Farm Fresh Blog

Yesterday I accidentally stumbled upon a bit of wisdom that everyone knows but we all tend to ignore. This world is full of people who burn the candle at both ends. None of us has time to be sick but it's a guarantee that if you juggle enough plates, they'll all come crashing down when the eventual illness creeps up. Such was my case. After two days of trying to sleep it off, I was still ready to kill my husband and everything canine that kept me from sleeping. I emerged on Sunday morning, still physically and emotionally exhuasted to find that the rescue dog had crapped all over his kennel because surprise, surprise, just like everyone else on the farm, Daddy expects Mommy to do everything and failed to calculate that dogs need to go to the bathroom.  grrrrrr......

(That pushed Mommy over the edge.)

So I packed up Lily the Border Collie, and a truckload of soap, and I left.  I left Other Half with EVERYTHING. I left him with a hungry barnyard of animals. I left him with a crappy kennel in the living room. I left him with 7 hungry, happy dogs that needed to be fed and exercised. I left him with a dirty house and an air conditioner that didn't want to work. I just took my dog and LEFT it all!

Lily is better at math than I am so she's my bookkeeper!

Lily, my headache, and I drove off. It was liberating. We drove straight to a convenience store for a frappuccino. (HEY! Don't judge me!") Soon caffeine was coursing through my veins and I was headed off to deliver my first soap order of the day. There is a joy to selling soap. Not only does it smells good. It brings friends together and makes new friends. And that was where I had my epiphany.

Friends are good medicine. Friends are good for whatever ails you. Ladies, whatever goes on in your life, take more time for your friends. There is something about having "girl time" that is remarkably healing. Old friends, new friends, friends you just met, they are all a salve for your soul.

Friends re-calibrate you.

Thank you, Shari for the wonderful, but all-too-short visit. We need to do this more often. Thank you, Jamie for letting me play with your Gypsy Vanner horses! There is nothing like playing with a 'highly-expensive-I-could-never-afford-it-so-just-enjoy-it' foal to brighten your soul. And God bless you, Mindy. We don't get enough time together but it's always memorable. There is nothing quite like battling a snake and playing the "is it a cottonmouth or not" game. Kudos to you for being bad-ass enough to put the snake in a bucket. You are my hero!  And Dorothy, thank you my new friend. From the moment we met, I knew I'd found another sister. And Jeannie, dear, dear Jeannie. What would I do without you?

And at the end of the day, after seven hours of girl time, bouncing from soap order to soap order, and friend to friend, I felt better.  My headache was gone. I was ready to go home and tackle the happy, bouncing, needy farm, to coax the sullen air conditioner back to life, to convince the husband that he really needed to buy me fajitas and a strawberry daiquiri.

And the world was a better place.

So the moral of this story is:  When things really look dark, when you feel like crap, when you are convinced that if one more person or animal demands something from you, a murder will occur, that's the time to dump everything, pack up your dog, and spend the day with girlfriends. It's the best medicine in the world.

Oh, and thank you, Lily for being both my doctor and my bookkeeper!

I may whine and complain about having to hold down a full-time job as well as handle a farm, but in reality, having a full-time paycheck affords me the luxury of being sentimental. For instance, let's examine this:

What an adorable little motley crew!

Over the years I've learned that some critters are just livestock and some critters are something special.

 Yeah, okay, this one is special, but I was thinking about this one:

 Roanie is getting a little long in the tooth. In reality, her teeth are falling out now. I'm not sure how old she is, because she was older when I bought her. In that time she has survived a savage attack from a police dog which left her permanently lame, and a chickenshit bite from a Trolldog (Trace) which took off half her ear. And yet, Roanie maintains a sweet attitude toward life.

By now, most ranchers would have cut Roanie from the team. She was never the phenotype I wanted to breed. After her dog attack, I really didn't want to use her for training the dogs because she has a decided limp.  So why did I keep Roanie?

