Life after cattle

I am trying to make sense of what to do now that I am not chasing cattle or working on rebuilding the loading corral. Mom continues to improve and sat up in a wheelchair today. There is talk that she will be released from the hospital early next week to a swing bed facility. Since my brother is doing a good job looking out for mom I am trying to determine the best time for me to go to North Dakota. It would be when mom comes home from the swing bed unit, and I would have to work around my Alaskan cruise dates.

Today I resprayed the weeds in the hayfield. The first time I sprayed the hayfield this year was the end of June / early July before Wyatt cut the grass for hay. Still a number of weeds. The thistle that grows in the low area where the grass is thick and lush is hard to kill. Probably for the same reason the grass is lush and thick there. I kill the individual thistle plants but the root system keeps putting up new plants.

Bob and Jan filled their little trailer with tree branches and similar stuff and I dumped it in my back pasture. I plan to use it when I burn tree stumps this Fall.

I also trimmed and dug up more of their yard's sod along the road. Bob wanted the strip along the road to be wider. He plans to put gravel in that strip. This way he doesn't have to run his riding lawn mower as such an angle to mow the grass there and risk tipping over. Earlier I had taken the sod the County torn up when they bladed the ditches before repaving the road. I had filled over half the pickup with that sod then. Today I filled over 3/4 of the pickup. It took me some hours to do this work. The temperature under the cloudless sky was 90 F.

I had taken off my sweat soaked shirt while doing the work. When Bob and Jan's daughter-in-law came to pick up her kids and was talking with me I noticed that after a bit she put on her sunglasses even though she was standing in the shade. Why was that?

Tired tonight from all that sod work.