Working on Labor Day

The past couple of weeks Kittee and I have stayed pretty busy around the ranch, her law practice and my school bus driving. I am still on the mend with busted ribs, and Kittee is trying to get in all the riding time that we cannot do together due to my horsey crash a month ago.

This weekend I have been working with Rusty in the round pen and his little filly -Summer- doing halter work, giving petting strokes and sharing hugs with her. Kittee has worked with Rosey this weekend in preparation for a showing in a couple of weeks, and has ridden Misty, Nugget, and Derby to keep their saddle blankets damp.





































Today while Kittee was working with Rosey in the round pen, I moved Summer’s little herd of mares and got everyone into running, hucking and bucking in the process of changing pastures. Gee it is fun to watch them do that…

Misty and Rosey enjoying the cool autumn air rushing their faces.

Yee Ha, Let'er Buck!!!
Mama Goldie and little Summer kicking up their heels

Thinking about how much fun and exercise that was.

Today we introduced Summer to Rosey, and that was a non-event with the two of them just sniffing each other and then went about their own ways. Later in the afternoon we moved boarders Raji and Sunny into this mare herd, again a non-event as we now have a two month old foal, a yearling, a two year old, and a three year old -all silly fillies- bonding with each other.

Yesterday turned into fall. Weather was partly cloudy, mild with before sunrise morning showers. Kittee and I just really took the day easy –a day of rest, with a nap- and early yesterday evening we sit up the card table for a game of cribbage. Before starting the cribbage game we pulled out the bottle of Sangria, cut some orange and lemon into glasses and had a drink of refreshing vino, which help us to decide to play a fast furious game of double solitary instead of cribbage.

We finished the day, after quite a few hands of solitary, dinner, and showers watching the rest of Yellow Submarine, which we started watching Thursday evening.

Saturday we made a quick trip to Walla Walla to take care of some business there and to watch the Frontier Days Parade. The parade was lead off by the Walla Walla Police Dept. motorcycle squad, followed by the Wal-Hi Marching Band, Indian princesses, some big fat women riding sidesaddle, pooper-scoopers with wheelbarrows, people walking their mini-horses and dogs, on and on and on, down Alder and up Main Street.


































The Master-of-Ceremonies for this year's parade and the Walla Walla County Fair/Rodeo was John Payne a guy calling himself the “One Armed Bandit” and his mule. These guys paraded through town on top of their transport/stock trailer, while the "Bandit" cracked his bull whip over the crowd's heads.

It was a rather nice affair for a beautiful Saturday morning outing into town.

Friday, Kittee had to go to jail; I stayed home and worked on income taxes. A rather non-eventful day until Kittee got home in the late afternoon and we sit out and enjoy a couple of beers, had a ribeye steak dinner and a glass of vino and watched horses romping into sunset.

During this holiday weekend we have tried our best to stop in the middle of the afternoons and relax with a root beer float while the day time temperatures are still in the mid to lower 80's. Fall is approaching very quickly around here and Round Up is just around the corner.

Last week Kittee stayed quite busy with one trial after another all week long, and I had my first full week of bus driving for the new '09-'10 school season Monday through Wednesday. Working for the school system once again we had Thursday and Friday off to go along with the Labor Day weekend.

Last weekend we got in our winter store of hay. By doctors orders I did not touch a single bale while stacking these loads of hay into store. That felt pretty good as I get older and begin to look at 20 tons of hay having to be put away… high and low into the barn.

Kittee and I still have to tarp the hay loft hay, but it is now all under roof for the winter, and that feels good.

And now last but not least, as Kittee and I was sitting out and enjoying the sunset in our backyard last weekend we noticed some new structures way out on the western horizon. We brought out the field glasses and discovered it was wind turbines encroaching from the west. The machines in this picture are about 10 miles to our west, at this point in time.

Eastern Oregon is now being covered with these machines springing up everywhere. This is not so very bad, except that 95% of the power produced in Oregon is being transmitted to the Californicators to our south, and in turn raising the cost of our power due to the incompatibility between wind and hydro power generation. This sucks as these machines take over our Oregon ecosystems. Our Oregon countryside is beginning to look like the ass-end of southern California.