 Roanie does produce nice babies that share her interesting temperament. This is her ewe lamb, Chuck.  I hadn't planned on keeping Chuck but when I noticed Roanie's teeth falling out, I decided that I needed to keep Chuck in case I lost Roanie. Why?

Who the hell knows?

Over the years I've just become attached to this little ewe with the will to live with a smile despite what life throws at her.

So while I might bitch about having to juggle everything because of that job. The paycheck allows me the luxury of keeping a critter that most ranchers would have sent to the sale barn years ago.

Their loss . . .

 "Take a bow, Roanie!"

And who could forget Roanie's first meeting with Baby Briar after her dog attack:  Blood Will Tell

A farm can teach you a lot about physics. For instance, did you know that a 3 inch rain upstream can cause a sleeping little creek to become a raging river that drags trees over large boulders and smashes through any fence-like structure standing its way?

For instance, take these boulders:

Now let's imagine the amount of water it takes to lift an entire tree trunk through this maze of boulders . . .

 . . .

                     . . . to smash into this fence crossing.

In this part of Texas, it is called a "water gap." I might take a moment to wonder why it is called a "water gap" when it is a gap in the FENCE across WATER, but Other Half has advised me multiple times that I cannot call it a "fence crossing" since it is a WATER GAP.  Whatever....

(I might also add that when I have this conversation, I remind myself of Dr. Sheldon Cooper of "The Big Bang Theory.")

But I digress.

Back to physics: Apparently rain in parts unknown can cause tremendous chaos to fences downstream because in addition to leaves, branches, string, tires, and toys, large tree trunks also follow the maze of boulders down our stream and end up smashing through the WATER GAP, thus causing the need to repair the fence after any significant amount of rain.

Note: ANY amount of rain in North Texas is significant.

We have been cautioned by local ranchers to not put a lot of work into stout fences across this creek. Apparently fences across creeks in this area should be mere suggestions to cattle and not a 'challenge' to The Creek, because anything, and I mean ANYTHING, really stout will just be smashed to bits anyway and become debris that damages someone else's Water Gap downstream.  

Ranchers up here just expect that they will have to check/repair their water gaps after every rain.

Another interesting tidbit: I also just heard from another rancher that the law on the books in Texas states that fences are to keep livestock OUT of your property, not IN your property. Not sure about the truth in this but worth checking it, not because I plan on letting my cattle free-graze on the neighbor's land, but I just happened to be fascinated by that kind of trivia.

Anyway, take a peek at these boulders. To get to this gap in the fence, one of our cows must climb down a heavily wooded, very steep 30' bank, or follow the creek A LONG WAY threading through boulders as big or bigger than they are. 

 Will a cow try this adventure?

Probably. They're cows. They're not gifted with a great deal of common sense.

  And so, like every other rancher in the county, we set about repairing fence crossings/WATER GAPS!

After arriving at the ranch and getting the cattle settled, we got about three hours of sleep ourselves before we had to attend to the real business of buying new axles and having someone weld them on. At both places the staff peeked under the trailer and said, (and I quote)

"Hit a pothole, huh."

I now have a better respect for potholes.

Anyway, the rest of the day was fuzzy. We went to bed early and went into a coma. I awoke from my coma to a most unusual sound. It sounded like a bull bellowing.  We don't hear this sound often with our bull, Bully (yeah, we're real imaginative in the name department. I wanted to call him Angus McBull but was voted down.) Bully is a very easy-going bull. He moves slowly and isn't a big thinker. We think he was probably dropped on his head as a baby, or perhaps deprived of oxygen too long in the womb. But he is a gentle soul and is easy to handle, so even though he's old and isn't much to look at, we like him a lot.

So I climbed out of bed to see what the problem outside was and saw this.

My first thought was "Wow, Bully sure plumped up quickly." (not enough sleep on my part)

Then he started moving and I realized, "Holy crap! That's not Bully and he's got our cows! He's taking our cows away!"

