Ranching
Wordless Wednesday: Homegrown Comfort
Categories: food, Gardening, Life, Ranching, Self-Sufficiency, Wordless Wednesday
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Current Events
Friday there was a big barrel-racing competition in Corona that Julie and four of her friends were riding in, and Julie invited me along to cheer them on. It was a nighttime event in a lighted arena to spare the horses from having to compete in the heat of the day, and I knew I’d be home really late, so the kids spent the night with Steve.
Julie brought a green horse she’s training and rode for “time only,” meaning that she didn’t pay the full entry fee and wasn’t eligible to take home any prize money.
This was an end-of-the-season event, which meant that the riders were not only competing for day money but also tallying the points they’d won over the spring and summer in hopes of taking home one of the prize saddles. Julie’s friend Shannon was already in the top of the points, and Friday she scored day money for her ride AND the saddle for the points she’d accumulated.
It was a fun night. I got home about 2:30 Saturday morning, and I would have loved to sleep in late. I didn’t get to though, because I had a calf to brand at Trinity that morning.
One of my cows (Steve and I split the herd when we separated) had calved after our spring roundup, and it needed to be branded. I asked Steve if I should handle that with some of my friends, but he said no, he’d come and help. In all honesty I was glad to have him there, because he’s bigger and stronger and more experienced than anyone I could have rustled up to help me. I still invited Julie, and she brought Josh’s two strapping teenage sons to lend a hand. And Steve OF COURSE brought his parents, because he is apparently unable to function without them.
Anyway, it all went smoothly. Turned out one of Steve’s cows had a new calf too, a little bull, so we branded mine and castrated his at the same time and had the whole thing wrapped up in less than an hour. I wish I’d gotten pictures, but my sleep-deprived self forgot my camera.
Sunday morning the kids and I went to church. Those of you who know me well are rereading that sentence, wondering if it’s a typo, because me and organized religion have never really gotten along very well. The one time I’d tried a local Anza church a few years back, it only reinforced my impression that home worshipping is, for me, the way to go.
So here’s how it happened: when school started up this year I volunteered to help out with an upcoming fundraiser. This led to having a very nice lady named Michelle invite me to join a walking group she was putting together. That led to meeting a bunch of other very nice ladies that I go walking with in the mornings now, and also to a recommendation that I try out a local nondenominational church with a great pastor.
So to church we went, and I did indeed enjoy it (and so did the kids, who got to make tie-dyed tee-shirts in the Sunday School part), and we’ll be going back next Sunday.
Sunday evening we had a dinner party. Not as fancy as the term might suggest, but fancy enough for us. It was a couple of weeks ago that Luke first said that he wanted to have a dinner party on Sunday. I kind of brushed him off, saying that dinner parties are expensive and the house was a mess and blah blah. A few days later he brought it up again, and I told him that the last thing I needed right now was a bunch of people in our house. This time he clarified that he didn’t mean for me to invite people over. He just wanted the three of us to have a fancy Sunday dinner together. I have no idea what inspired this request, but I told him that yes, that sounded like fun and we should do that sometime, and then I instantly forgot all about it. So when the next Sunday rolled around and Luke asked if we could have our dinner party, I had absolutely nothing on hand to serve that was worthy of such a grand event.
But THIS Sunday I was PREPARED. When we got back from church I sent the kids to go visit Steve, and then I got busy roasting a chicken, making mashed potatoes and gravy, baking biscuits, and chilling sliced cherry tomatoes and zucchini in a balsamic vinaigrette dressing. I got out the good dishes and some candles, and when the kids got back we had a perfectly lovely dinner party, just the three of us.
It was so nice that we’ve decided to make a Sunday tradition of it.
Today Julie came over with her truck and helped me get rid of the last of the trash, the big stuff that never would have fit in my car. So that’s DONE!! Whoot!
And because no Ramblings post would be complete without a bit of navel-gazing, I’ll share a minor epiphany I had this week.
I think I like being single.
I don’t mean that I’m glad Steve and his issues are out of my life, because duh, obviously.
I mean that I’ve begun to genuinely enjoy my life just the way it is. I like the freedom and the simplicity. I like the lack of drama, and the quiet sense of unity, and the cleanness of it. After 39 years of shaping my life around the expectations and demands of other people, I’m discovering an unexpected peace and joy in simply tending to my own spirit for a change. That sounds horribly selfish, but I can’t help it. It’s where I’m at right now.
