When you have mechanical equipment, it frequently needs repairs. Tire repairs one of constant needs. Russell has learned to plug a tire pretty good. Necessity is the mother of learning how to fix stuff.

My lifelong pal Ricky Frank came down for a visit. We had to take him for a ride with Sky and Sapphire, of course.

What a postcard, eh? Ricky was nice enough to drive one of my parents’ vehicles down here for them. Oh, yeah, did I mention that my parents sold their house in Utah and moved down to the Ranch? Well, now you know :-)

It’s the Fall and High School football is what’s going on in Texas. Here in Milford, we play 6-man football which is really fun to watch. Ryan is #10.

Diane cheering up in the stands.

When a player goes down, or there’s a timeout on the field, then you’re supposed to “take a knee”. I never quite understood that, but that’s what is considered proper behavior.

One of our favorite things to do is go out and shoot some pigeons. Clay pigeons that is. Here’s a shot of Ryan and Eric with Joey, their cousin from Southern California doing their best to knock down the skeet.

Special note of achievement: Eric, this summer at Boy Scout camp at Constantine, set the camp record for most skeet shot down while working on his shotgun merit badge. I think he got 38 out of 50. How about that?

Lately I’ve been seeing wild pigs, deer and armadillo just about every morning as I go walking. Not sure why so much lately, but here’s an armadillo for your viewing pleasure. It crossed the road in front of me not more than 10 feet away. The dogs barked at it and got it to run and then they chased it and even tried biting the back of it, which of course got them nowhere. The armadillo took a few swipes back at them and scurried into the brush and back into its hole.

Can you see what I see in this picture. That’s right, that is an elk. What a surprise to see an elk on our place, but sure enough that’s what this is. It must have escaped from a nearby exotic game ranch.

Here’s a tighter shot so you can see that for sure this is an elk.

We’ve been dreaming of having our own draft horses for many years. We’d been looking on and off at the Internet horse sale sites and thinking about it. Well we finally got serious and actually contacted some people who were advertising a team for sale. Had we ever driven draft horses before? Did we know how to rig them up and all of that? No, but it looked like fun and it seemed like it might be useful for our place.

One Saturday last month, we set an appointment up to go to Winona, TX which is northeast of Tyler. Sure is nice out there. We went to see Sky and Sapphire, two white draft horses of the Shire breed. There are a number of different draft horse breeds. Probably the most famous are the Clydesdales because a certain beer company uses them in their advertisements. Shires look a lot like Clydesdales. Also Belgians and Percherons are other well-known draft breeds. These horses can be quite large as you can see.

Stan and Lyn Jenkins owned Sky and Sapphire and were wonderful hosts on our visit. We brought the whole family plus a few visiting cousins and invaded their place. They couldn’t have been nicer. They were so patient with us, explaining and teaching us how to handle draft horses.

They took us all for a ride down the country road where they live. They even let us take the lines and do some driving.

Here’s Diane getting some hands on training. It’s a bit intimidating trying to steer these animals. Stan was a very patient and capable instructor. These horses are so well-trained. Here we are – Novices – taking these horses out on a fairly busy road. Traffic is continually passing by. The horses just pay no mind and continue on.

Well, we were thrilled and would like to have bought them on the spot. But, we wanted to be careful and give it some thought first. So, two weeks later we decided to go ahead and buy them. We went back to Winona, took some more driving lessons, learned how to harness them and hook them up to a wagonette (we videotaped all of that so we could refer to it later). Then, wouldn’t you know it, we were draft horse owners. Stan and Lyn definitely had mixed emotions to see this team leave their farm. But they were glad to see them go to people who obviously loved them and would take good care of them.

You should have seen the rig we had to put together to haul the team back to our place. As a matter of fact, here’s a picture:

That’s about a 25 ft Dodge Dually truck followed by a 30 ft long, extra tall and wide horse trailer, followed by a 16 foot long flat bed trailer to hold the wagonette. Boy did we get some looks as we took the drive back to our place. Needless to say, we were very glad to get home with no incident.

We got them home and out to pasture with a few other horses. We happen to have an Arabian mare (white) who is a nice gentle horse that we keep in one of our pastures with another Quarterhorse mare (sorrel). They all made friends real quick. These are pretty much regular sized horses. This picture contrasts Sky and Sapphire with those two other horses and you get an idea of how large these drafts are. Quite the sight to behold.

This looks like an ordinary landscape picture and it is except for one thing. If you look close you can see a rather large size buck deer. I say large for our area. I see deer on our place almost every day, but a buck this size is rare for me to see. And in fact he was pretty much by himself, because 10 minutes before I took this picture, the rest of his herd had already taken off. He seemed to jump out of these trees all of the sudden, and seemed a bit surprised to see me between him and the rest of his friends. In this next picture I’ve zoomed in a bit so you can see it better.

There he is. I’m not sure how many “points” he is, probably someone out there could say.

Here’s another funny one I just had to include here even though it’s actually from last summer. Peter has this really cool tricycle with a wagon trailer. And Noah was more than happy to climb in the back and let Peter tow him all over the place. Noah could be a minimalist dresser at times.

This actually happened a few years ago — pre-blog. But I saw the picture and wanted to show it. We had some pretty strong (not tornado) winds come through one day and they were strong enough to grab the trampoline and whip it right over the corner of the house and land it in this tree. If you look closely you can see one of the branches sticking right through the trampoline. Pretty crazy. We survived just fine, of course but the trampoline was a total loss.