Miss Mom

I miss mom. She passed away a week ago today peacefully in my brother's home after a short battle with a recurrence of the thyroid cancer she had 7 years ago. I have been at peace with it all, but it doesn't make me miss her any less. My family was able to spend some quality time with mom for family home evening Monday before she passed away. Rachel and Lydia played a violin flute duet for her and then played several songs from the primary song book. They played for about an hour, although I don't know that mom was very responsive I am sure she was aware of them playing and enjoyed it. She loves music. After talking things over with dad and my brother  we gave her a blessing reassuring her that we will take care of dad and that it was ok for her to move on. It was a very tender experience as I hugged her, told her I love you and had her be aware enough to respond with I love you back. My family was able to say goodbye... it was a very tender moment where the Spirit was very strong. Wednesday morning was not a surprise when I got a text message saying "Come home". Mom's funeral was a very fitting tribute to her, Jayne, Lyndi, Allen and Brett Smith spoke, Rachel and Lydia did their duet, I sang and Julie Weist sang. It was short and sweet and I feel that mom was pleased. Dad is having a hard time which is to be expected. My news that I am moving to North Dakota had poor timing with everything that was going on and didn't help him much. I am having a hard time coming to grips with the move today, I am excited and scared all at the same time. There is so much to do and I will be in North Dakota where I won't be any help to Barb with packing up. I have to be on a plane on the 9th of November so that I can start work on the 12th. Things are really going to get crazy.

"You're so much handsome now dad"

I put a new picture of myself on my blog.... Rachel had me go look at it, then she asked me to scroll down to look at the old one. She started laughing, I was so round in the face in the old one. She is still laughing.... she said "You're so much handsome now dad". I don't know how to take that! She tried to save face by saying "you were handsome before, we didn't notice that you were so... dorky" trying to make me feel better. Sometimes I don't know how to take my teenagers. She is still laughing....

Crazy

Things are really crazy! Shortly after mom and dad's home flooded dad was admitted to the hospital. He had 3 stints put in, and while there passed out and flat lined. It was really scary for a couple of days, we are glad that he is home now. Mom has actually been improving the last couple of days. She still can't walk but she has been feeling well enough to actually admit that she feels better. The farm and cows are busier than ever, I am refereeing soccer, Barb is going to school and DJB is moving to a new location.... Whew! I have not had any spare time lately with all that is going on and actually once again forgot about my blog. I was reading Jacob's blog which is what me remember that it has been a long time since I have written. I really don't have anything profound to say. Our family is really busy right now. Jacob will be home tomorrow for fall break, Rachel is refereeing soccer and teaching violin. Lydia is playing soccer, they are region champs! Jed has been taking over for Jacob with mowing lawns. Josiah is spending more and more time with his friends, he has become a very social person. Barb is getting settled into her classes and figuring out her professors.

What a mess

The last two days I have spent trying to sort through and clean up the mess caused when my parent's home was flooded. The Laub pond dam, dike, levy whatever you call it breached when the water level got high enough that water was flooding the playing field next to SCMS. I have never seen more than 3 or 4 feet of water behind that dam. Anyway, there was a large amount of water that came down upon the homes in Santa Clara, one of them being the home of my parents. We always wondered what we would do with all of the stuff in Mom's basement, however, hauling it out into a giant pile on the back lawn and throwing the majority of it into a dumpster was not one of the scenarios that we thought about. Mom and dad's home is situated in a spot that no one ever thought that it would be affected by a flood. The blessing that comes from it all is that, one, the basement is cleared out and two, dad is considering other options besides staying in the home with mom even though they can no longer take care of each other due to mom's decline in health.
I am grateful for all of the people who came to help. Many I know, some I do not, it doesn't matter, they came and helped. We live in such a wonderful community, watching the thousands of people converging on the area to help everyone dig out is just amazing.
Dealing with the aftermath has been taxing. I really didn't have a whole lot in mom's basement that was "mine", my sister had a lot of stuff, mom and dad had 43-44 years of stuff and there was a lot of stuff that came from my grandma's. Seeing all that was lost or destroyed was difficult. I feel for those who lost so much more. Some of the homes will have to be torn down. Few had flood insurance. Many are devastated. I always thought "It's just stuff". Now I know that the "stuff" has meaning and memories attached to it. Hardest for me was seeing Patti's room that has been mostly untouched since she was killed gutted and stripped clean, finding her stuff in the pile and seeing much of it unsalvagable. Hard is the only word that comes to mind to describe it.

