ranching

I'm sitting waiting for Ruth at her dollhouse club meeting, and since I have little else to do I thought I'd finally end my procrastination streak.

The sale of our cows is going well so far, not enjoyably, but well. We shipped the first of the herds to the auction this past Monday. I felt a little like putting a beloved pet down. The girls will actually be going to a new and, hopefully good home. But I worry about them because there are not all that many ranchers who care for their herds as much as we did.

In my opinion the best cover that Wired magazine has ever had was on the December 1999 issue. It depicted a winged woman casting herself off of a cliff. I believe it was meant to signify the excitement and potential of the new millennium, but there seemed to me to be a note of unease and uncertainty about the picture. Excitement tinged with a frightening leap of faith into the unknown. Of course the new millennium was just a calendar ticking over from one year to the next, and the importance of it, had only to do with the human brain liking round numbers.

We branded today. Not the best job, not the absolute worst either, but it really isn’t much fun for anyone concerned—us or the calves. The whole thing almost didn’t happen. We’d arranged to hire some help because we no longer have anyone else working for us, and we can’t do labor intensive jobs like that ourselves (there are only three of us after all). We hired one guy from the nearby Hutterite Colony, and, or so we thought, arranged for another who lives in Fort Benton to come out and help.