"Family"

I'd like to wax philosophical about family and all the different kinds and meanings that go along with the word but honestly I'm not feeling real great today so will be brief.

Anyway, the above picture is a partial "family" shot of the Jag and Reece (outside edges) with 3 of their half grown pups. Rock is the one I'm holding and he's mostly his mother's son in personality. I love that goofball! The two Jamie has are Rye (sitting up more) and Hope (mostly black). Hope is very much like Jag's side of the family and Rye seems to be a bit of both right now. The pups are all starting out really well and both Jamie and I are excited about them.

Now, for those of you who don't know Jamie. She has become one of my best friends in the last few years and to me feels more and more like a sister. We celebrate family highs and lows together. We talk dogs but more often than not, we discuss husbands, kids and ranching. So, this picture doesn't include all of my family (or even close to it actually) but it does have some important members of it!

Holidays

I hope everyone had a blessed Christmas and a great start to the New Year. I have enjoyed the last two weeks immensely! We had family visit and spent a good deal of time hanging out together. I'm very fortunate to be able to get together with quite a few of my extended family members for all of the holidays.

My dad is the pastor of our church, Living Word Community Church. We meet in the old Movie Theater in our nearby town (well 30 miles but it's our closest town). We're a non demoninational, ranching kind of church who live by the word of the Bible. We had quite a few special performances (singing, cowboy poetry, narrations, etc) by people in our area at our church this month. I'm always amazed by how much talent out little community has. Pretty exciting!

We start school again tomorrow. The boys aren't overly thrilled with it but I'm ready to get cracking on it again. We're taking down the Christmas decorations tonight. I'm not ready! It's pretty amazing when you think about the whole Christmas story. Maybe if we can all remember it more throughout the year we'll be better people for it.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Picture game

Okay, I got tagged to do the 6th picture game. I won't go into all the details as I think everyone else that blogs has already been tagged and played the game.

This was my "6th picture" in my archives on my computer. It is Jag holding the replacement heifers up to the cake pickup. I think it was when he was 2 so about 4 years ago. We had weaned these heifers in the corral and dog broke them for about 4 days or so. Then moved them to a section pasture where we fed them all winter. We'd drive over and cake them every morning. It only takes about 2-3 times before they figure out what the pickup is about. The dogs gather the draws and such and we wait in the middle of the pasture. We're keeping some calves of our own again this winter so the dogs get extra work again. Yay!

Winter weather and Survival

Well, we're all battening down the hatches again. We're under a blizzard warning for tonight and all of tomorrow. No one seems to be taking it lightly after the last storm. We're all praying we're going to be terribly over prepared for what is supposed to be coming. They're not predicting a lot of snow (5 inches) but they were only predicting about 6-8 last time and we got 2 feet. The part that's bad about this one is how much colder it's supposed to be. We're supposed to maybe reach 3 degrees on Sunday with windchills down to -30. So we have all the livestock fed down in the draws and I'm going to move sheep close to the house before it gets dark tonight. They'll have the big, machine shop to get hunkered down next to and if it gets to bad they'll just have to go in it. Mike hates that thought! We have the generator close by in case we lose power and the garage is full of firewood. So, I think we're about as prepared as we can be anyway.

Now, for my survival story from the last blizzard in November. A friend of mine lives north of me about 2.5 hours. She got hit pretty hard as well but thankfully didn't lose a lot of sheep. Unfortunately 2 of them could never be found. She was out feeding shortly after Thanksgiving and noticed the top of a sheep's head where a snow drift was melting. She knew she was dead but glad to know for sure now. Except, the head moved a bit! She and her husband went to digging and sure enough she was alive. This was now 24 days after the storm. She was extremely thin and soaked because of the melting snow but was able to stand in there. So when they got her dug out she walked to the barn and went right to eating hay and drinking. She's needed a lot of TLC and is still pretty thin but looks like she's going to make. It's just another reminder of how strong the will to survive can be! Simply amazing to me.