And that was my weekend, and the rest of my week is even busier. Sadly, my immediate future is mostly full of oil changes and smog checks and doctor’s appointments and school meetings and similarly unblogworthy events, so if there’s a long dry spell that’s why. I’ll be back when things slow down a bit!
Summer Adventures, Part 2
The last day of school was June 13th, and it couldn’t come soon enough for us! Steve and I picked the kids up right from school and took them down to Temec to see Indiana Jones, to celebrate. I was the only one who’d seen it before and I was a little concerned that Luke would have a hard time sitting still for the whole two hours, but both kids were completely mesmerized from the first frame to the last. Gotta say though, it didn’t help Luke’s fear of stinging/biting insects one bit. Curse those giant ants!
The following Tuesday, the 17th, we finally squeezed in our “spring” roundup.
It was wonderful to see the cows and calves all fat and happy again on the lush spring grass. Mahogany started out fidgety and spooky, but she settled down nicely as the morning progressed. And this was the first year that Elizabeth was able to really help with bringing in the herd, thanks to her growing rapport with Stormy. It was a good day!
It would have been a great day, except while we were there at the pasture the fuel pump on my car quietly died, and I ended up having it towed up to Idyllwild for repairs. They couldn’t find a new pump for it anywhere but at the Saturn dealership, ditto the fuel filter that they recommended I have replaced at the same time, so the whole thing ended up costing me just under $1000, including the towing fee. Yowtch!
Back when the kids and I were planning out our “Summer of Adventure,” we’d scheduled a trip to The Imagination Workshop for Wednesday the 18th. We weren’t sure what exactly it was, but it looked interesting and didn’t cost much for admission, so we wanted to check it out. When Steve heard about the outing he wanted to come too, so we made a family day of it. Which worked out well, since the guy at Idyllwild Garage said they were waiting on the parts for my car and I wouldn’t have it back until Thursday at the soonest. So we all went down in Steve’s truck.
The Imagination Workshop totally exceeded my expectations! It’s an amazing and delightful clutter of silly “inventions,” optical illusions, cool science and physics gimmicks, secret passageways and plenty of hands-on fun. I wish I had more pics to post, but something about the lighting in there confused my camera and almost all of my photos came out blurry. :^(
After we left the Workshop we stopped for pizza at a place we’d never tried before, called the Temecula Pizza Company. It doesn’t look like anything from the outside; just a featureless storefront tucked in between a Carl’s Jr and a Mobile station. But the pizza was INCREDIBLE! I ordered a personal-size piece of heaven with white sauce, smoked chicken, dried cranberries and two kinds of cheese (provolone and gorgonzola) that was freaking amazing. We will most definitely be going back there.
Thursday was the day I was supposed to leave for Laughlin with Julie and Josh, but they were having technical difficulties with their boat and weren’t able to get it fixed in time. They were still going to Laughlin, just not on the river part. After a lot of agonizing over whether or not to go anyway, I finally decided to bow out this time. The urban/casino scene isn’t really my thing, and I was afraid I’d feel so out of place that I’d dampen their fun.
The fuel pump didn’t come in on Thursday. The Idyllwild Garage guy said I wouldn’t have my car back till Friday. I told him that was fine, I didn’t really need it until Saturday anyway.
Friday Steve wanted to have a father-and-son day with Luke. They took a bunch of trash to the dump, did a couple of ranch calls (Luke likes to hand the shoeing tools to Steve as he needs them), and then they headed down to Hemet to get the truck’s oil changed.
While they were doing all that, Elizabeth and I saddled up our trusty (and not-so-trusty) steeds and went for a nice ride. It was fun to cruise along, go as fast or slow as we felt like, and talk together without Luke’s endless chatter constantly interrupting us. We might have to do this guy day/girl day thing more often!
All four of us arrived back home within twenty minutes of each other, and shortly after that I realized that somehow at some point my cell phone had fallen out of my saddlebag. Luckily the ride had mostly taken place on actual roads, so Steve drove me back over the route to look for it. No luck. When we got back we tried calling it, and it turned out that a friend of Steve’s had found it in the road near his driveway. He was nice enough to bring it up to our gate. Yay!
Since I was originally supposed to be in Laughlin that weekend, Steve had planned to take the kids to the Orange Empire Railway Museum on Saturday. With me not being in Laughlin after all, it was decided that we’d take my car and save some money on gas. Except! The fuel pump STILL hadn’t come in, and now my car wouldn’t be ready till Monday! Whee!
