Here Come Da Judge

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There are a lot of things that claim to be the ultimate American experience. Apple pie. Baseball. Hot dogs. Tackle football. But for my money, nothing strikes a deeper chord in my nostalgic little hometown heart than the Homecoming parade.

For those of you from other countries, Homecoming is a fall event staged by high schools and colleges, generally linked to football. The original intent was to provide a designated home football game and a few surrounding activities to which alumni of the school could come and mingle with other alumni. Now it's mostly a week long frenzy of school spirit activities. The level of frenzy varies depending on the attitude of the school administration toward sports and the level of fanaticism amongst the followers of the school and team in question. But for most small towns, it includes a parade, in which each of the four high school grade levels enter a float of their own construction.

My class stunk at floats. We are the only class in memory that DIDN'T win as seniors. As juniors, we had a little mishap with the extension hose on the tailpipe and gassed our driver. We are probably the reason the floats are now built on trailers instead of directly over the chassis of the vehicle. That was, of course, the best float we ever constructed, but we were disqualified because it failed to finish the parade. A little harsh, we thought, considering the driver didn't even bash in any parked cars when he passed out.

Given all that, it makes perfect sense that I was asked to judge this year's floats.

It turned out to be a relatively painless and not particularly difficult task. And yes, I voted for the seniors. Hey, they had Axel Rose singing Welcome to the Jungle, monkeys in hammocks, and boa constrictors made out of ventilation hoses. Hard to beat.

 Kudos to the sophomores, though, for their sandy beach, cityscape, and an killer sound system blasting Paradise City. (No, the theme wasn't Guns and Roses, just seemed like it).

The freshman did a decent job with Surfin' USA. That blue thing on the front is a wave. There's a wolf (our mascot) on a surf board on top of it. 

Mostly, though, kudos to the weatherman. I don't recall a single year in high school when the candidates for Homecoming Queen and the cheerleaders didn't have to wear thermal underwear under their dresses. Or down-filled jackets over them. 

*I had to do my judging and get back to work, so all pictures are pre-parade. And unlike the old days when we started our float construction early in the week, this year's classes started at 8:45 am this morning and had only until noon to finish. Not bad for three and half hours' work.  

Back Ups

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Some of you who've been hanging around this blog for a while have probably noticed that I'm not writing as much as I used to. This is at least in part due to a shift from four to five days a week at my day job starting last spring. Part due to trying to finish a book that refuses to end. And part because of a phenomenon known by writers as 'apple picking'.

See, when you first start writing a blog, you have a lifetime of material to work with. It's easy pickins, like plucking the apples off the lowest branches of the tree. The longer you blog, the more you have to stretch and work for stuff to write about, even when you live on a ranch where the humans and animals sometimes seem to live to provide fodder for humorous stories. At the point where blogging crosses over from fun to work, if you're me you have to start wondering why you're putting quite so much time into something that doesn't pay particularly well. Or, um, at all.

But I also appreciate all of you who do stop by regularly and love to hear from you in the comments, and since I don't expect everyone has read everything I've ever posted, I've decided to do a "Back Up" post once a week, in which I go back to this time last year and see what was happening and share my favorite post from that week.

So here we go. Approximately one year ago, plus a couple of weeks. Imagine my surprise to learn that we were all in a state of Spontaneous Confusion.

Also this week last year:

This year? That field is still green, thanks to late snow storms that delayed planting and a cold, wet summer.

Here's hoping the decent weather will hang on for at least another month, or we're going to have a whole lot of barley hay.

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Rammin' Speed

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Sometimes, it just has to be done.

Talking Dirty

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Heads Up:  You probably have a better internet connection than me. Almost everyone does. Therefore, the videos may not take half a lifetime to load for you. My apologies in advance if they do. 

Know how you can tell what event a cowgirl competes in? Ask her how the rodeo went. If the first words out of her mouth are, "Well, the ground was...", she's a barrel racer.

Ground as in the arena surface. Otherwise known as dirt (usually, but more on that later.) Dirt is very important to barrelracers, as they are competing in a horse race that requires three very tight turns executed at a very high speed. You want it soft enough that the horse's hooves can get a good grip on it, but not so soft that they get bogged down. Damp enough to pack well and keep the dust out of your face, but not muddy and slick. (Don't even get me started on the idiot in the water truck who stops to chat on his cell phone, creating a small man-made lake around the third barrel.)

The best analogy I can give to those who are not rodeo people is downhill skiing. The Olympics in British Columbia were a testimonial to how course conditions can take you out of competition before you even leave the start house. Sunshine softens the surface of the snow, making it slower. Shadows and cold weather make ice, which is faster, but also harder to turn on. And rain or snow on the course before you make your run is a disaster. The farther down you are in the start order, the more chewed up the course gets and the harder it is to ski well.

