I walked in from feeding the horses this afternoon and sat down on the wooden steps that lead to the white kitchen door. I started scraping off the mud from my rubber boots and stared thinkn'.

Here it was, a blazing 51F with sun and blue sky. I was thinkn' it had been a pretty good day. I had gone to the local co-op early in the morning and bought 10 bales of some good second cut mixed gras hay. I loaded them into the back of my Chevy pickup and along with Freckles my dog headed on home.

When I got home I asked my wife to go out to one of the pastures and help me hang a gate that had been knocked off it's peg hinges by the wind or the horses. That way I could drive to the barn unmolested without the horses trying to tear chunks of hay from the bales in back of the truck.

My wife normely dosen't like to do this kind of thing because the ground is muddy and yucky etc., etc. But she cowgirled up and we got it done.

We had been thinking about buying a bird feeder this past winter so we decieded to drive into town to Lowes. We got the feeder and a shepard's pole and a bag of feed and headed home, sort of. My wife wanted to stop at the local Save-Mor and buy some apples for the horses. That done we startyed out for the house once again. Sort of.

You see, when you let my wife drive, a one hour trip takes at least 3. We stopped a locally owned family BBQ place for lunch. After a good meal we once again headed out for home.

When we got home I put the shepard's pole in the ground on the small embankment outside our kitchen window on the other side of the driveway. I then lifted up the feeder which my wife had filled with the bird feed. 10 POUNDS of bird feed. The pole bent way over and I thought it was going to break. It didn't and now all is good.

So as I sit here in the late afternoon sun scaping mud off my rubber boots, yeah, it was a pretty good day.

Oldcowboy