So we piled into Steve’s truck and headed to Perris. Steve’s parents met us there at the museum a bit later.
Luke was delirious with pleasure at being surrounded by all those trains and machinery. The rest of us were delirious with impending heatstroke. It was 107º in the shade that day, and we were not in the shade; we were in the broiling sun surrounded by hulking metal behemoths and often on black asphalt. I’m not normally bothered by heat, but that was like being in a toaster oven. And inside the trains it was even worse! Gaaahhhh.
Still, it was a great museum if you like trains. I forgot to bring my camera (!!), but Steve’s mom had hers so we got some nice pics. You can’t even tell how close to heat collapse we all were.
Sunday we all spent here at the house, hanging out and playing Clue. We just recently discovered that game, and it’s turned out to be oddly addictive. Simple enough for Luke to easily grasp the concept, but with enough opportunities for surreptitiously gleaning clues from other players’ careless remarks that Steve and I have begun to get downright cutthroat about it. Ah, the pleasures of clean family fun. 🙂
Monday my car was finally fixed, and we brought it home. Hooray!
During all of this, Steve and I have been doing the two-steps-forward, one-step-back cha-cha. Some days everything seems to fall effortlessly into place, and other days feel like one long struggle to mend an unmendable relationship. It’s…wearying.
We finally decided that it’s time to try marital counseling. So we picked a guy pretty much at random out of the yellow pages, and Tuesday was our first session.
We can’t decide whether that went well or not. The guy listened to our tale of woe, asked a bunch of questions, and finally said (rather dubiously, Steve and I both thought) that he could help us if we really wanted to try and make it work, and when did we want to start our weekly sessions?
Interestingly, the fact that a marital counselor appeared to be of the opinion that our marriage is probably doomed has only made Steve and I all the more determined to make it work. Apparently we both possess the “Oh yeah? We’ll show HIM!” reflex. Nice to know we have SOMEthing in common. ;^)
And now I need to get outside and get some work done in the yard, because it turns out that yardwork does not do itself while one is out galavanting around at museums and such.
It looks like the apricots will be ripe within the next week. Mmmmmm, apricots.
And that’s all the news here. I will attempt to get back to posting more than once or twice a month, so my updates don’t all read like novels. :^)
Weather
Folks love to write about the weather on their blogs. I’ve tried to resist that urge myself, because I’m usually bored silly reading about other people’s weather. Weather is only interesting if it’s *your* weather, I think.
Be that as it may, today I feel the need to wax rhapsodic about the weather. Because as it happens, I’ve been working on my taxes.
Not seeing the the connection? Well, for those of you who don’t live in SoCal, let me tell you that 2007 was the most horrifically dry year in recorded history for us. Or maybe you already knew that; all those news clips showing ginormous wildfires raging across seven tinder-dry counties in October probably told a fairly revealing story.
It was SO dry. Sand dunes and blowing silt dry. End Of Times dry.
We lease a pasture across town that is, in theory, always green. Up until around last August/September it was always green in practice too. In fact, most of it is a “protected wetland,” which means it can never be developed. Wetland. Marshy. Green. Grass. Fat, happy cows.
Last fall it finally dried up completely and we had to start buying hay for the cows. Every day. Coincidentally, the years-long drought had driven the cost of hay up to ridiculous heights. It’s up to nearly $15 a bale right now, and let me tell you that adds up in a hurry. We sold off a bunch of cows, waited to see if it would rain, then when it didn’t we sold off a bunch more. We agreed that if the rain hadn’t come by Jan 1, we’d sell off all but a small handful of breeding stock.
Around the end of November it finally rained, and we all breathed a sigh of cautious relief. It rained and snowed through most of December, and rained and snowed some more in January, including this past weekend and today. We’d be dancing in the streets if we were dancing-in-the-streets sort of people — and if the streets weren’t so floody and muddy right now. Seriously, YAY! All we need now is a stretch of warm, sunny weather and the cows will be up to their knees in new grass. (Meanwhile, of course, we’re still buying hay.)
A few weeks ago we got a census form from the Dept. of Agriculture. Big long thing, with lots of questions about what we’ve produced, how much the ranch has earned, what our ranch-related expenses were and so on. It has to be filled out and returned no later Feb 4.
