Wild Hogs

Matthew spent a few days with us last week. He brought out his bike and was riding all over the place out here. He is really getting the hang of it!. It's great to see. He very proudly told us "I can ride with only ONE hand on the handle bars now!" Pretty good for a little guy who couldn't even ride it without training wheels three weeks ago.

Lee was washing his Harley and Matthew decided he needed to wash his bike, too. This is how he parked it when he was done....

Cattle Round-Up

Friday morning I was up before dawn to head out and do some "day work" rounding up cattle down toward Benson for a friend of my friend Jean. I loaded up Sassy around 4:45 and headed over to pick up Jean and her horse, Jeremiah. We met up with the 6 other cowboys, saddled up our horses and headed out to go find some cattle. Here I am with Sassy before we started out...
(you can click on the pics to make them larger)

The object was to round up the cattle (mostly heifers and about a half dozen calves, and a few bulls) and drive them over to another pasture. Some of the calves couldn't have been more than a week old! One little red guy in particular was so small, maybe 50 lbs. I wanted to bring him home....

We pushed the cattle through some pretty rugged terrain, down some canyons and through a railroad tunnel to another pasture and our job was done. We then made our way back to where we had parked the trucks/trailers.

When we first started out there were a lot of clouds and it was somewhat cool. By the time we were heading back, the clouds had burned off and the sun was out in full Arizona force. It felt like we had been out riding most of the day. Turns out, when we got back to the truck, it was only 10:30 a.m. !

Here are Sassy and Jeremiah sharing a moment at the end of the day. :)

We had a great morning riding the range....

Winged Horse

This is a new bracelet I created yesterday with a pendant made by my friend Jean. I loved this pendant when I saw it!

Her business is called SilverPaws and she also has an Etsy shop at http://www.silverpaws.etsy.com/. She handcrafts all her pendants from sterling silver or PMC silver. She has a lot of nice horse designs on her site, as well as some great paw print pendants on her site at http://www.silverpaws.net/. Jean also has a horse, Scout, that she adopted from Equine Voices, the same place I got Piper. :)

I thought this bracelet/pendant would be a nice remembrance for someone who has lost a special horse. Or just a horse lover in general...

Turbo is a Star!

Somewhere along the line in my surfing the web for bunny related sites, I found one called Bunny-Whipped.com. Of course, I had to check it out. It's a cool site, they have all kinds of bunny related gifts and apparrel. They also have a contest section, where you can submit photos of your bunnies. I submitted a photo of Turbo and she won first place! We received a prize in the mail (a Bunny-Whipped tote bag). Pretty cool! They want to do an interview with Turbo to put on their website, but that hasn't taken place yet. I'll update with that when it happens. TURBO ROCKS!


Here is her winning picture:













Check out the other winners at:

http://www.bunny-whipped.com/contestresult.htm

Learning to Ride

Matthew spent the long weekend with us. He brought out his bike to learn to ride. The first thing we did was take off the training wheels. It was time to get serious! We spent some time on Thursday night letting him get used to the bike and balancing himself and just coasting along without putting his feet down. Friday morning, he was up and at it early. By 10am Friday morning he was pedaling and really getting the hang of it. He spent the rest of the weekend riding all over the ranch and loving it! The first thing he did in the morning was go outside and get on his bike. Way to go Mud!!! Here he is with Uncle Lee's german motorcycle helmet on...

And here he is....just before he ran into the

back of Uncle Grant's truck...