Soccer Ref

I refereed my first 3 soccer games last Saturday. It was a blast! I am glad that they gave me the younger kids on the smaller fields to start, I am still sore today. I had the U9 girls who are playing with a keeper for the first time. I had to help them out with the new keeper position a little, they also were not used to goal or corner kicks and throw ins since they are done differently at the younger ages. Still it was a blast. Rachel was one of my ARs and Justine a girl I coached with Kyle was the other. The biggest problem that I has was that I wanted to coach them instead of be the referee.

Cow Chips: Jumping Cow

Sometime after we had the experience with the calf that liked to jump fences we encountered a cow that I named Jumping Cow. This cow was a little skittish and whenever you got too close to her she would go find a fence to jump over, usually causing a lot of damage and you guessed it, a lot of swearing. Most of the time when you have a cow like this they will settle down and not be as bad after a while. Not this cow, it seems that the more time that passed the worse she got, she got to the point that when you drove up to feed the cows she would start looking for a fence to jump over. Her calf was starting to learn the art of jumping as well so we promptly weaned the calf to get it away from its mother’s influence.

At one point this particular cow jumped one fence too many and got on my brother’s nerves for the last time, he called a local butcher and set up an appointment with the Jumping Cow. When I was a kid I remember more than one cow that we took to visit “Uncle Lewis” or Lewis Meats that local meat packing company that was near our home. Unfortunately Uncle Lewis has gone When the butcher went to shot this particular cow the first shot did not kill her. She almost jumped out of the corral before he could shoot her again. This time the cow did not learn to not jump fences and she ended up as hamburger in our freezers.

The thing that made me decide to include this story is what happened later. I was helping my wife make meat loaf for Sunday dinner and as she looked at me with my hands in the mixture of meat loaf I had a funny little smirk on my face. Of course she wanted to know what the smirk was about so I explained that I was enjoying making a meat loaf out of this miserable pain in the neck cow. I was also thinking about how good she was going to taste and the satisfaction that I was going to feel being able to eat her. It was a very good meat loaf and very satisfying. I made sure to let everyone who ate any part of that cow after that know it was “Jumping Cow”. Right now I wish we had another unruly cow since the meat in my freezer is not as plentiful and defiantly doesn’t taste as good as this particular cow did.

Cow Chips: Fence Jumping

In early January of 2010 we decided to work some calves. By work I mean ear mark, brand, vaccinate and a couple of other things that I will not mention. There were five calves that had been gathered in after we worked the majority of the calves, so on a Saturday dad, Allen and I decided to take care of these five. This turned into a bigger project than we bargained for.

We cut the calves out of the corral that they were in away from the mother cows and loaded them into our stock trailer. We then drove them across the feed lot and unloaded them into the pen where we have the branding chutes. After getting everything ready, I chased the first calf, a big bull calf, into the chute. This particular calf had been giving me some trouble over the past couple of weeks, he seemed to find a way out of the corral every night and I had to put him back into the corral every morning. I finally figured out to lock the gate to the hay stack so that I could at least contain him there instead of having to chase him all over the whole feed yard every morning. During this process I learned something about this particular calf that I should have remembered on this morning. He could jump. I watched him jump over the manger from the hay stack side one morning, something that I previously did not think possible. The reason I should have remembered this is because when I chased this calf into the chute, as he reached the squeeze chute he stuck his head out the top and then jumped over it.