My main "men"

Well it's official, Zac has been retired from cattlework and most of the hard work on the place. He hasn't done the bulk of it in over a year now but we've finally decided he just can't do the tough jobs anymore. He still gets to do plenty of work around the place and some of the smaller trials but his body just doesn't keep up with his heart anymore.

Heart. It is the one word that describes him the best. I have worked a number of dogs now and have had and still do have ones that are more talented but if I ever have one that has as much heart as Zac has I will truly be blessed. I have never "lacked for dog" in any situation I've put him in. It's not that he's always the toughest (although I'd put him up against most I've seen) it's simply that his heart will carry him through whatever is asked of him.

I made to many mistakes in his training to even know where to begin. I started using him on the place to moves cows and calves at 6 months old. I put him in way to many situations that have aged his body way to rapidly. If given the chance to go back and do it again I'm not sure if he or I would know how to do it any differently though. We've always just been a team and no matter what needed done we figured out a way to do it. Probably not always the correct way and darn sure not with a lot of finesse but we always managed to "get 'er done"!

One of my favorite memories of Zac is during a huge fire in a neighboring pasture in August of 2003. In the mayhem a bunch of lambs got pushed into a tank and couldn't reach the bottom. They couldn't get any footing to be able to get out. I grabbed the ones closest to the edge and started pulling them out. Zac watched me for a minute and I was just taking my boots off to go in after the others, he jumped in without me asking. He started grabbing them by the base of their tails and pushing them to the edge for me to grab. He would then let go and go after another one. You just can't train that in a dog!

Zac just turned 9 on Thanksgiving day and besides my family there isn't one thing I'm more thankful for than to have this dog in my life. He has officially moved into the house. Some days he acts older than his age. Other days you'd think he's a pup again. He loves to set out sheep for the young dogs and back them up if something challenges them. One of his other favorite pastimes is watching TV with us in the evenings. And I DO mean WATCH. Not just sit there, he totally gets in to it. His favorites are anything on Animal Planet and Football. I don't think he'll ever see another tough job or really hard trial course again but I plan on enjoying every day I get with him.

So this brings me to my other "man", Jag. He wasn't as fast maturing as Zac but I also had an old reliable to fall back on while training him so didn't put him in the situations I just threw Zac into either. He was a challenge to start as he pushed on me and when I pushed back we often met with an explosion.

I have been amazed at his natural talent. He's the best outrunning dog I've ever owned and stellar at reading stock. My hubby always says he's got more finesse than most but doesn't always choose to use it! His sheer determination is what kept me going with him when he was young and I was getting frustrated. Nothing was going to get by him. I'm pretty sure he would have died trying rather than not get it stopped. Didn't matter what species it was.

Jag is now the dog that does the bulk of the tough work around the place. Dustin's dog, Kat, helps quite a bit as well but she won't work for me anymore. During the blizzard he was the dog who helped us find all the weaned calves and move them out of the draws. He was the one who worked for 10 hours the one day helping move neighbors cows around. I'm not sure I've seen a dog lose weight as quickly as he did during that 2 week time span. I fed him like crazy but he just put in way to many miles. Always ready for more whenever I asked.

One of my favorite memories of him is when I sent him after the ewes and lambs right at dusk. The coyotes had been giving us trouble and I wanted to move them closer to the house. He's always great at gathering everthing so I just went about my business and figured he'd show up soon enough. Well the sheep quit trickling in but no Jag. So I went looking. I called but no Jag. It took me quite awhile but I finally spotted him on a side hill just laying there. I hollered but he wouldn't come. I was getting a bit torked then so ran up there to give him a piece of my mind. When I got there he was laying next to a big hole that was very deep. I really couldn't see anything down there but just then I heard a faint little bawl. It was a lamb and I had to reach in well up to my shoulder to reach the little bugger. His mom had left him but Jag wasn't about to!

Jag just turned 6 and I'm hopeful that he has many years left of ranch work as well as on the trial field. I hope to spread the work out to my younger dogs more quickly now so I don't age him as quickly as I did Zac. It really is nice to know I have an old reliable again though!

