Thursday, September 16, 2010

Truck drivers, lamb wrestlin’, and catchin’ quail

Sounds like a grand time huh? …actually I know what youre thinkin…”wait! You never finished your hospital adventure! …and capitalization?! When did this happen in this blog?!” …calm down. My internet is still down so I type it up on word and just transfer it to the blog…and word document automatically capitalizes for me (boo!) and frankly dont feel like bothering to change it lol. And as for the hospital gig? Ill finish it and itll be up by the end of the week. Does that work? Ah well…cant please em all.

So the trucker deal….i have a feeling that truckers get bored while driving. That’s why they created satellite radio…so truckers don’t fall asleep and kill people on the road (ok not really but go with it). Truckers have to find ways to stay amused and alert while driving the many hours they put into transport. …this is why they try to scare the crap out of college kids that cross the freeway bridge from the apartments to campus. Here I am minding my own business when right as a tractor trailer goes barreling under the bridge im walking across…usually half asleep…he decides it would be great fun to honk the horn. …listen here you big rig drivers…while I laugh about it now…are you really that bored?! I must say you time it perfectly. Maybe I should actually go look and see if there is a sign that says honk at college students crossing the bridge…or look up in trucker manuals if that’s a rule that must be done or see if there is contest to see how high they can get us to jump…

After horsemanship (which went exceptionally well since the teacher wants me to continue to ride the horse with the most attitude because in the hour that I was in the saddle, I settled her down and had her acting better than ever) I went over to the cross hollow event center near the farm to help out with the stock show going on…now let me pause here to announce that I have Never been to a stock show. …this comes as a surprise to many people out here. They figure a girl from Tennessee that’s an agriculture major-animal science degree would have been to tons of stock shows. Hate to disappoint but Thursdays stock show here in cedar city was my first stock show EVER. I have no clue how the scoring goes. Whats the difference between market lambs and regular ewes? Seriously? Come on. So im told to go grab the spotted ewe…uh ok. So I nab her like I saw the 7 year old kids doing earlier and put the halter on her and try to get her to come out of the pen….its a LOT harder than I thought! Anyways I got the hang of it…learned how the scoring system works for stock shows…I actually learned a lot that afternoon.

Saturday rolls around and woody, blake, and I head up to Parowan to work on some things…we pull up and there were some quail chicks running around outside their pen. Lucky, the neighbors dog, became quite the asset that day…lets just say that border collie caught on fast and helped us find all the little buggers. So here I am with a net in one hand and keepin an eye on the dog because when he caught a chick he had a habit of walking away with it… the thing was the chick hid in the tall grass…which was tall because there was an irrigation pipe in the middle of the grass…so im trompin around with the dog up and down the grass to make sure there were no more out there…lucky froze and then pounced…I snatched the slobbery chick from his mouth and then as im walkin back to the pen another chick runs out in front of me…so a chick in one hand and a net in another I sweep and miss…I go for it again and the chick darted to the side and again I missed…the next time I practically dive bomb the stupid thing and make it…all while managing to muddy myself and land in the swamp I was in…fantastic! So now I get the great task of putting two chicks in the pen at the same time…all in all 12 chicks were found (thankfully that was all that had been in the pen in the first place). 11 were found alive (no the dog didn’t kill any). Out of the 11 found, the dog found and caught 9 on his own and only injured two of them and for a non-bird dog that seems impressive to me. Anyways…it was an interesting day as far a ranch work goes…but a nice respite from town life and classes and roomies