So I hauled on some blue jeans and went outside. By then he had the cattle by the front gate and was walking back and forth at the gate, bellowing at the top of his lungs. He was definitely NOT Bully. I started to walk down there to check him out and then common sense tapped me on the shoulder.

"Do you really think it's wise to go walking up to an already excited bull that you don't know, in an area where you have nowhere to run, at a time when your husband is asleep so no one will hear you but the copperheads. And as your crumpled body is bleeding on the ground, the rattlesnakes will laugh at you."

My voice of common sense can be quite cruel, but reasonable, so I opted to hop in the mule and drive down there instead.  Up close it was clear he was not Bully. He was pacing and hollering at a stray heifer on the outside of our fence.

She was lost and looking for a herd. She was young and scared so while he bellowed on one side of the fence, the young heifer bawled on the other side of the fence. The new guy was a beautiful bull but my first concern was Bully's health.  Had he hurt Bully when he took our cows?

So I raced off to the pecan meadow in search of Bully.

I found him pretty quickly. He was standing in the field by himself, looking a bit confused.

"Everyone left me," Bully said.

"Yeah, Buddy, don't worry. We'll get them back."

So I went back to the cabin to wake up Other Half. Even on a good day, getting him out of bed is a task, and I knew he was still tired from the trip up, but if you tell a cow man that a strange bull is trying to steal his cows, that will galvanize a man out of bed. Like a rocket.

He drove down there and admired the bull. Nice bull. The picture of youth and vitality. (Looked like trouble to me.) We just assumed that the bull belonged to a neighbor who had been leasing our property for his cattle. We figured that he hadn't been able to get the bull out before we came. No worries. As long as Bully was safe, we didn't mind how long he stayed.  We opened the gate to allow the little lost roping heifer to get in with our cows and everyone was happy.

The Big Bad Oil Company had taken down a forty foot section of our fence on either side of the driveway in order to put in a pipeline under our driveway. Since they were still working on it, they had temporarily replaced the good fencing with a flimsy wire "gap" that supposedly served as a fence but not to a bull like this:

 Believe it or not, there is a flimsy wire fence beside this bull. Not much of a barrier.

And since we had no desire to see him take down the wire gap and take our girls to parts unknown, we drove the cattle back down to the pecan meadow.

I was worried the bull would hurt Bully. Other Half and I watched closely from the safety of the mule, but then really, what were we gonna do if two Volkswagons get into a fight?

Fortunately, our bull is gentle and realized the new bull was much bigger and younger. The new bull barely glanced at ours. Everyone resumed grazing and all was well.

We spent the next three days trying to figure out who he belonged to. The first guy pointed us toward another neighbor, who claimed the roping heifer, but said the bull wasn't his.  What the heck?!!!  How could he NOT belong to either of these guys? We are in the middle of NOWHERE! (B - F - E!)

Anyway, Other Half just happpened to notice that there was a phone number on his ear tag. Not sure how we missed that earlier. So he called the number. The lady explained that her bull had a habit of wandering (a LONG WAY FROM HOME!) and that her son would be picking him up and taking him straight to the sale barn.

Other Half mulled on that. I could see the wheels in his head turning. He was thinking he might buy this bull as a replacement for our old bull. This is what he didn't see.

Every morning when I woke up, I drove around the ranch on the mule. Every morning that damned bull was somewhere else. He was a travelling man, always on the move. After the first day, our girls quit following him. He was a tall, dark stranger, but Bully stayed in the same 20 acre meadow with plenty of grass and a pond. Really, why wander over 133 acres with this new idiot?  Our girls are kinda lazy too, so they turned their affections back to Bully. 

Several times Other Half mentioned buying that bull. Each time I pointed out that if someone wants to take a bull that nice to the sale barn, he IS A PROBLEM!  On Monday morning the boy showed up with horses and within thirty minutes Rover was headed toward the sale barn. I drove back to the meadow to find Bully grazing peacefully.  He had cactus thorns in his face, and his testicles (OUCH!) and he's a bit old and moth-eaten, and not the brightest crayon in the box, but Bully is a sweet bull. He stays home, causes no problems, and consistently sires beautiful babies that gain weight quickly. So who needs a fancy new bull?

