It’s been far to long since I have posted an entry, and I blame LIFE!. It certainly is not any reflection on ….me.. ahem.
So, here is a brief summary of some of our recent “ranch” life. My second son, Adam got married, my youngest child Cierra did a foreign exchange to Germany, forest fires swept through the Klamath forest all last Summer and left us untouched and unharmed, and I survived a pretty remarkable horse wreck on a green-broke horse. People tell us regularly that we need to write books about our life experiences here on the ranch, but I am afraid to scare the general public away with the magnitude of the events that are “normal” for us in this setting. So, I tone it down a bit with comments like: “That green-broke horse started frog-hoppin so I bailed-off to the side as she reared-up. Yep, it was a good ride”
This last week, my wife Heidi got too close to my chain saw as she tried to “help” with the work….she of course was injured, and is doing fine by the way, but here is a comment from our good friend Jeanne: “Geez, Doug! It was bad enough when you tried to take off your own leg, but now you are going after Heidi’s extremeties! Ranch life was never so exciting! Sort of My Friend Flicka unites with Jason Krueger. Maybe it’s best the February get together was postponed. Bob and I need time to prepare armor and brush up on our defensive skills. Perhaps we should bring our own chainsaws, just in case. What do you think??”
With reactions like that from best friends, you can well imagine how those that are outside our close circle of family and friends might react to a phone call and short tale about my pushing my femur through the back of my pelvis under a 1200 pound horse!….So, we simply say “I had a good ride.”
Now that I have sufficiently scared ALL of you…please be aware that all of our family is doing great, that we still love each other, that we would not live anywhere else in the world, that we feel sorry for the rest of humanity living in climate controlled bubbles and that none of our guests ever ride a green-broke horse or run the 36″ bar chain saw. The fires are all out, the river is not flooding, the roads are still in place, and bigfoot has not been on the ranch, recently ………… I hope all of you can join us as we share a good ride and taste some of the Western frontier in 2009.