Round Up

Hmmm...were to start with today.

Well I guess the beginning! I did chores this morning as usual and this time nothing was extemely ill or trying to escape- just hungry! We went up in the pastures to cake steers and also put in some salt and mineral- which created a few trips back and forth to the shed from the pasture. After checking the heavy cows we are not down to one...yes one cow to calf on the place- which is pretty darn exciting!

I was given an hour or two to run to town to check my mail and get groceries since I haven't been off the place in several days. One of the things I needed in town was a cheap watch, since I figured the one I normally wear is way to nice to ruin...so I looked at all my stops and didn't find one. I decided to make a trip to the True Value to check out their supply. Well, they had watches but only nicer ones or children's watches. ...Yup that's right- I am now the proud owner of a green and yellow googlie eyed frog watch! Not sure how long it will be green and yellow but hey it's cool anyway! After my quick trip to town I came back, changed back into my dirty clothes and we set out on four wheelers to sort off a cow calf pair that somehow ended up with the dry cows. This took a while since she ran us all over the place...and it really didn't help that I had no clue where we were going...but eventually we got her in and stopped to eat lunch.

After lunch we went out and saddled up for this afternoon's round up (branding tomorrow). Merl's brother and his son as well as his cousin and his two kids came over with their horses and eventually Merle joined us on a four wheeler and Tina and Jeff (the other hired help here) did too. We started off split up into two groups..but of course en route of a 2600 acre pasture I found myslef alone with fifty head of cattle that I found moving west. Since I had no clue where to move them and it appeared that someone had herded them in that directions I pushed them down the draw...until I ran into two other riders pushing them east. The easiest way to make youself look like an idiot: drive half the herd in the wrong direction for a while. So, after feeling completely stupid we continued to go back and look for more and more pairs until we thought we had as many as we were going to find. We rounded them all up, sorted off a few that didn't belong, and set up coral panels for tomorrow. By the time we were done I was ready to start evening chores.

Tonight-on account of feeling like a dumb idiot...I made myself a cake! lol yep that'll fix it! So I had pizza and cake for supper and took Joe out for a walk (Still trying to decided where to keep him around here). It's a little wet and chilly and supposed to storm tomorrow, which will make branding very interesting...I'm a little nervous since I'm of course the only person who hasn't branded before. We'll see how it goes.

I'm off to shower and go to bed!