I don’t talk about it much here, but I started a business this year.

I actually started doing it a few years ago, when my friend Jeff got called up to active duty. I did some simple filling in for him, until the client decided that I shouldn’t be there without insurance and a license.

No problem; I took a course and took a State test and now I’m a licensed operator (you’ll forgive me if I don’t say in what.) When he needed help again, he added me to his contract as a subcontractor and got me covered under the client’s insurance policy.

It’s a really small business so far. I do one little thing three or four times a week. But that one little thing pays pretty well. Jeff has given me a lot of encouragement and guidance, and I wouldn’t even have considered a business of my own without him.

Now he’s branched out into another area, and he wants me to go with him. To expand my business means that I can’t just slide anymore, and it took a lot of thinking to decide if I wanted to make that step.

Well, I did it. I took steps to make this thing permanent, and possibly my sole source of income sometime in the future. I registered a Business Name and I’ve applied for a Business License.

This gives me a sense of permanence and independence that I’ve always wanted. When I was married the first time, I went straight from college, being mostly supported by my father, to my husband’s house. Nothing was ever solely mine, and I was always plagued with doubts that I could support myself if I had to. It made me really insecure.

Well, getting the job that eventually led to this one made a start on my independence. Getting divorced and working two jobs to support my family got me further. Landing a full time professional job that meant we didn’t have to worry about where the rent or food was coming from had me feeling pretty damn good. I took charge of my own life and my own dreams. I had my very own truck, bought brand-new. I had a horse trailer, a horse, and a camping trailer; things that I’d always wanted, and that I got all on my own.

I finally proved to myself that I could take care of my family and myself. I’m there. I’m my own woman and I don’t need to depend on anyone else to survive. If I lose this job, I’ll find another, and we’ll be fine.

This business is just another step in my independence; one that I didn’t know was there. I now believe it’s possible to support myself without depending on an employer. I can make my own path.

And it’s a path I really need to start looking at. This job I’m in now might last another calendar year. It might not. Work here is closing down; the government employees I work with will all either be out of a job or working from a remote location come September. I will most likely be the last remaining government-type representative on site, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to stretch that through 2005 or not.

It’s unsettling, and it’s scary to think that I’ll have to look for another job at that point. Jobs in this county simply don’t pay that well; it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to find something to support myself in the manner to which I’ve become accustomed.

But making my own path, while terrifying in its own right, looks like it might be a valid option. I have to start now to be able to build up a client base in time. And I have made steps towards that, and it feels good. I’ll be taking a week off in September, whether I have paid leave from this job or not, to go take a course that will be crucial in getting another certification. With that certification, I should be able to make a go at it, even if it’s only part time for the first year. Ideally, I’ll still have my full time job during that year as a cushion.

Jeff has egged me into this; he’s too busy right now with it, since it’s a side job for him too, and he says he wants to share his clients with me. That would be great to build up a reputation in this area and eventually spread it to the home ground. Cowboy’s given me tons of support, and his advice is invaluable as a long time small business owner. He knows how to get things done.

This business is giving me roots in other ways too. I put my business address as Cowboy’s house, with his complete support. I’ll be using his shop once in a while, which will be his business office too, eventually. He does not want me to work for him, since he’s had bad luck mixing business with marriage, but sharing office space is totally fine. It gives me a sense of permanence with him too. We’re in it together for the long haul, but there aren’t a lot of external signs of that.

It’s terrifying if I think about it too much. I have nightmares about being the sole support of my family and getting sick or hurt. That’s what insurance is for, I know, but that usually doesn’t cover loss of income. But I think about it a little harder, and I see that I’m not alone. Cowboy and I will always back each other up; it’s my independence that I don’t want to lose.

So what steps I can take have now been taken. I’m waiting for my licenses to come back from the county. I’m working on my continuing education for my State license. And I’ve made a commitment to this business, which really is one to myself.

So here I go.

Wow, I really need to get that whiny, kind of TMI entry off the front page, and yet nothing much is going on to replace it.

I get the baby goat tonight, so I should have a terribly cute update tomorrow.

I still haven’t got the garden planted; I’m reduced to making sarcastic comments about plowing, but they’re not doing much good. He must really hate to plow. If I knew how to hook up a three-point hitch and the plow was at our house, I’d dive in. I’d like to get the irrigation set up. The seedlings aren’t quite ready to go in the ground, but I’m way late on the corn. The peas will just have to wait until next year, since they like cool spring weather and it’s already pushing 100°.

