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Friday, January 22, 2010

Sweet dreams


I am posting this again early in the morning to stay on schedule. Yesterday was a busy day and a long day but a great day. I have to do a bit of early morning feeding today before I head to Pasco to go on the “young at heart” cattlemen’s tour planned today. Hope to see and meet some of you young people. I am bringing the donuts and am excited about today’s tour and tomorrow’s workshop. That excitement made me not sleep very well last night.



I have never been any good at sleeping. I enjoy sleeping when I can sleep; it is just that I have too many issues with sleeping. I blame it mostly on my post college trucking days. Often I was on a run into British Columbia Canada hauling juicer apples or processor cherries sometimes both directions. 700 or more miles a day with a load and unload on each end plus at least one border crossing each way did not leave much time for slumber. There were times you got so tired you just had to stop at the next wide spot and grab a few winks or risk hurting yourself or someone else in a crash. The first truck I had was a 1972 Kenworth that did not have a sleeper. A piece of plywood strategically covering the gap between the two seats in the cab was what had to suffice for a “bed” at different times. Luckily the old needle nose truck had an excellent heater.



I cannot blame it all on the truck driving. Even in High school I would wake up at 2 am and remember I had a major paper to turn in the next day. The fact that it was now May and the assignment and due date had been given to me the previous October did nothing to help my ability to sleep. Now days I will sleep a few hours and wake up thinking about what the next day entails and struggle to go back to sleep.



Part of the issue is unless I am totally exhausted I can’t sleep more than 4 hours at a stretch. Don’t get me wrong I can sleep 6-7 hours a night but I need a 2-3 hour break in between sessions. I do not know if this is because of life experiences or other influences. Maybe it is conditioning from my single days when you wanted to wake up early and sneak out before your true love you had met at the Cowboy club the night previous woke up and no longer had the effect of alcohol in her reasoning. Sober females tend to ask difficult to answer questions like what is your name and what is your phone number. Even if they happened to still be smitten with you in the daylight hours, unless they can cook a good breakfast it is tough to overcome the deficiencies in their physical characteristics now that you were judging those characteristics with your own sobriety.



At least the sleep walking, sleep skipping and sleep mowing the lawn has subsided for the most part. You may laugh but you just wait until you have the experience. See how you feel the morning after you have slept cooked and ate yourself a grilled peanut butter and green bean sandwich. My parents were witness to an incident when I was in high school. I had slept crawled out of my window late at night and slept rode my motorcycle around with friends between the hours of 1 and 3 am. I think they were as shocked as I was when I woke up from this as I was crawling back into my bedroom window as they stood there watching my return. Dad was so shocked he lost total control of his emotions and got angry. I felt terrible.



As a kid and even now I still struggle with lots of dreams and nightmares. You may not know how it can affect you if you do not deal with it yourself. Let me tell you, when you have a nightmare about being chased to the edge of a tall cliff by some midget aliens dressed as clowns you will know. The mini extraterrestrial Clarabells chasing you with cattle prods in one hand and a feeder cattle contract margin call in the other then you will know terror. In the dream you know you are getting close to the cliff but since you are running naked and have nothing to fight them with but a French fry in one hand and a bowl of Pistachio pudding in the other you keep running until………… Yeah wake up from that and just shake it off there John Wayne.



Today’s real environmentalist species found on the ranch is the raccoon aka Procyon lotor

Today’s picture is a fall first calf heifer and her calf out on corn s

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