she would stay longer than the ten minutes it took her to bolt down a plateful of food. Whee!

My Thanksgiving Day with Jenny and her husband and her brother at her in-laws house was quite simply wonderful. There was laughter, there was happy conversation, there was marvelous food and fun games and surrounding everything there was love. You could feel it in the air of the house.

I think if I ever get involved with another man I’m going to spend at least one Thanksgiving Day with him and/or his family before I make any decisions about whether the relationship is going anywhere. Seriously.

Friday night a medium-sized group of us went up to Idyllwild for some karaoke.

That’s Jenny on the far left, then me, then Luke and Elizabeth. On the far right is Dee, and next to her is her very sweet mother.

There was much singing.

Toward the end of the night some guy came over and sat down at our table and started hitting on me in a fairly unsubtle manner. Wanted to dance with me, wanted me to step out back and “chat” with him. I was not at all interested, but when someone told me that he was married I was pissed off just on principle. Adulterers suck.

And now it’s Saturday morning and I need to wrap this up because I’m supposed to be driving the kids to the home of one of Elizabeth’s classmates for a playdate. This is a first. Elizabeth has never liked any of her classmates enough to pester me to take her to their house before. So, I’m thinking this is a good thing and I need to hit “Publish” and go get in the car. If I missed any typos I’ll fix them later.

Hope everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving!

Categories: Family, food, Friends, kids, Life, Love, Music, NaBloPoMo, Ranching, Self-Sufficiency, Weather | 3 Comments

Memory Lane, Part Last: Bailey Ranch

Posted on November 14, 2008 by Debora

Life at Bailey Ranch (the place Steve and I were caretaking when we first moved in together) was pretty sweet at first. Sure, there was an epic mess to clean up that the previous caretaker had left behind — it took us MONTHS of working every day to get it all hauled to the dump — but in exchange for that we lived there rent-free. The caretaker’s house was a tiny, ancient mobile with cardboard walls and a nonworking oven, but compared to where I’d been living it felt like the Taj Mahal.

And the part of the ranch that we lived on faced a big green-year-round pasture that needed to be grazed down, so our horses and cows were fat and happy and our feed bills were practically nonexistent.

Which was good, because money was TIGHT. Steve was working part time as a veterinary assistant, and I was collecting unemployment from the closed-down machine shop and searching for a market for my art. Collectively it would have been enough to live on, but to complicate matters, Steve knew literally nothing about managing money. The term “drunken sailor” comes to mind. When he lived at home with his parents (which was right up until we both moved to Bailey Ranch), they had given him his own credit card to cover all his living expenses, and THEY paid the bill every month. So Steve had it in his head that credit cards=free stuff, and somehow that didn’t change when it was MY credit card we were using and the bills were coming to us. “What do you mean we can’t afford that?” he would protest in exasperation. “There’s almost seven thousand dollars left on the card!”

Adding to my frustration was the fact that Steve’s father was constantly swooping in, paying some outstanding bill or handling some repair that Steve should have taken care of, and then WHINING INCESSANTLY ABOUT IT. And it was no use me asking Steve to ask his father to please let us handle our own concerns, because financial independence was a completely alien and totally unwelcome concept to him.

I know, I know…and still I married him. What can I say, I thought it was something he would outgrow once he got used to living away from his parents.

Anyway, so we were always looking for ways to supplement our income. So when a local horse-trader asked Steve to put a little training into a couple of problem horses he had, Steve agreed and they came to live in our pasture.

One of the trainees was a striking pinto Mustang filly called Bunny, so named because of the perfect rabbit shape on her right shoulder. I was inspired to paint her.

When I showed the painting to the horse trader, he bought it from me and asked me to do two more of his horses, a mare named Sixxy Miss…

And an aged Thoroughbred stallion named Jet T Chub:

Chub was gorgeous for his age. I ended up breeding Stormy to him, but as with all of her pregnancies the embryo was reabsorbed before the second trimester.

Word got out, and other people asked me to paint their horses.

In the middle of all of this, Steve got a decent-paying job working security at the new casino and we got married. And pretty much the instant the knot was tied, he started talking about having kids right away.

I was not on board with with this. There were too many aspects of our relationship that still needed work before we brought another human into the equation, not to mention the appalling state of our finances, and frankly I personally did not feel ready for motherhood.

But it was all he could talk about. How much he wanted to be a dad, how much he had to offer and teach our children, how he wanted us to be a family instead of just a twosome. To prove his sincerity and devotion to being a good father he quit smoking, quit Copenhagen, stopped overspending and paid off all our debts.

So, about ten months after the wedding, I got pregnant. And it turned out that when Steve talked about how much he wanted to be a dad, what he actually meant was that he looked forward to hanging out drinking beer with his teenage sons, because that whole gestating-infancy-toddlerhood-childhood stage? Was noisy and messy and inconvenient and a major buzzkill and he wanted nothing to do with any of it. His parents helpfully told him that just because I no longer had the energy or desire to hang out in smoky bars, didn’t mean that HE had to stay home. So they all went out partying together, and he went back to smoking and chewing and spending money like he found it in the road, and oh yes, apparently that’s when all the cheating started too.

Looking back, that was pretty much the end of our marriage: the day I gave in and got pregnant. It took another eleven years for me to admit it and give up trying to save it, but that was really when it ended.

And coincidentally that was when my art career ended as well, because as soon as I got pregnant all of my creative juices started flowing in a different direction and the part of my brain that did the art thing completely shut down for a year or so. It took me most of my first trimester to finish that picture of old Tank, and I wasn’t happy with how it turned out so I gave it to the owner for free.

I tried to get back into it when Elizabeth was a baby, but once she started walking (and climbing!) there was no place to work that was safe from her. So aside from a Christmas card or two, I haven’t done any artwork in about eleven years.

I’m thinking maybe it’s time for that to change. I could paint, print and sell greeting cards maybe, or get serious about writing and illustrating children’s books. Or go back to doing pet/horse portraits. Even in this economy there has to be SOME kind of market somewhere that I can break into.

So…there you have it. The Twenty-Year Retrospective of Debora’s Artistic Journey, Which Actually Only Spans About Ten Years Because I Hopped Off The Art Bus Halfway Through.

Further updates as events warrant!

Categories: Animals, Artwork, Family, Horses, kids, Life, Marriage, NaBloPoMo, Ranching | 10 Comments

Ranching

Ripples

Resolved

Ranching v2.0

Saturday Summary

Memory Lane, Part Last: Bailey Ranch

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