Herding

For the past two days, my house has been inundated with cows. And cowboys.

You may recall that we are the proud owners of five cows. One is a Hereford, the other four are Angus.

Herefords are such sweet cows, and very cute!

Because I am still recovering from surgery, this year I was not up to a long car trip to Oklahoma to buy cows. Merle was disappointed, but determined. The ranch where he bought his beloved “Star” was having a final sale this year. They are going out of business, so all of their stock, equipment, and interest in the cattle business was up for auction. He HAD to be there! Last year he bought several embryos from which we expect calves next spring. In fact, he had the Hereford (red and white cows) embryos implanted in Angus (pure black cows) moms. This could prove to be interesting.

This year, he wants to expand the herd even more. He loves cows. The more cows the better. But the cows at this sale are expensive. Many of the best sell for over $100,000.00. That is not an exaggeration, I assure you. The only way he can have the cows he loves with the money we have is to buy more embryos.

But I couldn’t go to the sale, and he was not comfortable leaving me behind to go to the sale by himself. Besides, he wouldn’t have had as much fun all alone! So—–

Yay for the internet!

The entire two-day cow auction was live on not one, but two internet sites. This included the auctioneers and their “let’s sell a cow” routine and video of each cow. Merle took a vacation day in order to be able to follow the auction and make a bid. And thank goodness he did, because he followed every cow/embryo/bull on the sale list, keeping track of the prices as the sale progressed toward the items he wanted. Those items were up for bid at approximately 6:30 pm. Imagine if he had to be at work all day!

This lasted for two days. At one point, Merle was using both the PC and my laptop….one to be able to hear the auctioneer and the other to be able to bid on the things he wanted because for some reason, the video and audio had a time lag of approximately 10 seconds. I know that I should have taken a photo, but it would have distracted him and he might not have been able to make the bids successfully. I don’t know that our marriage would have survived that.

In any event, we are finally quiet around here today-it is just the football game. No cows, no auctioneers.

But we are now the owners of 6 new purebred Hereford cow embryos.

Life just doesn’t get better than this.