The lives of the cowboys...

Well, today started out as a fairly ordinary day. Out of bed, kids to school, off to work at the ranch. We were sorting calves out (some to ship out tomorrow, some to keep around for a while, some to sell now) and had gotten not quite halfway through when one of them jumped, kicked out a hind leg, and hit Mom in the jaw, knocking her out, splitting her lip, and loosening some teeth. She came around quickly, but with no memory of what had happened, and spitting blood.

Dad and I got her up on the four-wheeler, and took her in and loaded her in the car, and Dad took her to town to the hospital. Turned out her nose was also broken, and the doctor recommended sending her to an oral surgeon right away. This meant a two-hour ambulance ride, since the car was acting up on the way in. Now I'm waiting to hear that the surgery's done and that they'll be ready to head back tomorrow.

So, in the morning, I'll be heading out to do everything that they normally do in the morning: feed the horses, make sure everything has water, feed the calves, then check for any sick critters in the fields. Ah, the glamorous life of a cowboy...

As the hard drive rotates...

Well, I've resuscitated my older iBook (Blueberry flavor, cute but slow, and much lower resolution these days) and one of these months I'll dissect the late, lamented iceBook and transplant its hard drive (and hopefully its Combo drive) into this one. If I'm feeling really brave, I'll try to reflow the solder on the power connector so it won't randomly go dead on me. If I was also feeling rich, I'd invest in a new battery, but brave is much more likely.

In other computer news, the monitor and keyboard for our family PC (ugh) both went belly-up, so we bought a new LCD monitor (which we use at a lower resolution than its optimum, but nobody but me seems to care), and borrowed a keyboard. The DVD burner we got last year also finally gave up the ghost, so we got another, and we all have some sort of MP3 player and cell phone and yada yada yada. I just bought a LCD screen for the oldest kid's laptop, so now I'll have to figure out how to get that apart. Ugh again. At least we got most of the rassafrassin "service contract" back, which will help pay for the screen it didn't cover. Grr.

It's spring and most of the cows have had their calves, so now we're beginning to brand and move 'em out. Yee ha.

I've been mulling over some thoughts of creating some sort of comic story. More on that if and when.

Two birthdays and an anniversary behind us, four birthdays to go, and a maddeningly wide array of special occasions that call for massive expenditures on nothing of any importance. Family life is existing...

Computer guy without a computer

My laptop, after having four motherboards replaced, finally lost the ability to start up at all. Right after the last motherboard's ninety-day (!) warranty ran out. Sigh. So, now I'm contemplating salvaging what I can from the corpse and selling the rest for parts, probably to a site that sells parts for computers that develop problems like mine. Needless to say, I am not at all happy about this.

Life on the fringes

No, this is not exactly a typical day, but it's typically the way things end up happening. I'm on the cordless phone, with tech support for the phone I'm holding in front of me, trying to make it work the way it's supposed to, while my own phone there on my belt just sits there patiently waiting for the trip home. I'm up on the fence because there's next to no cell phone signal there, so I kept having to enter codes, then wait for the phone to get enough of a signal to tell me that, yes, it still thinks it's roaming, no matter which home area the support line tries to put it into. As of this writing, it still insists that it's roaming, and additionally will neither send nor receive calls to either its current or former numbers. There is the way things should work, and there are all the myriad mysterious ways things do (and/or don't) work. The former, of course, is all the support staff has instructions to cover. The latter is what my life, by and large, is made of.

And so it begins...

Well, it's finally happened: I've started a blog. Or journal. Or some such. Now, we'll see how long I can go between entries. I'm expecting something along the lines of the Harper Lee catalog, myself...