So it is in the barrel racing. Run order is huge. Barrel racers call it being 'on the top of the ground' or 'on the bottom of the ground'. On top means you're running at the beginning, before the horses have dug trenches around the barrels. On the bottom means you're chugging through everybody else's ruts.

Like skiers, different horses prefer different ground conditions. Big, strong horses can power through deep, sandy ground, while smaller, quicker horses usually handle hard pack better. Which means no matter how hard a rodeo committee tries to make their ground as wonderful as possible, someone will nearly always be unhappy. Which is one of the reasons it can be difficult to find suckers...I mean volunteers to serve on rodeo committees.

And then there's the weather. Rodeos tend to last more than one day. In the case of the Calgary Stampede, more like ten days. Stinks to be up on the day of the rainstorm:



Even indoors you have to deal with the top and bottom of the ground, although many rodeos do their level best to keep it as even as possible. In the video below, notice the men with rakes who rush out behind each cowgirl to fill in her tracks:



And then, of course, there's Pendleton, which is like nowhere else because there's, you know, GRASS. And the pattern is HUGE, because the barrels have to be set clear out on the dirt track where it's safe to make those tight turns. The extra distance, the unfamiliar surface and running square into the blank wall of the bucking chutes on the second barrel can mess with even the best horse's mind. Witness the horse that ducks off before the second and third barrels, which has qualified for the Montana Circuit Finals for the last three years running and is generally dead solid:



Barrelracers are quite, um, passionate when it comes to ground conditions. To the point that more than one rodeo committee member has considered the wisdom of an unlisted number. And a bodyguard. Because hell hath no fury like a barrelracer on a rampage. Worse yet, a whole pack of them.

All of which leads up to the Joke of the Week, which I first heard at Pendleton courtesy of rodeo clown Flint Rasmussen:

"My wife is a barrelracer. When she dies, she will have to be cremated, because there is no ground good enough to bury her in."

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Buckle Bunnies and Back Numbers

Sorry, one more click for this one. Head on over to my group blog at Everybody Needs a Little Romance for today's words of...well, not wisdom, for sure.

Running Off the Hill

Yes, we're back. No, this isn't my happy face. It snowed here at the ranch last night. It was eighty degrees every day in Pendleton. If I hadn't left my kid in Spokane, I may never have dragged myself home.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Pendleton Round Up (and I was one of you until I moved to Oregon) it is a rodeo unlike any other. While I was there, I tried to take some photos and video to demonstrate exactly why this is the case. Keep in mind, though, I am a roper and so are all my family members, so I hope you aren't expecting to see bucking horses and bulls. Also keep in mind I have an inexpensive digital camera, so the video is pretty crummy. But at least you'll get the idea.

So what's so special about Pendleton? Well, there are a lot of very cool traditions surrounding the Round Up, and they start and end with the arena. Let us begin by looking at a normal rodeo arena. This is Ellensburg, Washington, another of the string of big pro rodeos in the Pacific Northwest. Nice facility, grandstands, well-groomed arena surface. Very much a traditional setup.

And this is Pendleton:

Yes, that is grass. With a dirt track around the outside. And yes, roping and riding on a grass surface is a little on the tricky side. On top of which, Pendleton doesn't have regular roping boxes. Or a chute. The calf or steer isn't standing out there in front of you where you can see it.

In Pendleton, you start with your horse's butt cocked up against the wall on the high side of the banked dirt track and run 'off the hill' onto the grass to rope. When you nod your head, the calf comes trotting out of a lane behind you, under the grandstand, and you have to try to time your start on the move. It's almost impossible to describe, so I took video.

Here's the cowboy's eye view of 'running off the hill' in Pendleton:

The reason timing is so important is at the end of that lane, between the white gates, there is a barrier rope shown in the picture below. About twenty feet out from the barrier is a laser-activated electric eye that releases the barrier rope when the calf breaks the laser beam. If the horse hits the barrier rope before the calf trips the rope out of the way, the piece of cotton string just to the left of the orange flag will break and the cowboy receives a ten second penalty. This is called 'breaking the barrier' or 'breaking out'. 

So not only do you have to run off the hill onto a slick grass surface and rope a calf that might go any which way, you have to try to be exactly twenty feet behind the calf when you hit the end of the lane.

Easy peasy, right?

*For those who care, I don't remember who the first roper was, but he caught a hind leg in his loop and wasn't able to tie the calf because it was all tangled up. The second was Tuf Cooper, with his dad Roy helping him with his horse in the roping box. He missed his calf. 

The View from Here

Two days of slack and one performance under our belts at the 100th annual Pendleton Round Up. Got a minute to post a few pictures, hope you enjoy.