WEIGH DAY

Living on a ranch is like herding cats EVERY DAY OF YOUR LIFE! There’s constant movement. Something is always broken. And the cows need tending to several times a day. And today, they needed to be weighed. You think getting weights would be easy. It is for us. We simply step on a scale, wait for the magic number to appear, curse at the number and step off muttering “damn scale is still broken.”. Well with cows, everything is about averages. First, you have to round them up. Darrin makes the funniest noises when he does this. Kind of like a “ssshhhh” you might say to the kids in a movie theater, only with a quick “sssstttt” at the end. Once they are corraled, you hope and pray they don’t get mad at having their face shoved up the ass of another and start trying to break the fences down. Hey, these fences have been here for a hundred years! I’m never convinced they’re going to stand up to 2,000 pounds of angry cows pushing against them. And then you separate about 10 cows onto a huge scale where they are supposed to stand quietly and not move. Well since that’s never going to happen, Darrin waits for an average weight and jots it down. He weighs the cattle because he sold them at a certain weight. Well that might have been a week ago. And since cows eat constantly, they’re constantly putting on weight. So on shipping day, Darrin will either charge the buyer more money for the added weight the cows have gained or he’ll not ship as many cows. Plus, trucks have a weight limit and can only haul so many cows before they are overweight. So he has to be able to tell the buyer how many trucks to bring to the ranch. In this industry, the weather and weights make or break you. But you know what makes or breaks me? Knowing there’s something cool going on at the ranch that I can take pictures of to show all of you AND having my Sorrels in the car with me so I can take those pictures and not ruin my heels! I swear my life is schizophrenic. On this one single day, I’m stomping around cow shit, breathing in tiny manure particles and 2 hours later, I’m interviewing Ann Romney. Oh if she only knew where I had just been!