Now let me get back to my tax work chores... :>(
and cuss some more.

That’s the way it is around the ranch this week --- Dale

Summer’s Birthday and other comings and goings.

Summer is two months old today…
She has shed a great deal of her foal coat and is becoming more and more a liver chestnut with signs of having a flaxen mane and tail like her sire- Rusty.


Today was as beautiful as the day Summer was born, with the sky clear and temperature mild, even a bit cool overnight. This weekend we are in the upper 50's at night and low 80's during the day. Feels great.


To celebrate Summer’s birthday we had a round of root beer floats… Mmmmmm that was good.







After our root beer floats we went out to pasture to play for a while. I did get a good video of Summer and Aunt Misty coming when called and will put that on YouTube next time I get to Custer Law Office, for now there is a short clip at the end of this blog posting.





To save allot of hot air -bragging rights- I will just stick a few pictures in here of our baby…

Strolling with Auntie Misty

Hey that's my hat...

We started today with a cup of horseshoe stand-up coffee and having to put on our housecoats, it was cool this morning. Looking out our bedroom window, we watched Derby and Nugget napping in the early morning sun.

Heads or tails? Your call.

The Dynamic Palomino Duo
are about as closely bonded as any two horse can be.When on the trail most people can not tell them apart.
We are always being asked... Which is who?

To start our day of birthday celebrating we had a nice hot bowl of yellow grits for breakfast, fed and watered the penned horses, and headed for town to pickup the Double Deuce. School begins Tuesday morning in Milton-Freewater.
After we got back from town Kittee saddled up Derby and continued to work with him on his jumping training. I realize that this picture doesn't show much of a jump, but prior to bringing out the camera, he did make a couple of really nice jumps over the rails.

Derby really has more tricks in his bag than we know what to do with. Appears this guys has done allot in his pre-McKuster Ranch Life.

Yesterday was a day of rest and a chance for Kittee to re-connect with the ranch. She was out grooming the mares in the riverside pasture, and then brought Rosey up to the barn for a bath and a bit of pre-show handling.
Rosey’s horse shows will start in a couple of weeks, with the Walla Walla County Fair and then the Eddie MacMurdo Horse Show. This will be the first time since June that she has left the ranch to show her lovely Arabian bay figure. The rest of Saturday we just laid low, as I am still taking care of/healing my broken ribs, punctured lung, and busted sternum.

I knew that was gonna hurt...

I did get in three acupuncture treatments that last week for my battered/bruised muscle pain and that really did help. A couple of those treatments were with electro-needles, which is a deep micro-massage in the injured muscle tissue. That works wonders and I am beginning to get around much better now.

Since it has been a couple of weeks since making a posting to this blog, I will go back a ways and try to catch up on the comings and goings of Kittee and Dale.
The week of the 10th through 15th Kittee made a trip to Arkansas to visit with her dad -"Pop" and stepmom -Gerd.



































































We talked by phone most everyday and on Friday they were to go to Fred’s Fish House.

