Thoughts from the Middle of Nowhere

This calf is sure casting a suspicious eye on me and the camera. Taken 2/13/2007.

Now here is an interesting way to pass the buck, blame the cell phone for killing someone instead of the alcohol you consumed. Let me give you a little hint,

YOU STILL KILLED SOMEBODY YOU IDIOT. IT DOESN'T MATTER IF THE BLAME WAS ON THE CELL PHONE OR YOUR DRUNKEN DRIVING, THE MAN IS STILL DEAD.

Does this idiot really think it will make a difference? I can't believe people sometimes. Does this make him feel better somehow or is it a ploy for a lighter sentence when he is convicted of stupidity?

Blame it on a simple twist of fate. Bob Dylan

I have a theory about life and how to handle things. You can't control what goes on around you, you can only control how you react to it. For some reason this calving season I am having a hard time following this. I am not reacting well at times. I have been getting real upset at the cattle which doesn't help at all when working with them. I don't know if its the stress of the calving season, the worries about the ranch, my daughters boyfriend or my new hired hand or a combination of all these things. I am personally leaning towards the hired hand but I hate to blame him for everything, I might want to but it wouldn't be fair.

Most of the time I am calm cool and collected around the critters but this year I'm having a hard time with this. I keep flying off the handle. I just realized these things yesterday so now that they are in my vision I can deal with them.

[To myself]I can only control my reactions to things, don't let them get to you.[/To Myself] It's easy, right? Now that I am aware of the problem it actually is.

Is it weird in here, or is it just me? Steven Wright

I think this is the most snow we have gotten all winter. It sure looks pretty with the sunshine, even though the mud as it melts is a pain. Taken 2/14/2007.

A heifer trying to get a closer look at me and what I was doing. The ice crystals on her whiskers really stand out in the larger picture. Taken 1/31/2007.

The heifers finally started picking up on their calving this last week. They were definitely not cycling when the bulls were turned out last spring. Nothing I can do about that, it's just the breaks. We have been busy though keeping up on things. It has really been tiring.

The weather has been nice for calving but as with everything involving the weather, it could be better. It gets just warm enough every day to create a lot of mud then it freezes at night and sets the mud up. The ground never dries up so the heifers have very little good ground to calve on. What a pain.

Did have the first casualties this last week. Two calves lost on one cow. I don't know what it is, but if I have a cow with twins in her she is more likely to give me trouble than any other one around for some reason. This particular case was a little weird. The heifer never seemed to have any contractions. I noticed her acting a little odd in the evening, not real calvy, but like she was going to calve within the next 12 hours or so. By the morning she still hadn't started to calve but you could tell by looking at the discharge from her that something was going on so I decided to investigate. When I reached in to figure out what was going on I knew there was trouble. She was fully dilated, but I could barely reach the calf, meaning that she wasn't having contractions to push the calf up in the womb. I reached in as deep as I could go and finally snagged a front foot of the calf and started pulling it up. I could tell by the way the way it felt the calf was dead, I hate pulling dead calves, it makes me feel bad. I worked for the longest time but I never could get another leg or the head or anything, all I had was one front leg. I finally decided the only way I could save the heifers life was to take it in and have a vet get it out, another thing I hate to do with a dead calf but what option did I have?

The Vet tried to get the calf out just like I did and was having the same problem. He had a pharmaceutical solution though, Pitocin (SP?), causes the critter to have contractions. She started having enough contractions to push the calf up and get a hold of the one leg and the head finally. He pulled the calf out this way. He them reached in and found another calf in there. It was so far down in the womb he couldn't get a hold of it so it was time for more Pitt and the contractions finally pushed it up enough to get a hold of. He then pulled it out. He said by looking at the condition of the bodies the calves were more than likely dead for a couple of days. Why she never had any contractions was beyond him. I guess the hormone that starts such things was missing.

When you have as many cows as I do around here you can expect this kind of thing to happen once in a while. I don't have to like it, but you have to accept it. Otherwise you will go nuts.

The cows should start calving here before to much longer. Spring work will really start taking off then. Things to do and cows to calve. If I just had help that was worth a damn around here I would really be looking forward to it. The way it is, I will just struggle through.