I saw that wistful look in Other Half's eye as Trouble drove away and hastened to point out that no matter how nice this bull looked, he had broken out of THREE other pastures to go walk-about. He had left his herd THREE times in search of something he couldn't find. There was one niggling thought that bothered me though. Our idiot cow Paisley, Queen of Trouble herself, was in season. I really, really, REALLY hope this bull didn't breed Paisley.  That's a match made in Salebarn Heaven.  Just sayin'.

We're back from the ranch! This trip was particularly exciting since we moved cattle across Texas. It was a major event that I'll share when I have more time, but Jesus loves us, that's all I know! Otherwise, we'd have a lot of dead people and dead cows scattered all over the freeway. Anyway, I'll save that for later. For now, I just want to say this:

      No matter how how bad things seem, when examined quite closely, one can see how little blessings line up. It's all a matter of your perspective.

Ask most people who've been through an event which destroys their home, and you'll hear how the real tragedy is the loss of family photos. If the house is scattered rubble, but a photo album survives, they consider themselves blessed. That said, let me show you this:

 LOOK! It's me!

Well, it's me 50 years ago.  When I was a toddler, our home caught fire. My mother only had enough time to grab her baby and run. My baby pictures were lost in the fire.  But here in this age of digital technology and social media, strange things happen.

It goes like this:

(1) Under duress, my mother joins Facebook.

(2) She reconnects with relatives she hasn't seen in YEARS!

(3) My 50th birthday rolls around.

(4) A dear relative just so happens to have . . .

DRUM ROLL please . . .

It's ME! It's ME! It's Ernest T!

(Okay, you youngsters won't have a clue who Ernest T is, but then, that's what Google is for.)

Yes, Great Aunt Opal just so happened to have not one, but THREE pictures of little ole me!

Check this out!

 What's with this hat?!!

I look like the AFLAC duck. My mother refuses to take any responsibility for this fashion disaster. She threw my grandmother under the bus on this one. Isn't that what family photos are all about. Embarrassing pictures that make you smile. Snapshots of little strangers who look strangely familiar.

Thank you so much Aunt Opal for keeping these old photographs for 50 years!

The world of photography is a slippery slope into addiction. My mom just gave me this lovely orchid for my birthday, and my first thought was "OH MY GOSH! I can take the greatest pictures of SOAP with that orchid!"

Yes, not only is photography addictive, but making soap is addictive too. It's hard to say what is my favorite part of goat milk soap - the peaceful time of milking the goat, cutting soap into bars, or letting my creative photography gnome take over and shooting still-life pictures of soap.

I tell myself that I take the photographs to "one day" put them on a website to sell the soap. Whatever....   I take the pictures because I like doing it. 

(Hey! Don't judge me! It keeps me off the streets!)

This is the closest I can get to enjoying

"Calgon, take me away!" moments.  

From time to time strangers cross our paths, and through inattention on our part, we forget to show our appreciation for the sunshine they bring. Such was my case today.

Although I enjoy PetsMart, I rarely take the opportunity to shop there, thus a trip to PetsMart is a treat for the dogs. Because we have so many dogs, only a chosen one or two get to go.

Briar - Nope, except to go to the vet, she never leaves the farm.
Ranger - No, strangers and shopping carts? His idea of hell.
Ice - No, slick floors. Ice has the "linoleum gene."
Aja - Only once, to try on boots for work, and then it took three police officers to protect Aja from the curious public who believe a police dog in public should behave like a stuffed animal.
Cowboy - from time to time he goes
Trace - He should go more regularly, but he is more interested in working stock.
Dillon - sometimes
Lily - ALWAYS! (Princess goes EVERYWHERE with Mommy!)

