the second week on the ranch!

what a week!! whew!!

it definatley had the good, the bad and the ugly!

oh were to start!?

i guess the good is always a good place to start! we got to go this week as intermidiate riders which ment we went with the faster group and got to gallop and go really fast! i was scared for my life! but had a blast! Catie took it up rather naturally! she was born to be on a horse!

we also met a bunch of great people and had a lot of fun with them, more fun then last week because the girls last week always spoke in their own language so it was kinda divided but this week everyone mixed together! good fun! we had an amazing camp fire on the wednesday night were everyone had to much to drink adn funny drinking names came to play... haha cate!! this guy shane got cate good! the trick was to lick a coin and stick it to your forhead then hit the back of your head to get it off. the one to get it off in the least hits would win! only he pretended to put the coin on cates head instead of actually doing it! so she was hitting her head with nothing on her for head!! it was so funny! hope that makes sense!! another reallly good thing that happened was we witnessed a baby foal being born! it was amazing! but the mom was having troubles getting the baby out so john started pulling on it to get it out! it was just so cool and not something you would see every day thats for sure!! oh and i got to ride a ram!!!! so fun and wierd!!! cate did it last week!

the bad... i almost died twice and cate nearly lost her foot!!!!! i know! you are intrigued now!!!

first for caties poor poor foot. while we were wrestling the biggest meanest tuffest cow in the lot it stepped on her foot! but she didn't let that stop her from helping us get that cow down!! and we did it in under a minute!!! very impressive i know! but unfortunatly caties foot is still healing from the blow!

as for my near death experiences well those are interesting stories

first was the barbed wire incident! we were riding our horses and mine decided to go dangerously close to the barbed wire fence we were riding beside then we started into a trot and all of a sudden the guy on his horse beside me moved in and was pushing me and my horse closer to the fence! i pulled back on the horses rains just in time to save my life before i got caught on the fence and pulled from my horse into the barbed wire! i could have lost my leg or hand or life!! ! very life threatening i can assure you!!

then the second incident was even worse! if you could barly handle the first i recommend you stop reading here and skip to the next paragraph! for those of you who are brave enough please carry on! we were rounding up the cows and calf's and going to divide them so we could wrestle the calfs. well we were down to only one momma cow and her baby, but she was the angriest cow we had met so far! so we spread out so that we could make her go the way we wanted her to go. i stood between the fence and a tree to make sure the cow wouldn't go that way. and the rest of the people stood to the other side so they wouldn't go that way which left only one way to go and thats the way we wanted them to go. unfortunatly shane(one of the guys on the ranch) wasn't thinking properly and ran at the cow straight on blocking the way we wanted the cow to go so the cow reacted by bending her head (which had horns on it by the way) and aiming at shane, when shane jumped out of the way the cow charged at me! its head still down aiming at my stomach i was momentarly trapped with fear before my feet moved me to the right, unfortunately the cow followed my movement so i moved to the left and again the cow was there!it was inches from me before shane ran up behind her and scared her the opposite way of my!! wow that was so scary! i was scared to be around the big cows after that!

NOTE: some of the above my have been exaggerated a little bit...

if you choose to skip the last part you can start here agian! tho this next part is also very gory!

now for the ugly!! one of the poor cows had cancer in his eyes, he looked so sad because its eyes were gone and there was only blood and the flies were flying around its eyes so sad! so john decide he needed to kill it!!! i know!!! that is so sad!!!!!!! i couldn't watch!!!! they shot him in his straight in the forhead, killed with one shot which was good but it was twitching after it went down and then they dragged the cow behind the truck to a spot where they could cut it up and keep the meat for the dogs i couldn't watch that either!! i couldn't believe what they were doing... the smells and the sounds were almost enough to push me over the edge and puke! catie handled it alittle better then me. she was able to watch and see how things were done "all part of the ranch life" as she says. not my cup of tea!!!

so to sum up we faced both life and death this week! amazing! thursday night a cow left the world and friday morning a baby horse was born! i faced life in death and cate nearly lost a foot! very very trying week!