No progress on the gophers either. I’m royally pissing one off—he keeps burying my trap without setting it off. The other two traps have been completely ignored, so those holes may just be vacant. I’m waiting for that cat Marci’s giving me. He’s my last resort, and I kind of wanted a cat anyway. A Siamese should be able to hold his own against the dogs.

That’s it, really. Life goes on, we keep roping, but it’s nothing noteworthy. I’m back on the horses and it feels good. Life is good!

Things to remember, in case I’m ever bright enough to go read my own damn archives:

You’re allergic to latex tape. You might remember this from the time you gave blood and got an arm-circling rash in an hour. That didn’t happen the next time, when you requested non-latex vet wrap, remember? Sometimes, instead of stitches, lazy doctors stick open wounds back together with tape. Tape that contains latex. See above. Remember when you broke your leg, and when the cast came off, the suture lines were all horrible? Yeah, like that. 

If you’re getting your tubes tied, you just might have an incision in a somewhat sensitive area. That you would really rather not be seen scratching like a baboon all day long at work. So don’t forget the latex thing.

And if you do forget it again, you might as well remember to just take the day off if you’re going to pound the benadryl, because you’ll be lucky to survive the drive in to work. Falling asleep at your desk doesn’t make you look good, and it’s even worse when you do it in a meeting.

Gah.

What a nice weekend, except for intermittent periods of feeling like crap. And those popped up without warning just to keep me on my toes.

I spent all day Friday in my jammies. I farted around, read some books, played on the internet, and scanned some of my childhood into my computer. I was set; I had homemade chicken soup, the bed all to myself, pain pills, and plenty to read.

Turned out that I didn’t need the pain pills. I was only muscle sore, not surgery sore. And they massively screwed with my sleep cycles, so I chucked them. I was up all night both Friday and Saturday, and I couldn’t even get to sleep during the day much. That’s really not like me; usually I’m the queen of the nap. A midnight snack is totally foreign to me, but since my eating cycles were screwy too, there I was, eating a bowl of cereal at one in the morning.

I did manage to sleep in on Saturday morning, and I felt good enough to go to the Hundred Dollar Store (H0me Despot) to look for irrigation supplies for my garden. That was really optimistic, both because I don’t actually have a garden yet and because I expected H0me Despot to have what I wanted. So then I went to the local hardware store and actually got what I needed.

I packed up the critters and went out to Cowboy’s for the weekend. He had planned to spend the weekend roping, and I knew I couldn’t ride. I spent a little time out at the barn on Saturday, but I didn’t feel all that great and it was really frustrating to be out there and not be able to participate. So I went home and took a nap.

Sunday turned out to be an ideal spring day. We slept in a little, and then went over to the barn. I was OK for the most part, but I took it easy. The boys roped all day long—most of our roping friends came over and we had us a little barbecue in the middle of the day. By Sunday afternoon I was over the worst of the crummy, so I took up my usual job of running the chutes.

It was a really nice day—it was hot, so it felt good to take a break under the shade. It was really low key; Cowboy cooked up some tri-tips and we had some of the usual fixings, but nobody was stressed out about it. That’s usually my role—to get stressed out over having everything right. This was a spur of the moment thing, and those can be the best.

Cowboy and I are both looking forward to when the ropings are at our house, and we have a patio to do these cookouts on. Eating off of hay bales is fine once in a while, but it gets a little dusty. That will happen later this summer, I expect.

Someone asked me for my cheesecake recipe, so here it is, copyright by me, sometime in 1999. It was inspired by combining my love of cheesecake with a traditional family ingredient.

*New: I’ve been getting a lot of hits for this recipe all of a sudden, for some reason. Why? Did the subject come up in some TV show, or are people all over the country spontaneously hungry for it? If you use it, please drop me a note in the guestbook; I’m fascinated to hear if it works well for you, and how the popularity is spreading. Thanks!

Dulce de Leche Mousse Cheesecake

Crust:

2 cups crushed shortbread cookies (about 1 package)

1 stick butter, melted

Filling:

1 cup Dulce de Leche, separated (see below about Dulce de Leche)

1 envelope unflavored gelatin

2 ½ cups chilled whipping cream

9 ounces white chocolate, chopped or in chips

3 – 8-oz packages cream cheese, room temperature

1 cup Baker’s sugar

For Crust: Combine crushed cookies and butter well. Press mixture into bottom of 10-inch diameter springform pan. Place pan in refrigerator to firm up while filling is made.

