This Will Definitely Bore You

With the exception of the laundry aspect of yesterday today was pretty much the same.  I spent the entire day quilting and finishing Marti’s Rocky Mountain High quilt.  I hope to put the quilt in the mail to her tomorrow and once she has received it I will post photos.  It is a beautiful quilt!!

Michael spent the day on his knees again and he wasn’t praying (well, maybe he was at times for things to fit).  He made great progress with the flooring—the front and rear of this travel are rounded and he did a fantastic job fitting the flooring to the curved areas.  The cabinet frames are real wood and we weren’t sure how to refinish these.  This morning we sanded a couple areas and have decided to keep the real wood, sand it down and apply a finish. 

And that’s it for our day—see I told you, boring!!  So, I will tell you another ranching story—when we ran cows here on the ranch we leased USFS land for summer pasture.  One summer we had a new lease, one the cows had never been on before.  We rode horses herding the cows from our place, up the East Boulder,  and onto the permit.  Michael was sure the cows could find the water tanks on their own—NOT!!  The next day the two of us rode up to check on the cows finding them in a huge stand of downed trees bawling their heads off—nope they hadn’t found the water tanks. 

We begin trying to herd the cows to the water tank and quickly realized we couldn’t ride through all those downed trees.  Tied the horses to a tree and began pushing the cows to the water tank which unfortunately was located DOWNHILL from us—cows don’t like to go downhill—cows are not the most intelligent of creatures!  For literally hours we, on foot, chased those cows down—then the cows would run back up—chased them down, then the *(&^%* cows would run back up.  HOURS we did this, it was July 4 weekend and it was HOT and we had no water, our water was back on the horses.

Finally the dummies decided we were trying to tell them something, they all ran down the hill and stuck their heads in the water tank!  Michael and I collapsed with relief—but then we had to hike back UP that hill and back OVER to our horses.  We too drank water out of the water tank inlet we were both so thirsty and hot.

That was one day I HATED being a rancher’s wife—I thought we were both going to die of heat exhaustion or murder all those cows before that day was over!  On the ride out and down the mountain we saw a beautiful cinnamon colored bear.  We were both so incredibly tired when we got home—the horses were fine, they spent the day tied to a tree!  All in the life of a rancher!

The above two photos were taken exactly one year apart, lots of snow still on the mountains in June, 2011, almost no snow this year, not looking good for irrigation or fire season!