Mucho caliente

It was once again a nice day in the beautiful Columbia Basin with diminishing winds from last night’s hurricane. Last night the wind howled and I always tend to worry about tumbleweeds leaning over single wire electric fences and offering cows a way to travel. I was pleasantly surprised that no such thing happened and there were not many tumbleweed’s to remove from fences this morning.

I worked all day today but really am not sure if I accomplished much. I had two conference calls taking up about 3 hours of the day. They were both necessary and productive but somehow are hard to see as tangible when the hours of daylight are so short. The sun seems to descend faster than Monica Lewinski in the oval office this time of year. I was able to read, delete and get my email box down to 72 unread messages when I started yesterday with over 1200 of them dating back to April. Many of them were the type sent by friends with a humor slant and they were fun to read.

I went to the corner store today and filled the Dodge with diesel and saw something quite simple but also humorous. As I watched the dollar amount spin fast and the gallon amount spin slow on the pump meter a minivan entered the parking lot. It was a Mexican family, a father, a mother and I am guessing about a 3 to 4 year old boy. When the father got out of the van to go into the store the kid threw quite a fit because he wanted to go inside. The father loudly told Juan Jr. that he was to stay in the van with his mother. The father got about half way to the store when little Juan opened the drivers side door and started running towards his father. Juan Sr. heard him coming and turned and chased him back towards the van yelling at him for not listening. The kid got the door closed just as the dad got there but the window was down just a bit. Juan Sr. was very animated as he told the kid to quit crying and to stay in the van. The father once again turned back towards the store and right when he passed the front of the van Juan Jr. laid on the horn! OMG, Juan Sr. about jumped out of his “pantalones” from being startled and I spit coffee about a mile laughing. I do not know what they came to the store for but at this point the dad had enough and he got in the van, slammed the door and tore out of the parking lot without even going in the store! I was treated to another bit of laughter when I was able to view the passenger side of the white minivan. The passenger side fender had one of those stickers that look like flames. Nothing like a set of flames to make your minivan look more awesome!

Today’s real environmentalist species found on the ranch is the Brown headed cowbird aka Molothrus ater.

Today’s picture is another in my series showing calf growth over the year. 0904g is a steer calf pictured as a newborn on February 25^th 2010 and today November 16^th 2010.