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. Albert Camus

A cold, snowy, Montana morning. You will note the cattle bunched up in a tight huddle for warmth on the left side of the picture. Taken 2/10/2007.

It looks like the Montana House wants to allow all the usable ground water in South Eastern Montana to be pumped out of the ground to be gone forever. I really hate to tell these people but ponds and reservoirs go dry over time and then the ground water is needed to water the cattle. If we have pumped the water all out for short term profits, there will be no more water so you can run cattle.

Also, I have another question. If this bill exempts CBM water from water quality standards, what happens with the State of Montana's lawsuit that Wyoming is contaminating our streams with CBM water? If it's exempt from Montana water quality standard, we have just given the Wyoming CBM industry a present of untold value.

Hopefully the Senate kills this poorly thought out bill. Ranchers who care about the long term in the cattle business realize how short sighted it is to dewater the aquifers we need for our survival in this dry country.

We have to preserve it and use it sustainably. And the short-term use of resources at the destruction of the long-term heritage of this country is not a policy that we can pursue. Bruce Babbitt

Sunset through the trees. Taken 2/17/2007.

I'm a little confused, a normal state it seems like. There is a bill in the Montana Legislature to public finance legislative races. The bill even talks about how the money is going to be raised for the idea. They would use $500,000 in State money to seed the project and then "fund the program with voluntary income tax checkoffs." All fine and dandy if you want to publicly finance campaigns. The next paragraph in the story is where my confusion starts.

Montana used the same checkoff method to help fund campaigns of governors and Supreme Court candidates, but the number of people contributing sank so low that the program was eliminated.

So, the citizens of Montana have a proven record of not voluntarily doing this via tax checkoff but we still want to try and do it again. This confuses me. Why is the person sponsoring this not showing a little wisdom and paying attention to what history has all ready shown to be a failed method of funding? Some people never learn I guess.

As for my opinion of publicly financed campaigns, I really don't have an opinion. At least this bill is voluntary. I don't like the idea of such a thing being mandatory. If it were mandatory it could violate a person's right to free speech. By being voluntary this is avoided. In the long run I don't support this since the voluntary funding idea will never work so then they will start using general tax funds to fund it. That I don't like.

Confusion of goals and perfection of means seems, in my opinion, to characterize our age. Albert Einstein

The flexibility of a cows tongue. They clean their nose out with it. Taken 2/11/2007.

I have a little update on the Mixed Message I talked about where the school was reinstating a basketball player over the objection of the coach for drinking, which was against the coaches rules. Obviously this happened while I was without Internet so I don't have the story but today's Gazette opinion sums it up.

I have to agree, this sends the wrong message to the children of the state. Get caught drinking, get suspended from the basketball team, have your parents complain about the suspension, and get reinstated and the coach fired.

WHERE IS THE RESPONSIBILITY OUR SCHOOLS HAVE TO TEACH OUR KIDS IN THIS SCENARIO!!!! Yea, teach them to get away with something clearly illegal, but I thought our responsibility was to teach them right from wrong, not if you are good at sports you can get away with anything you like.

What is happening to us as a society that venerates athletes over the law? How sad.

I feel bad about my outlook, how I feel about people and society, and that I'll never be part of society the way I should. Mike Tyson

I see the state of Wyoming is again looking at building a pipeline to carry coalbed methane water to another water basin other than the Powder River basin. The drive to get this water out of the Powder River basin is that Montana is currently suing Wyoming about the contaminated water the CBM industry is dumping into water that flows into Montana. Sounds like a grand plan. Use state money to remove the water for the CBM industry.

So, where do they want to dump this water so that it doesn't offend Montana? In the Big Horn River. Last time I looked the Big Horn River also flowed into Montana from Wyoming. So, to not contaminate Montana water in the Powder River Basin with CBM discharge, the state of Wyoming is going to dump the water into another basin that flows into Montana, the Big Horn. These people need a little geography lesson so they can see where the Big Horn River flows to. How stupid can they be.