Snow pictures

It's hard to tell in this picture but there are 5 1/2 foot tall fences buried in there. The rams were in that pen and the snow banks were hard enough to walk them across it and put them in a different lot.

I'm standing on the snow bank taking this picture. That tree broke off onto the chicken house. The chicken house with all but one chicken it was completely buried. There wasn't anything but a bit of the roof showing.

The dogs could walk across the fence in the high spot there and it's over 6 foot high.

Once it settled down around here my boys had a blast digging a huge tunnel in this bank. They had a great time naming all the different "peaks", "mountain ranges" and "passes".

The barn towards the back is 14 foot tall at the back. The snow drift actually gets much higher to the left of the picture. That one went to almost 20 feet tall. The drift towards the front went into the building. To get in there I had to dig a little hole and then I could shimmy in on my stomach up against the ceiling. Thankfully the rams weren't in there. Just one stray chicken.

Blizzard!

Well, the first weekend of November was almost summer like weather. Dustin and I spent it at a dog trial in t-shirts enjoying the 70 degree days. The second weekend was a totally different story.

It started to snow Wednesday afternoon (the 5th I believe) and we lost electricity by 3 pm. It snowed pretty good all night and woke up to close to 8 inches. Thursday the wind blew hard all day with gusts close to 80 mph. Add another 10-12 inches of snow coming with it all day and it made for a disastrous blizzard.

Not to be dramatic but everyone is pretty much in agreement that it's the worst one we've had here in at least 30 years. It's the worst one I can ever remember. The worst part was that it wasn't predicted to be even close to this bad so we didn't have time to put the sheep anywhere different. They were down in a good draw but after almost 2 days of the wind and snow blowing that hard, it blew them out of there and through the fences.

By the time we were able to see enough to get to them on Friday (we tried on Thursday but you literally couldn't see 2 feet in front of you) it was a horrid sight. The majority of the snow drifts were six feet tall but many were between 12 and 20 feet. The rams and feeder lambs had a barn but it had literally filled to the roof with snow in all but about a 2' x 10' area. Two of the feeder lambs had been trampled and died as a result.

We started finding the ewes scattered out all over the pasture. It was a pretty horrible sight honestly. It was hard to tell that they were even sheep. They looked more like snow drifts as they were SO covered in snow and ice. Mike started putting hay out for the ones that were fairly grouped up. Zac and I started gently easing the others up to the hay. We got a count and realized we were about 40 head short. So we went looking and found about 20 up against the fence in the pasture. There was a huge snow drift on the other side. Mike found a couple of air holes and we started digging. We found 20 head of ewes buried in there. It was amazing to me how many of those were still alive. It took us 4 hours to dig them all out but all but 6 of them survived. We never could find 4 of them and still don't have a clue as to where they might be but we're assuming they didn't make it. There are 3 that are still down that were buried in the snow bank but they seem to be getting stronger every day. Who is it that says sheep are weak? Ha!

We had just weaned calves about a week prior to the storm hitting. The snow buried a good portion of the fences around the country including the pasture our calves are in. We found all but 50 head on Friday. We found the remainder by Sunday. We lost 3 of them in the storm and we're dealing with a fair amount of sickness in them now. We had about 40 head of neighbor cows that had made it to our house on Friday so we finally got those all moved back to their rightful places on Tuesday. The boys and I have had our fill of riding in deep snow to last for awhile!

We still don't have electricity and they're telling us that it might be Thanksgiving before we have it. There are over 1000 poles down in our local area. The National Guard is in here now helping the Electric Company get through the snow and now mud to get to the poles. So, it looks like there may be light at the end of the tunnel!

We are very blessed and things like this have a way of reminding us of that. We know how much worse it could have been for our livestock. We know how many other people around the area only have electrical heat and have had to leave their homes until the power comes back. We know that all of our family and friends stayed in during the storm and weren't stranded in vehicles all over the state. We are so thankful for a great generator that we can run some of the household appliances on from time to time. Most of all we're so grateful to live in a "community" that all works together to help each other out whenever it's needed!