Monday was a Monday of Mondays. Toni went to check and 10 heifers were out and one Hereford pair (who was not even in the same pen). She chased them around, Murtaugh and Meranda showed up to help her at precisely the wrong time and ran them back over her. She got them in with the cows, but not before they went through a couple of fences and got Sagebug out with pushed over panels in all of the excitement. Sagebug proceeded to run through the fat steers about three times but did not go over the hotwire. After his three rounds of running he wanted to know what Toni was doing as she was trying to pick the panels back up so he just came back to his pen without any chasing. After everything was put in some type of a pen and the cows checked, mom sent her a picture of the coming two year old filly Absolute out and eating hay. Toni got down there to find that Absolute was covered in cockleburs, but unscratched besides that.  Angel the tb stepped on something out in the circle and injured her leg, so mom and Anna went down and got her, they had to lead her up the hill since it was too muddy to get the trailer down there. And guess what else they found in there? 5 bulls that were out and in with the horses. Due to all of the run off there is water across Horseshoe Rd, so that is fun. But, it is warm enough we do not have to get up to check every two hours. Toni and Kade worked on the fence Monday night were Absolute got out, and Kaine went to help the others feed. And Debbie, I know you told me last Friday that Jaxsen likes to help more than we give him credit for, but I did not hear of him helping with the fence or feeding…

Tuesday morning Kade had a dentist appt, so Toni ran him down to that after checking, she called on her way down, and told them she was running 5 min late, they told her she was actually 10 min late, and she had to reschedule. So they rescheduled for Wednesday. Kaine made himself a hair appt after school, he said he was tired of his mullet, but his hair did not look that much different when he got home. Cows were out eating the corn and hay that night and Anna and the men spent a lot of time chasing them in the dark and fixing fence. For some reason we were not getting power from circle 3, so they had to run down to circle 5 and steal that fencer, so I do not know what is keeping those in. Ben’s transmission stopped going in reverse, so Kaine had to go down and pull them backwards. So they then came up and got my ranch pickup, which I am currently very concerned about since Ben is not easy on anything. And Debbie, Jaxsen helped Toni build fence on Tuesday.

                On Wednesday dad and mom went to tri cities, they brought me a coffee at work and mom came in to check on George 2.0 (the fish). Toni brought Kade down to the orthodontist after checking cows, the last char heifer calved. Kade wants to do leather work so they had lunch with aunt Peggy and uncle Tom then went and got some of the leather working tools Tom has. Uncle Tom also has a bunch of surgery tools from some random lot of stuff he got at an auction so he gave Toni more forceps, some tiny scissors, and some other cool stuff that we hope we never need.  We had a load of grain delivered, Kendel went down to show him where to dump it and he got stuck, and he dug himself out by hand. MC got his gate open and went down to the house, so he was at the house. When Toni and the boys got down to do chores they saw the chain was broke and put him back and fixed the chain. They also put a few poles along the middle pen. It is time to get all the fencing projects that we need to get done, done.

On Thursday 958 calved, one of the heifers that Kade showed. She had a big bull calf. One of my lucchese mules got chewed by Ben’s dog. However, Ben is denying it was his dog. Most chores in the mud, they are feeding the cows pulling the flatbed with the tractor, Old Red the pickup can’t make it through. Toni can barely make it thought with her pickup checking the cows. Toni stayed with Grandma on Thursday night but they got some fence worked on before she left. We are actually fixing a section that the colts had destroyed, so it is really annoying because it shouldn’t be on the list of fencing projects. But we have to get it done so we can take the panels that are there up the hill for the project that we really need to do to replace one last hill fence at Mom and Dad’s to use that pen for a stud. Barbed wire fence is not ideal with stallions, so we are trying to replace it all. This is the last high pressure barbed wire fence we have left to replace. We will still have some barbed wire, but not much.

Ben was home on Friday, they are working 9 hrs and get every other Friday off. Which is the opposite of the Fridays I get off. He hauled the heifers back up to the house and turned them in with the cows. Chad came out and trimmed the riding horses, Tank and a few others. We finished the rebuild fencing project and started on the actual project. The boys are still going and feeding circle 5 so they negotiated a stay on packing the heavy Powder River panels up the steep hill until Saturday. Everyone is busy, lots of mud, so whatever. We let them have a break. I stayed with grandma on Friday night.

                Kade had a shooting meet on Saturday, he got second in buddy shot.  He did great. The Connell team did great overall with a second-place finish and some of the other kids won some great awards. The trap team is overall an amazing group of kids. Ben and I ran down the power, and why we did not have any at circle 3, 2 fuses were blown, so we got that fixed and fixed the fence and turned the cows out into 2. Anna worked on fence then went to Milton Freewater with Lane. At moms and dads Toni, Kaine, Kade, Jaxsen and I worked on the fence in the middle pen. Toni got some new tool for the cockleburs in Absolute’s hair and worked on that for awhile. I told her she already has that tool but she is always getting new tools to try to get the crap out of the horse’s mane/tail. Absolute didn’t want to walk through water when her grooming session was done so we worked on her for awhile. The big boys packed panels up the hill and Toni and I tied them up and hooked them together.  We were one panel short to reach the spot we wanted to get to with panels. Even if we put as many panels as we can up there we still have a bunch of heavy, long, terribly back breaking poles to pack up the hill and get on the fence.

                Sunday was a nice sunny day and we spent most of it building fence around the corn field. Prior to fencing Kade took Stormy out for a ride.  Kaine’s girlfriend Kendra came out and rode along. Kendra has one of those home ec fake babies that you have to pack around for a school grade. Funniest thing ever to see Kaine packing a car seat. Hopefully we don’t see that for real for about 10 years or more. Kaine’s dog Andee was freaked out by it and would not get near him and hid behind me. Both Kaine and Kade got their pickups stuck. Toni, Anna and Jaxsen got a lot of posts in while I pulled them out and Ben rolled up wire. We were amazingly efficient because the ground is so soft. Ben said that isn’t going to be great when the posts fall over in the mud, but we are all positive about the fact that we got all the posts in we needed to and can get the cows out on more stalks and into cleaner areas.  Mom made us sandwiches since we were all starving. Then Kaine and Kade packed the last panel up the hill and Toni, Kade and I put two poles up. Now to the pole sections.  We have 6 ½ sections left so that means 26 poles. We can do it. We can do it.

To quote Kaine’s favorite singer Walker Hayes (Kaine does not like Walker Hayes) –  it’s good times, right.  No really, we joke, but the crew worked hard this week.  We are about to start the countdown to our first 2024 foal. We used to have a fun Facebook challenge on who would foal first, but haven’t done that for a while. If anyone has any guesses, just for fun, put it in the comments. We are checking mares, but should be a few weeks off. Exciting times ahead, and not fence building exciting, actually really exciting.