No More Drama

Sorry for the sad lack of posts lately but to be quite honest, there hasn't been a whole lot to post about. When there is a deficiency of drama in one's life, it gets hard to come up with the entertaining and juicy bits o' blog fodder.

Hubby and I are planning a trip to the city this weekend. We're gonna eat out at a nice restaurant and go see a movie. Maybe "Wild Hogs" - we've heard from folks who saw the sneakview last weekend that it is really good with plenty of laughs.

The rodeo drill team thing is going good. I'm really enjoying being part of a group of people who love their horses and riding as much as I do. We know that people don't come to the rodeos to see us but once we get out there and do our thing, they see how entertaining it can be. Rodeo contestants might think we are "sissies" for just riding around in patterns carrying flags but the crowd enjoys it and that is really all that matters seeing as how they are the ones who paid for tickets.

The Bear is still ornery as ever. The weather has been really mild and pretty down here for the past couple of weeks with only a chilly day or two here and there. So we have been spending as much daylight allows outside playing in the dirt and chasing the dog. Good times.

That's about all that is going on around here.

By the way, has anyone really seen Castro lately? Because I'm thinking somebody is just posing his corpse for photo ops. But that's just me.

An Inspirational Gift

A friend passed this along to me and I feel compelled to share it with whomever happens onto my blog, whether intentional or not.

I've never been a big fan of "religious art" meaning those depictions of Christ and the Virgin Mother.

But this artist's creations are incredible.

This is Hilarious!

I apologize if you have already seen this one in your Inbox but I had to post it because the punch line sounds EXACTLY like something my Dad would say!

A Montana cowboy was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture when suddenly a brand new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him.

The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the cowboy, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?"

The cowboy looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, "Sure, Why not?"

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he receives an e-mail on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored.

He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with e-mail on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response. Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP Laser Jet printer and finally turns to the cowboy and says, "You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves."

"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves," says the cowboy. He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then the cowboy says to the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?"

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?"

"You're a Congressman for the U.S. Government," says the cowboy.

"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie. "But how did you guess that?"

"No guessing required," answered the cowboy. "You showed up here even though nobody called you. You want to get paid for an answer I already knew to a question I never asked. You tried to show me how much smarter you are than me when you don't know a thing about cows . . . this is a herd of sheep. Now give me back my dog."

Horse Dancing 101

Here's a grid of some of our patterns. This is just page 1 of 4. These twelve patterns represent about 2 to 3 minutes of real-time action. We want our opening ceremonies routine to last at least 10 minutes.

Colonel hasn't seen the entire 4 pages of grid yet. I'm hoping he's feeling frisky and up to anything we try. But like every other old man I know, I'm expecting some b****ing and moaning from him (because his preferred activity includes staying at the house and eating).

Back in the Saddle

I know I told y'all about the Rodeo Drill Team week before last but Canada sent us a freezing cold winter front that Friday afternoon so we didn't get to practice last weekend like I was anticipating.

But we did get out to the arena yesterday afternoon and today to practice our patterns. We did it all at a walk-trot because we are going to have to have it down pat once we put music to it because that will up the tempo considerably. Add that to the fact that some of the horses don't feel like "dancing" at times and we have our work cut out for us.

I am really excited about taking this project on. The entire team is made up of some really fantastic people and spending the last two afternoons with them was a lot of fun and then some.

I'm going to scan in a couple of our patterns so you can see what I'm talking about.