Making good Hands and Horses takes lots of Wet Blankets
09.01.10
Making good Hands and Horses takes lots of WET BLANKETS
By R.P. Smith
The summer crew is all back in school and I am making the adjustment to being my own boss. I remember the feeling from back in my school days that as school started I had not gotten nearly as much done over the summer as what I had hoped to accomplish. This is not a feeling that I had expected to carry on through my working lifetime.
This fall will be quite a bit different in the fact that we are not chasing so many rodeos. If you include the sessions that were taken in at the National High School Finals in Gillette, Wyoming, I have attended over fifty rodeos in the past year. With my college-age sons competing in two different regions this coming year, I will not be nearly as involved in their continuing careers.
While we were in Gillette for the finals we did not see a lot of our son Zane, who was competing, but we spent a good deal of quality time with our two younger children, Hannah and Caleb, ages twelve and ten. Since we do not have a television antenna up at our ranch, the choices of viewing at the motel was a pretty big deal, but with some parental guidance, we were soon down to two that we felt were OK: the History Channel, and Animal Planet, although I did have to point out some possible pitfalls in theology on some of the Animal Planet programs.
One of the shows that was kind of fascinating was titled something like “Is It Me or My Dog” where a Mary Poppins like character comes into your home and resolves conflicts between the inhabitants, some of which are of the animal variety.
Part of the reason that I thought this show was so interesting is that I had found myself in a similar position earlier in the summer.
See the rest of the story in the September 2010 issue of Saddle Up Nebraska. To subscribe call 1-800-888-1380, only $15 a year!
Tags: back to school, Gillette Wyoming, National High School Finals, Rodeo
