Dee's reply

I was pleasantly surprised this morning by a reply to my email to Ms Dee Jepsen. I won't bore everyone with the entire email, but will summarize by saying she seems to be sympathetic to my cause. She stated that she was only the messenger, not the enforcer. Also, she is not with the dept. of no labor, but is a professor at OSU, that teaches farm safety and was merely commenting on the new rules. I started to invite her to my school, there have been lots of kids through it and they all got quite an education.

Now on to important things:

Our first two calves out of our good cows. If prices hold, I'll be able to retire on these two.
We calve on this set between now and Christmas, work them in April, then ween in June. Most years we turn them out on grass until they weigh around 800 pounds, then send them to the feed yard.

A little knife I finished yesterday. 2.75" cutting edge, 7.25" overall length. The wood is black locust that I bought from Mike928, a follower of this blog. Good stuff Mike, it left for a good home this morning.

Kyle's deer for 2011.  He hunts about 15 minutes every year and gets something like this. I guess it helps that he cowboys all day every day on the ranch and knows where every thing hangs out, and what time they get there.

Around the ranch

It's been a hard luck week in the shop. Snapped the handle tang off a stainless steel damascus blade trying to drill pin holes in the handle. Drill bit binded just right and ruined what should have been a a pretty expensive knife. I quenched a kitchen knife this morning in oil, put it in the tempering oven, ran off and had a piece of pie with the neighbor, came back in 2 hours and the blade had a slight bow in it. Not enough to really hurt any thing but I wouldn't feel right about selling it. I guess Kim will get another for her kitchen.
Been getting ready for the knife show, here are 14, I have 13 more on the way from the sheath maker. When it is all together, I will get some good pictures to post.

These are some I took while riding and looking the other morning.

Ranch pictures

We got out and looked around this afternoon. these are a few pictures we took on the Admiral place.

A shot from the hill, looking north east. My shop is to the left in the picture.

Angel, my bulldog, cooling off.

Kim's longhorn cow. The purpose of her longhorn herd is to let them die of old age, get their heads, and mosaic them. They do turn out pretty. She allows me to put an angus bull with her cows and keep the calves.

I hope this bunch of cows survive the drought. It's gonna be a long winter for them, with no more feed than we have, but they will probably run out of water before we run out of feed so it won't matter. We are luckier than a lot of cattlemen in the area. There are a lot that are desperate to sell or ship now, and the sale barns and slaughter plants are completely full of east Texas cattle. Fire ran most of them out of grass, and it is causing lots of big runs at the sales. Thing can always get worse, and they will.