Now I know somebody is going to point out to me that the Big Horn River flows so much more water than the Powder that the contamination will be diluted well before it reaches Montana. IT'S THE PRINCIPLE OF THE THING YOU IDIOT!! If you are going to pipe water away from where it's produced so it doesn't go into Montana, it wouldn't be wise to ship it to another river basin that flows into Montana. This isn't Rocket Science.

I also have commented before on how stupid contaminating anybodies water is for short term tax profits to the state. The long term health of our water supplies is more important if you ask me.

Stupidity is also a gift of God, but one mustn't misuse it. Pope John Paul II

Reading Karen's story about the tied up bull reminded me of one of my bull wreck stories. Sometimes these critters get in the biggest predicaments. I know I'm not a very good story teller but bear with me.

It was many, many, many moons ago and I believe I had gotten the bulls in to pour them in the fall. We got them poured all right, not having a chute they would fit in you don't want to know how I poured them, it isn't exactly safe, we were taking them back out to their pasture when the wreck occurred.

There was a round bale feeder sitting in the pasture which this bull decided to investigate. Now this feeder has parallel bars going up at about a 45 degree angle and the bars are about 2 feet apart. It is built in three sections and where the sections meet is a bar that goes straight up and down. Therefore at three different spots on the feeder there is an opening that is 2 feet wide at the bottom but narrows to a point at the top instead of maintaining the width all the way to the top. Well guess where this brilliant bull put his head in the feeder? At one of these spots. What happened when he decided there was nothing in the feeder and lifted his head up and went to back up?

You got it, he wedged his neck in and was stuck. He got a little upset at this point and started really pulling back to get out. Two thousand pound bull vs. 200 pound round bale feeder. Yup, he started backing up and pulling the feeder along with him. This was more than my horse could handle, he knew that feeder should not be moving so he sucked his tail down tight, reared and turned, and decided to go visit the far side of the pasture. It took me a little bit to get him under control and not trying to run away, but there was no way he was going near that bull and feeder that was still moving around all over the place.

Now I have had this happen before to cows with these feeders and all I had to do was get in the feeder and stand on the cows head to push it down until she could get it out. They usually only go no more than 900 pounds at the time and were not pulling the feeder around. One look at this 2000 pound bull and I knew this solution wasn't going to work here. I did not weigh enough to be able to push his head down even if I could get a steady enough platform to work on, with him moving it around, there was no way I could make it happen.

So I studied the situation a little bit closer and come up with a solution finally. Since the opening at the bottom was larger than the opening at the top where the bull by lifting his head was trapped, if I turned the feeder over the larger opening would now be at the top where the bull could pull his head out real easy. I got off my horse and threw my reins to the hired hand and started chasing after the bull/feeder combination to attempt to turn it over. I yelled at the hired hand to tie the horses up and come help me.

I finally get up to the bull/feeder combination and the bull is getting a little owly at this point. I get my fingers under the edge of the feeder and start to lift it up to try to turn it over. The bull is throwing his head up trying to get it off and is not helping me at all since with his help I am having to lift it higher and higher all while walking along as the bull is backing up. I yell at the hired hand to get over and help me all the while trying to flip the feeder over. All of a sudden the bull drops his head which gives me enough leverage to push the feeder all the way to a standing position. I then managed to get my fingers under the edge again and finished flipping the feeder over.

The bull at this point lifts his head up to the top of the now full sized opening and backs out. He then calmly turns away and walks off after the other bulls who by now are in their home pasture. I looked around and spotted the hired hand and asked him why he didn't get in and help me when i was trying to flip the feeder over. He said that he had no idea what I was trying to do since I didn't tell him, which was true, and he figured one of us had better stay away from the wreck so they could haul the one that got hurt to the hospital. All I could do was laugh. I couldn't blame him for not helping me, he had no idea what I was up to. I guess I need to communicate better sometimes.

The predicaments these critters get into sometimes are amazing. The risks people take to get them out of these wrecks are also amazing. What I did might have been stupid, but what choice did I have? I had to get the bull out of the situation.

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. T. S. Eliot

This was taken back when we were bringing the heifers home. The hired hand was bringing up a slow heifer to the rest of the bunch. I titled the picture lonely because it had a very open, lonely feeling to it. Taken 1/29/2007.