I’m one of those people that always puts off doing my taxes until the last possible second. I hate everything about doing taxes. My brain just isn’t wired for math. It loves words, images, images created with words…it’s fair to say that my brain harbors a genuine passion for written words and all the many beautiful ways they can be combined to stir the soul and fire the imagination. Numbers, not so much. My brain literally seizes up when confronted with numbers in large quantities. So I work on my taxes a bit at a time, and usually get them out just in the nick of time.
And now I have this census form to fill out, for which I will need to figure out all of the ranch part of our tax information by Feb 4. Yarg. It doesn’t help that despite all my best intentions for getting more organized, we’re still using the time-honored cardboard-box-in-the-computer-room method of storing all our receipts and stuff.
So, in a prevailing spirit of annoyed resignation I dumped the contents of The Box out and started sifting through them. Sorted them out, started adding up all the different kinds of expenses. In fairly short order it became obvious that the pile of hay receipts was going to be alarmingly tall. And man alive, it sure was.
I put off adding up that pile until last. Today I finally rolled up my sleeves and tackled it. And it still blew my mind when the final numbers were in.
We spent a staggering $15,073.27 keeping our livestock fed last year, mostly just between the beginning of September and the end of December.
And now it’s raining and raining and raining.
I may go dance in the street after all.
Categories: Life, Ranching, Weather
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New Horse For Luke
My seven-year-old son Luke is the only member of the family who has never embraced the equestrian lifestyle. This is partly because he has a natural inclination toward gadgets and machinery rather than horses, and partly because his ponies (we’ve tried several for him) tend to quickly pick up on his unassertive “passenger” riding style, and take full advantage of it. After being run off with a few too many times he’d gotten to the point where he didn’t want anything to do with riding at all.
Well, this is a cattle ranch: everyone has to be useful here. And neither Steve nor I was willing to accept that Luke would never experience the fun of helping to bring in the herd, or sorting cows and calves in a branding pen.
So about a week and a half ago Steve came home and announced that he’d found the perfect horse for Luke. “He’s just a loaner, but he’ll help Luke build his confidence up. He’s push-button safe.”
“A horse?” I asked. “Not a pony?”
Steve pointed out that a good horse is better than a bad pony.
I thought about that, and then said if Luke was game I was. So a few days later we all went to check out this paragon of obedience.
The instant we laid eyes on him, Luke and I started having second thoughts. This was a very *big* horse — bigger than any of the ones in our own string at home.
“He’s too big,” Luke declared, backpedaling a bit.
I tended to agree. I mean, it’s one thing to take a tumble off a 12-hand pony. A fall off this monster could break bones!
“Give him a try,” Steve urged. So we saddled up Gigantor (actually his name’s Beau), and Luke rode him around the yard, shaking like a leaf and whimpering the whole time. Luke I mean; Beau was fine. Maybe a little on the sluggish side, but that’s not such a bad thing for a kid who’s been soured by too many bolting ponies.
“He’s too big,” Luke repeated after the test drive.
“It’s totally up to you,” I told him. “We can take Beau home for you to ride, or you can go on riding Trinket.” Trinket is his current pony, a cute little thing with a scarily unpredictable streak.
He thought about it for a long moment, apparently weighing Beau’s lumbering compliance against Trinket’s perky stubbornness, and then mumbled, “I’ll take Beau.”
So we brought Beau home, gave him a few days to settle in, and then the four of us went on a family trail ride. Luke started out terrified, trembling, protesting loudly to all and sundry that he’d never wanted to learn to ride in the first place and lamenting about the unfairness of life in general. But by the end of the ride Beau’s laid-back obedience had lulled him out of his fear, and he even seemed to have gotten used to the size of his new mount. Steve and I agreed that we should do family rides every Sunday for as long as the nice weather holds out, to work on Luke’s riding.
Yesterday, to my amazement, Luke prompted us to start getting ready for our weekly ride. “Come on,” he pressed, “I thought we were going to ride on Sundays!”
Wow.
Since Luke was feeling more comfortable, and the weather was gorgeous, we went for a much longer ride this time. Beau and Luke (believe it or not, the Dukes of Hazard joke never occurred to me until I started writing this post) got along beautifully, and Luke even voluntarily trotted up at the front of the group for a while! Woohoo!
What a difference the right mount makes! We’re hoping this will be a turning point in Luke’s feelings about riding.
And many thanks to Ted and Bentley for the kind loan of their horse. :^)
We’ll have that boy ridin’ herd before he knows it!
Categories: Family, Horses, Life, Ranching
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An Invincible Summer 