Light at the end of the tunnel

My little boy will turn one in about a week. Today in the mail was a bill from the hospital where he was born. Insurance paid (thankfully) a large portion of the bills from his birth and a hospital stay when he was about three weeks old. Since we’re not made of money I made payment arrangements to pay it out. I’m getting closer to having them all paid down, but it’s kind of hard to believe that its taken so long.

I joke with Spence when ever he rough houses with Shaun, “Don’t break him, he’s not paid for yet!” Some day he will be paid for..

Shaun and Spence at the wedding this past weekend.

Wordless Wednesday

First iris of the season.

Red dirt

No, I’m not talking about the kind of red dirt under your feet, but instead a kind of music. Some even call it Texas Country. I heard an interview on the radio this morning and the DJ said they were one of the few stations in the state of Kansas who play Texas Country. It made my heart sing a little.

I was introduced to Red Dirt music more than 10 years ago. I was attending K-State at the time, and my sister was at Oklahoma State. She had a CD of Jason Boland and the Stragglers, and one weekend when we were together, she put it in my pickup’s CD player. I was hooked, and she barely got her CD back.

In the spring of 2000, I headed to enroll in Oklahoma State University for the following year and visit my sister who was already living in Stillwater. We had tickets to attend the annual Tumbleweed Testicle Festival as well. The event now features a number of red dirt artists and is still held every April at the Tumbleweed Dance Hall. www.calffry.com. It’s coming up this weekend, April 26, 27 and 28.

While living in Stillwater, we had the opportunity to see a number of bands as they were starting out, and it sure is good to hear some of them on the radio now, mixed in amongst the crappy mainstream “country.”

My favorites still remain the same, Jason Boland and the Stragglers, Cross Canadian Ragweed (now defunct, but Cody Canada and the Departed are touring), (the original) Great Divide, Gary Allan and now I’ve added: Randy Rogers Band, Eli Young Band, Casey Donahew, Stoney Larue and many more.

The local station, 96.3 the Marshall, has a couple of hours on Fridays dedicated to Red Dirt. Sure makes me happy to hear “Pearl Snaps” or another Red Dirt song that takes me back to Stillwater, Okla., and College Days.

Everyone’s a photographer

I take photos for work and for fun. I had a couple photography classes in high school and later in college. Back then it was all film cameras and it forced you to know what apetures, f-stops and shutter speed all meant. My first introduction to digital photography was one class I took in junior college where we used one of the first digital cameras out by Kodak. It held an amazing 8 photos on the memory card. Fast forward nearly 15 years, and it seems as though everyone has a phone with a camera on it or a point and shoot digital camera for that matter.

I’m a sucker for a good photo, and try pretty hard to get the best shot with the light available and the camera in my hands. I will admit, a lot of the time I let the camera do the work for me, and leave it set on automatic mode. My new camera is allowing me to branch out and try all the new settings on it, even working from manual mode.

The thing that gets me is the “photographers” that take a mediocre photo and turn it into something neat all with a couple clicks in Photoshop. Maybe I’m jealous because I don’t have Photoshop, but it should be an amazing photo before you have to (or want to) edit it on the computer. To me there are three edited versions of a photo: color, black and white, and sepia. On my Mac I have iPhoto and it allows me to edit photos and change the colors and tones pretty quickly. My favorite is the antique tone, but at times I really just care for the color version straight-out-of-the-camera. I have been testing out Picasa a free download from Google since I’m too cheap for Photoshop.

So which do you like best?

Wordless Wednesday

The three mares.

The mares come in for their evening meal.

Should have been a storm chaser

I’m blaming it on the fact I have a smartphone with internet access and I can check the National Weather Service forecast at any hour of the day or night. I can see what the weather is currently doing or what they are predicting for a week out. I love watching the weather, especially the storms that develop around my home. I have pretty much an unobstructed 360 degree view of the environment.

Forecasters have been saying for the last week there might be a significant weather event – thunderstorms and tornadoes for today, except they were only saying 20% chance of such storms in western Kansas. However, when I stepped foot outside to get things around to go to the farm sale, I had that uneasy feeling about the weather. It was dark to the west and clouds kept rolling past us to the north. The cattle across the west fence were walking the fenceline and when I left to go to the sale they were all bunched up.

