Neversummer and Nocturne

The hard thing about having a child is, well, having a child. They need watched and stuff. I’m not used to staying in the house. I am usually out doing the work, cows and what not. So when the weather cleared up and the guys headed out to try to find the cattle it was a little hard to stay home and watch the child. They set out on the four wheelers because the day before when my father in law tried to take hay to the cattle, with the pay loader, he got stuck. Which took considerable tractor power to pull out. That was the bunch he could reach, the roads were impassable and he couldn’t get near the others.

Sunday things cleared up and they went looking for a way to the cattle, again. When they got to that pasture it was empty. The trail was clear though. Through the fence and straight into a neighbors corn field. Bad for the corn, great for the cows. I finally got to venture out to take them wire to repair the fence. The highway was clear, the county roads passable but barely. On every side loose live cattle grazed the ditches and hay bales left in fields dead cows graced every fence corner.

As far as the father in law knew, last I heard, they had only lost one old cow, but that is a loose count. I think people will still be finding strays come weaning. I don’t know what made this storm so much worse. If it was all because the cattle are still out on summer pasture with out protection or if it was the rain before or maybe a lack of winter coats but I have never seen so many dead cows. Calves at calving in spring blizzards die all the time, just last spring everybody took bad losses, but not cows. Now it seems like there are dead cows every where. I have heard stories about how much worse it is not too far north and west of us, I can’t even imagine.

Chadrad, more pictures and stories

It’s only October. I’ve been decorating for fall, we aren’t supposed to be getting a blizzard.

We have company visiting, for the winter. I know I have heard it said that fish and guests go bad after three days but we are going to give it a try anyway.  Not everyone was happy to see them, but those who were upset will just have to learn to live with it. Maybe they will even become friends in time. You might recognize our visitors from the parade pictures from Festival and the reunion.

Because it has become apparent that I am never going to write anything.

It’s a very important thing, occasionally a bit delusional.

This is how I see myself when riding Nevel:

Or at the very least:

It is interesting that I seem to want to be doing dressage when I ride western, I guess I need to be doing western dressage. So maybe I can picture us like this:And very soon we will be doing this:

I was so excited when my husband showed up the other day and obliged me with some pictures so I could see just how graceful Nev and I looked together. Imagine my distress and dismay when I discovered I looked like this:

In my defense I was trying to lower my center of gravity in hopes of being less likely to fall off with the green horse, open space, semi and pay-loader stuff going on. It is a little sad to discover it working so very well. Apparently the helmet doesn’t automatically make me elegant and graceful like all the enlish riding people always look. Maybe I should get a pair or breeches? No,bad idea. Diet time.

Nev is still pretty at least.

We very seldom go out, just the two of us. Finding a sitter is such a hassle. But this was a big deal, a rare chance not to be missed. Marty Stuart was coming, if not to town, close enough to count.

Fortunately my equally Marty Stuart loving husbands very young sister isn’t old enough to share our love and agreed to babysit, on a weeknight even. We promised her we should be back by ten, easy. We weren’t. Then we kept her up even later telling her what a great concert she had missed. I think she thinks us old folks are crazy.

We got there before the seats filled up too bad and sat five rows back in the center. Perfect seats. They opened with some of his hits. The whole band took a turn singing. They were all great. Watching a concert with my brilliant husband is more than listening to music, I get to learn the history behind it. My favorite piece of trivia this time was that the base player, who also played an upright base, so awesome, was the lead singer of Exile when they recorded my favorite song of theirs, Keep it in the Middle of the Road.

They played the upright base, the mandolin and of course  guitars. The instrumentals were spectacular. Then they slowed it down and closed with some good old Gospels. They came down for a meet and greet after the show and we wanted to stay so bad but it was already after nine and we had a good hours drive back to pick up the child we had promised to retrieve by ten so we very reluctantly headed home.

Just a little one, mostly wind a bit of rain. We laughed together at the weather radio, they said a few times that anyone outside in the path of the storm WOULD be injured.  We heard rumors that some corn fields up on the highway got hailed pretty good and thought we would drive past to see them when we headed to town for milk. That’s big excitement out here in the middle of no where.

Imagine our surprise when we got a call asking my computer guy husband to put a note on the school web sight that there would be no school Tuesday. “Why?” he asked. Well apparently there was a storm and anything outside in its path was injured. It ripped the roof right off the school auditorium.

I immediately texted a friend who lives in the path this storm took. She responded that no they had not come through alright. They got six inches of rain and three inches of hail, and hauled a horse to the vet who tried to jump a fence in the storm. He didn’t clear it and needed stitches the length of his belly.

Everything in the storms path was destroyed. Trees were stripped bare, grass was pounded into a pulp. Water stood in fields and had washed over the roads. The corn field had been hailed alright all that was left was stalks and ears, they looked like sticks stuck in the ground.

See more here, here, and here.

I have mocked that name for as long as I have lived out here and heard it on the radio, but now that I’ve been, really it’s a nice little festival. It helps to know what things are before we decide to hate them.

This year my old,old husband celebrated his twenty year high school reunion at festival. He and a whole three other classmates that showed up. The class celebrating their fiftieth had the whole class there except, I hear,  for the dead one and the one in prison. But for the twenty only four showed and one of those missed riding on the float because he was announcing the parade on the radio. They had a great float. A hay wagon pulled by a beautiful team of Percherons. It was a good time, but hot.

We got a cat.

I don’t know how happy I am about it. It certainly wasn’t on purpose.

My husband was headed after a load of hay. He turned a corner and saw, at the last minuet, as he ran astride of it, a kitten in the road. A little grey, Siamese, colored kitten in the middle of the grey gravel road.  Fortunately the wheels went around instead of over and the cat didn’t move.

He of course stopped and picked it up.

It is a fat little kitten, well cared for by it’s mother until it somehow ended up in the road. At first it hissed at us but with a little petting has become quite friendly. We are feeding it milk with a dropper until we convince it to drink from a bowl. Elly wants to name it Bwuh. She gets very excited about the whole thing and really wants to pet it or drag it around by its head. It would be nice if it were a good month older. Bwuh wisely spends most of her time running away.

This is just what I need two small un-house broken creatures crawling around the floor getting into everything.