OH how I wish I could have gone to Fred’s Fish House… right after their dinner they sent me some pictures to help relieve the pain of no Fish Houses/ Fish Camps in our Oregon neighborhood.

~~~~~~~

While Kittee was in Arkansas, I had a couple of days in Pendleton at school bus driver’s summer camp with the MidCo Bus Company. Last Saturday our newly formed Walla² Fly Fishers had a Fly Fishing Fair at a nearby Walla Walla winery, which made for a day of fly casting, tying, wine sipping fun in our neighborhood.


I was able to do a little casting even with busted ribs, but most of the time I sat and tyed flies and walked around taking pictures, eating a great lunch, and sipping vino. The Waterbrook Chardonnay did go well with the grilled salmon that was served for lunch.


Other than these activities I just laid low for the week, licking my wounds, petting Summer, and resting before the next school year rolls around.
OH yeah, last week was wheat harvest (seems a bit late this year) around McKuster Ranch, which move some elk and deer out of the wheat fields across the road, and gave us some additional Sunday morning wildlife viewing from the breakfast table.


Usually Summer will run or trot to me when I call... today she was not into having her picture taken. Here is an 8 second video shot of our Summer.


And that’s the way it is around the ranch --- Dale

The heat wave has broken -or- was that my back?

Since Friday July 3rd, many of our daytime high temperatures have been 100º and more. Day after day, after day. The sunshine has been beautiful and all-in-all it has been a most perfect Arabian desert summer for our horse herd and even for our Summer. The only thing about this kind of July-August weather is we have to move early in the mornings or wait until sunset to have any work/ play time outside.

Last evening the weather broke, and for the first time in over a month we had rain. We had cool, wet rain all night long. It feels great. Since the end of June we could have caught all our rain in a tea cup and it would not have washed the dust off a car windshield.
Last evening after the rain started all the mares gathered in a small group, with tails towards the wind and protecting Summer. The Dynamic Palomino Duo didn’t seem to care about the weather as they turned into mud-puppies, solid chocolate covered colored mud-puppies. Forget their palomino registration, they are just brown head-to-toe horses today☺
Today our mid-day high temperature reads about 71º and it feels great, even though I am sure we will be heading for the 100º mark again soon.

This past week working with Summer has been a joy, as she now comes across pasture when called. She is now blending in with all the mare herd except for Shaiela who continues to show herself as being the royal bitch mare. But we have to consider… Shaiela is pregnant, uses her pinned back ears and snake head moves when communicating with everyone but Rosey.

This past week Summer has really started to show the shed of her foal coat. She is going to be a liver chestnut in the body and probably flaxen mane and tail much like her sire – Rusty. Her lower hocks are remaining light, maybe lightening enough to make me wonder if she might have all around socks. It will be interesting to watch this coloration progress in the next couple of months and so on.

Yep, looks like two black eyes on Summer this week☺

Last Saturday Kittee and I started pretty early, cleaning up and tacking the palomino duo. We left the ranch heading up the Ole Cashe Hollow Road Trail around 8:00 a.m. to beat the heat. Weather forecast was calling for 100+ temperatures for the day. We had a great ride for 2½ miles out, when we stopped and let Derby and Nugget have a break and some fresh wheat head munchies. Kittee and I were sitting in our saddles enjoying the day and our ride up the hill, I was proud of Nugget as he did a great job of keeping up with Derby on the up hill trek. Anyway, there we were, everyone relaxing, horses eating, Kittee and I taking a few sips of water when Nugget raised his head, pointed his ears, turned to the right and bolted… 0 to 60 in 8 seconds. I don’t think I even had a rein in my hands when this happened. So as we raced along the hillside I decided to bale out of the saddle, as the hillside would diminish my fall’s distance to the ground at whatever speed we were then traveling.

This is not a good situation to find yourself in.

Anyway, after everything came to a stop, I realized that I was not gonna ride or walk back to the ranch from here. I told Kittee that I was hurt, I could smell blood, then I could taste blood. Soon thereafter I was spitting blood and Kittee trotted Derby and Nugget back to the ranch to get an ambulance for my ride to the ER. At St. Mary’s we found that I had broken two ribs, punctured a lung, and bruised my sternum rather badly, so for the past week I have been laying low and learning to get up and down, and breath lightly without allot of chest/back pain.
OUCH! that hurt, still hurts, but I feel an urge to be back in the saddle in time for our cool, clear autumn weather. Cowboy-Up. Since last Saturday's crash, I am much more mobile today and find breathing much easier... I feel I am healing very well, but have a bunch of wadded muscles in my back from head-to-tail in need of Dr.Vu's needle therapy. I will finish my pain drug intake tonight and plans are to be feeding, watering horses and driving to Pendleton on Monday and Tuesday mornings for annual driver's training. Kittee is going to be visiting with her dad/ stepmom this next week.

And that’s the way it is around the ranch --- Dale