At the sale we got rained on twice, so we packed it up and went home. As soon as I got Shaun, the dogs and myself into the house it started raining and then pouring. Pretty soon round one passed by. The satellite kept going out since its on the south side of the house and the storms were coming from the southwest. Then round two came. More rain and a few chunks of hail. The TV finally came back and they were saying tornado on the ground near Ashland. Not cool. My husband was down near there. Then they were saying reports of a tornado 3 miles from the Clark County Lake. Pretty close to the Scott Family Farm. Then forecasters were saying Bucklin. Ugh. Between the intermittent satellite TV, the radar on the computer and watching the windows in the house, I about gave myself an ulcer.

Sounded like the first storm that went to the southeast of my place, produced a tornado near Wright, another reported near Spearville. Another storm went past us over to Burdett and Hanston. From the sounds of it Burdett got more than one storm out of it. The one near the farm produced a tornado near Bucklin and later Mullinville.

The clouds have gone and now the sun is shining. I wonder if the heat will bake up some more watching later this afternoon? Here’s a few pics of the backsides of the storms.

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Farm auctions

I love me some Friday night junk auctions and traipsing around the flea market on a Saturday morning. I get a kick out of finding something old to become new-to-me. However, farm auctions don’t give me the same feeling of satisfaction. Sure, they are auctions, and the highest bidder wins, but that’s the only person who wins (in my mind).

A few years ago my dad quit farming and sold out. That cold January day was one of the hardest in my short time on Earth. I took the day off work to stand out in the cold and support my family, only to watch the stuff he had worked so hard for be sold for dirt cheap. I haven’t been to another farm auction since.

This Saturday my Godparents are having a farm auction of their own. They’ve retired and built a new house in Manhattan to be near their children and grandchildren. I’m not sure if I want to go, but Mom suggested I go with her. I have always seen the auctions as a bad thing. They signal the end of an era, the end of a farm, the end of a way of life.

Maybe that’s not the right way to feel about them. They could very well be a place for a young farmer to get his feet wet in the agriculture business. They could let someone get a piece of equipment for a decent price and not suffer the mark-up a dealer would stick to them. They are a part of life.

Sunset after a rain at the ranch in 2006.

First Easter

My favorite photo I took on Easter Sunday.

Parents and children

I ran across an article about saving the family farm and ranch for future generations in an agricultural publication located on the west coast, the Capital Press, through Twitter a couple of months ago. A few of the quotes stuck in my head from the story and I wrote them down because I have become rather forgetful. The sticky note I scribbled them on found its way to the top of the pile this morning and my brain started moving at warp speed.

The quotes:

“Parents don’t owe their children anything, but parents who provide for their children give a real blessing.”

“Remember, ranches can be replaced, families cannot.”

These two quotes struck home with me at the time because of my own family’s history and the recent loss of my father-in-law. It’s hard for me to imagine not having the place where my parents currently live. It was hard enough when we lost my grandparents in 1989 and the family turmoil that came after the funeral and the splitting up of possessions and land. Granted I was only 10 years old at the time, but I had two eyes and ears and could see what my parents were going through. Now as an adult I see my husband dealing with his own family and what his dad left behind on the farm.

Before we had children, Spencer always talked about having something our kids could have when they were old enough. He wanted something tangible, as in land. I agree, but I also want our children to get an education and be able to choose to come back to the farm and enjoy it. I don’t want them to get burned out working like a dog helping Spencer and I make a place where they can some day take over. Not that hard work won’t be in their future, because it will. Kids need to know the value of a hard days work.

I owe my parents a lot – both monetary and emotionally. They were the best parents a girl could ask for. We didn’t have much, but what we sure as heck appreciated. Mom and dad worked hard trying to make a living farming and taught us a lot of things growing up and I still learn from them even now as an adult.

I admit I was spoiled. I always had a pickup to drive, a horse to ride and an entry fee for the barrel race or rodeo. In college I never had a job, and had parents who continued to push me to excel academically. And I did.

Now that Shaun is nearly a year old, the future is creeping slowly up on us. I think to myself, what are we going to be able to give him when he turns 18? What about when he goes off to college? Spencer claims his kid will work and not have it “easy” like I did. Picking my battles, I refrained from saying, “Taking 18 hours a semester at a university was WORK.”

I thank Mom and Dad for all you did for me growing up and even though there’s no longer any “farm” to pass along to us girls, you still gave way me more than any tangible item could have.

The Orebaugh family Christmas 2011.

My kind of neighbors

Our closest neighbors are more than a mile away. From our house you can’t even see theirs because of the lay of the land. Recently in the pasture to the west, we got some new neighbors. They are the best kind.