It is not unusual to have one or two get away while working the calves, and normally it is a matter of running them back into the pen and starting over. This time however things were different. This calf after jumping over the chute proceeded to jump over a fence into the horse pen. Again, this was not too big of a deal although it did cause a lot of swearing. We simply opened the gate between the pen we were working in and the horse corral and went to bring the calf back up and start over. This calf is a descendant of Houdini because he proceeded to find a hole in the fence and got into the hay stack. I went and headed him back around the hay stack toward the horse corral and he found another hole to get back into the corral where we wanted him. I went to grab a panel to plug up the first hole that he went out and Allen and dad started driving the calf and the three horses toward the pen where we need the calf to go. The horses were in front and the calf was starting to get a little bit crazy from being chased around so much; he ran up behind the horses, this is a big mistake. Never get behind a horse. Dad’s horse Clyde sensing something behind him kicked out and drilled the calf right between the eyes with a metal horse shoe. There was a resounding “crack” that sounded like a .22 caliber gun going off and the calf dropped in its tracks.

Dad, Allen and I had never seen anything like it, at first we thought that the calf had been killed. Dad and Allen proceeded to push on the calf’s ribs and abdomen to try and get it to breathe again. It took several minutes before the calf stopped twitching all over and started to breath. It was several more minutes before it tried to stand up, which it could not do at first. Finally we got it to its feet and got it to take a couple of shaky steps. We then proceeded to walk it up to the gate and put it back into the pen. We decided to let it stay there while we worked the other calves.

We proceeded to work the other four calves while the one that got kicked got its senses back. The next one went like it was supposed to. The one after that got through the squeeze chute and, you guessed it, jumped over a gate and got out. The one that we just worked followed the jumper over the gate. In late November we worked twenty-five or thirty calves without one jumping out, on this day three out of the five we were working jumped out. That is the way it goes sometimes. After working the two calves that did not jump the fence we decided to try and work the one that got kicked. The calf that got kicked had a cut and lump on its head and blood running out of both nostrils. As I looked at the calf I had a thought occur to me. If this calf had stayed where it was supposed to have been it would not be in the condition that it was in at this time. It is very easy to get into a bad situation, there are a lot of situations that do not seem bad at first, but can turn bad very quickly. For this calf, the situation turned bad in an instant.

We to can find ourselves in a situation that turns bad quickly. Many times we will get involved in something that seems innocent enough only to find ourselves some place we do not want to be. The lesson to learn is when to stop, take a look around and change course if need be. The calf did not change course, it did not know what would happen if it ran up behind a horse. It almost paid for the mistake with its life. The interesting thing is, he never jumped another fence after that. When a mistake is made the most important thing to do is, like the calf, learn from the mistake and never do it again.

7.16.13

I was thinking about this incident last week before I went to girls camp. I knew that I would have to talk to the girls after their testimony meeting and was thinking of stories that I could used to illustrate a point. This story came to mind; I was thinking about how the fences that this calf was jumping were placed there as a protection and not for the purpose of being a restriction. Many times I hear young people complain about the commandments restricting what they "can do". Many look at the commandments of God the way that a cow looks at a fence. As an obstacle keeping them from where they want to be. Fences are placed not only for the purpose of protecting areas from the cattle, but more importantly, for protecting the cattle. The fences in our feed lot protect the cattle from the busy road that runs by, all of the cars and trucks that are a danger to stray cattle. They protect them from hay stacks, that if they get into can cause them harm, a cow can and will eat to a point where they bloat, a condition that will kill them. The fences separate the cows from the horses, and sometimes from each other. A horse can cause sever injury and possibly death with a blow from a steel shod hove. Cows, and especially bulls can injure each other fighting over food water and territory (Bulls fight for mating rights) These fences are protection to the cattle and if respected will keep them safe from outside danger. The commandments are the same for us. If we heed the commandments we will be kept safe from the adversary, who has no power over us if we but simply obey the commandments. Oh how I would like to be able to make everyone understand this principle of the gospel. However, like Nephi, I sin in my wish. Forcing anyone to do or understand anything is Satan's plan. I hope to be able to use this story sometime to possibly help someone understand that the commandments are a protection and not a restriction. 

I read a talk by President Henry B. Eyring last night where he talks about his impression that these experiences are given to us by the Lord and that he expects us to learn from them, write them down, and share them. I hope that by writing about this and other experiences that I have had and will have that my posterity and others will be blessed.