The guy in the wheel chair there and the guy in the red jacket standing next to him were the judges for the contest. Craig Cameron is the guy to the right with the blue denim jacket on. You can see he is holding the microphone in his hand. He was having trouble with his voice because of a cold or something but he made us hear him alright. It was a kick watching the cowboys and cowgirls make their way through the course. The fastest time was around 6 minutes and they were scored 0-10 for each obstacle with 30 seconds on each of the 13. We don't know who won the contest because they didn't announce it while we were there
The extreme mustang final was on Saturday and we were able see most of it. The program is that 90 horse trainers are selected from applications and 1 of 90 mustangs are assigned to each trainer, then they have 90 days to work on them before the finals. At the finals they bring the horse in and demonstrate their success or lack of success to the judges. They are scored and placed according to the way they perform. I believe the winner gets some money, but I don't know how much. Once the competition is over the horses are all adopted out at auction. We saw the last three go through the auction and the third to last brought in $300, the second to last brought $5000 and the last one brought $1500. Kind of all over the place. They all did a very nice job training their horse and it was a good show. Most of the trainers claim they would rather train a wild, untouched mustang than a domesticated horse.
Anna had a lot of fun during the weekend too because of all the vendors there selling their stuff. She came away with a cool yellow denim jacket (you would be jealous Tara) and a couple of Tee shirts. She was a bit disappointed that there weren't very many boots because she was hoping to buy a new pair. Like she really needs another pair :)
We got home from Albany on Sunday afternoon and immediately loaded the horses up and headed for the fair grounds for our ride with the posse. Even though we were tired from messing around at the show all weekend we enjoyed the ride then went to Subway for dinner and got home late.
The rest of the week was fairly typical for me but Anna was off for spring break and Delaine was off several days during the week. They both worked on Friday. I got a call from Anna on Friday during my lunch break while I was talking to Mom on the phone. I got off my call with Mom and called Anna back to see what was up since she rarely calls me during the day. She was a little weepy on the phone and finally told me that the pickup wouldn't start when they went to go to lunch. Turns out she had left the headlights on when they got out of it Friday morning and the battery was dead. She wondered what to do. I suggested getting someone to come and give them a jump start. It wasn't an emergency so I didn't want to drive the 35 miles back to town to get the pickup running. One of gals at the office talked to her boyfriend and he volunteered to come and give them a jump. When he got there the jump didn't work so he took the battery out and took it down to Les Schwab to have it charged. I knew the battery was good because it is practically brand new since we replaced it when we bought the truck last summer. So they skipped lunch and worked the rest of the afternoon until I got off. I went into town and picked the battery up and put it back in the pickup, and it started just fine with a freshly charged battery. That was around 4:00pm so they were pretty hungry from missing lunch. We went home and snacked some because there was not time to eat since we were taking the horses out to Dodge Creek for our Friday evening ride. After the ride we stopped at Subway again and had a sandwich with the posse group and got home around 9:00pm. I think it will be a good while before she leaves the lights on again . . .
The Friday evening ride was sort of interesting because we all brought and obstacle to work our horses with. One of the gals brought a bunch of balloons and tied them all around the arena, we brought a blue tarp and made a "pond" on the ground, there was an umbrella and a lariat. I couldn't get Dustie to go over the tarp though I certainly spend a lot of time trying. The highlight of the evening was when I tied the lariat to a big orange highway cone and drug it around the arena. It spooked every horse there including Dustie! She was fine with it for about a half revolution around and then she noticed it following her and got a bit excited. She spun around like she has never done before and start moving back and to the side and the spun the other way and was backing and starting to loose her balance so I let go of the rope. Then I did it again and she repeated her excitement again. Then the third time I did it she was pretty good about dragging it. It was nice to find out she could move like that . . .
On Thursday Anna took her first private lesson on her saxophone. We found an excellent instructor we hope can help her improve her playing. The instructor is a lady that comes from Chicago and is a professional. She has played with some very highly rated symphony groups as the lead oboe player. She also plays and teaches the piano, saxophone, flute, bassoon and clarinet. She is very nice . . . she and her husband moved to Roseburg last summer to get away from the rat race in Chicago. She has been playing three gigs a day most of the week and was just getting burned out and wanted to slow down a bit. Roseburg ought to be a good place to slow down. Anyway we're excited for Anna to be able to take lessons from such a high level professional. I've been kicking around the thought of taking piano lessons from her, do you think a 55 year old man can learn to play the piano?
Today we worked outside some and I increased the size of our round pen to around 50'. I decided to get the tarp out again and see what Dustie and I could do. I worked her around the tarp for around 20 minutes when she finally decided run across it so I worked her that way for a while and she finally settled down and walked on it, then I walked her back and forth across it and turned on it a couple times then put her back in her stall. I'll do it again tomorrow and maybe I'll ride her across it too . . .
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