Today however, Dillon was The Chosen One.  He was quite excited, but on his best behavior. We shopped. We avoided children. We avoided other dogs. Dillon was stressed, but having a good time. His shopping cart was full of beef bones and stuffed toys, and he had controlled his urge to lift a leg and mark things. (which is why I like FEMALE dogs!)

We were just approaching the counter when our stranger appeared. She was a sweet woman who politely commented on how handsome he was and asked to pet him. Since Dillon is normally the friendly sort, but was a bit stressed, I told the lady that it was up to Dillon, as he was a little overwhelmed by everything at the moment.  The lady talked to him nicely and put out her hand, but Dillon ignored her. He gave her the classic, "look past" look. 

This can be interpreted as "I see you. I don't wanna see you. I don't want to make a scene or anything, but I'd rather you just went away, so I'm gonna pretend I don't see you."

Now this situation can be played a couple of ways:

(1) Force the dog to endure the stranger. This can result in either:

     A. Unhappy Dog is violated by total stranger. Dog loses trust in handler. Dog no longer feels safe in public.
     B. Unhappy Dog growls at stranger. Handler jerks dog. Dog loses trust in handler and no longer feels safe in public.

Or . . . .

(2) Handler recognizes the look and advises stranger the dog is stressed and shouldn't be approached. This can result in either:

     A. Stranger is offended. Dog trusts handler to take care of him. Dog feels safe in public.
     B. Stranger is not offended. Stranger recognizes "the look" also. Stranger continues to talk sweetly to dog and tell him "Maybe another day." Dog feels safe in public. Dog feels safe enough to happily eat cookie offered by store clerk. Total experience: Positive for dog.

Now fortunately, our stranger was a dog person who recognized the look and not only did not push herself into Dillon's space, but wasn't offended. This interaction gave him the confidence he needed to interact positively with the next person he met in the store. It was a positive learning experience for him. I wish I had taken the time to thank her profusely for her behavior. How a dog is treated in public can shape his entire outlook in the future. I never allow people to push themselves onto my dogs. Although I try to be polite, my attitude towards the public is this:

"My dogs are not here to amuse you or your children. I do not rush up to your husband, pet his head and gush about how handsome he is, so please don't push your attentions onto my dog. Rude is rude, whether it is a human or a dog. If you ask, and he wants to approach you and get his ears scratched, then that's okay."  (this doesn't apply to husbands.)  I don't allow my dog to drag himself into your space, so I appreciate it if you don't push into his."

Dogs are like people. Some are gregarious, and some are more reserved. As a puppy, Dillon was more social. As an adult, he is reserved with strangers, and it behooves all of us to respect that. The world is just a happier place when we respect the space and rights of each other.

I give you . . . .

       . . . Franken-puppy!!!

OUCH! (makes my butt pucker)

Other Half has been on the working on the border and I have been spoiling someone while he's gone.

Other Half has that rancher mentality. Livestock is livestock. Dogs who are supposed to be guarding livestock are supposed to be outside WITH THE LIVESTOCK!  (yeah that's probably true.)

But I'm a softie...

....  and it's hot.

So this week I've been letting a certain someone inside. It started innocently enough. She needed to be brushed and I sure as hell wasn't standing out in that heat to brush her. So I brought Briar inside and she sprawled on the carpet while I watched Longmire and brushed her, and snipped out the matts.  She was in Heaven.  Briar LOVES air conditioning!

So this morning after I did a head count of livestock, I turned the sheep in with the horses, and let Briar in the house again. She found one of Henry's stuffed toys and decided to play keep-away with Ranger. That big dawg richocheted around the coffee table and bounced off the couch. Other Half would have stroked. I laughed and laughed and laughed and wished I had a camera.

He is coming home today and so Briar is back to being an outside dog, but she sure enjoyed getting a peek at how "the other half lives."

And since we are currently designing the barn at the ranch, Briar also put in her order for a window unit air conditioner in the barn.