For Filling: Using electric mixer and pre-chilled bowl and beaters, beat 2 cups whipping cream to peaks. Set aside in refrigerator.

Bring remaining ½ C whipping cream to simmer in heavy medium saucepan. Remove from heat. Add white chocolate and gelatin and stir until melted and smooth. Cool slightly. Using electric mixer, beat cream cheese, sugar, and ¼ to ½ cups Dulce de Leche in large bowl to blend. Slowly beat white chocolate mixture into cream cheese mixture. Fold whipped cream into white chocolate/cheese mixture. Pour filling into prepared crust. Heat remaining Dulce de Leche in pastry bag or Ziploc bag to melt slightly, and drizzle over cheesecake. Cover and refrigerate overnight.

Dulce de Leche is an Argentine milk caramel. My mom used to make it, but I have found that the Smucker’s brand is just as good and much easier. It’s by the ice cream toppings at my grocery store. It’s really rich, so you might want to start small and taste as you go. Baker’s sugar is really important since this cheesecake isn’t cooked. It doesn’t leave a gritty feeling.

I’m not going to get into the gory details, but I’m here and I’m all done and I feel good enough to be up and on the computer. Actually, I feel pretty damn good. Hooray for anesthesiologists who give you something for nausea!

I’m going to camp out on the couch tonight, and fart around quietly tomorrow, but I expect that I can be working in my garden by the weekend. Cowboy took really good care of me, but he’s off to go roping now. That’s just fine, since I kind of wanted to be able to schlep around the house on my own.

Angus jumped the fence again last night.

This has been an ongoing problem since he’s been an adult. It’s a five-foot fence, and I can’t afford to replace it with a taller one. Not that he couldn’t clear a taller one anyway; he sails over the current fence like it’s not even there. I have to keep him chained up in the back yard, except I let him off when I’m in the kitchen so he can have a break. He usually only leaves when I’m not paying attention to him.

Last night he snuck out even though I was right there in the front room. He usually comes right home when I call him, and then I let him have it. Haven’t been able to break him of it, and one of these days, he’s not going to come home. A black dog doesn’t have much chance on a dark road at night.

Last night, he didn’t come when I called. I drove the neighborhood and couldn’t find him. About a half hour after I noticed he was gone, he came slithering back in. He was soaking wet, so I figure he was either rolling in something, or was tied up with someone’s bitch and got the hose turned on him. He’s lucky he didn’t get shot.

I’ve tried everything to deal with this—I have a kennel that he just digs or jumps out of, and he’s broken more chains than I can count. I can’t keep him chained all the time. It’s not fair to the dog and I don’t want piles of dog shit all over my back porch.

I run him a mile or two every day, but that doesn’t seem to wear him out enough to keep him home. I think that has just kept him in the physical condition he needs to visit the pig farm a mile away.

So this morning, I bought a shock collar. I think it’s the only solution. I’ll have to lurk where he can’t see me and let him have it as he’s going over the fence. It will also come in handy for distance training. He gets a little too wound up when we’re working cattle, and this will let me reach out and get his attention. And I can finally do something about the chasing trucks thing at Cowboy’s.

I’ve wanted one for a while, but they’re so expensive. Last night was the last straw though. I figured I either had to dump some money into the problem, or let him get killed. He may piss me off to no end sometimes, but I don’t particularly want him dead.

D-day is coming up for getting my tubes tied (or should that be T-day?), and I do believe I’m starting to get nervous. I’ve been having dreams about babies and being pregnant.

Now, I really and truly don’t want any more kids. But this little primal part of me really wants to have Cowboy’s babies.

My head says, “Leave it alone. You don’t want kids. You have kids, two more than you’d ever thought you’d have. Four is plenty. Hell, you’re going to be facing grandchildren before ten years have gone by. You like your life. You like the portability of kids who are growing up. Babies are a major pain in the ass.”

But then the ol’ uterus gets a word in edgewise. “But babies are cuuute!” it whines. “You want a part of that man. Wouldn’t you like to raise a little cowgirl?”

I really need to smack that little voice down. No. I do NOT want more kids. I don’t know what I would do with a girl anyway. Cowboy’s 47, and he definitely doesn’t want any more. As it is, he’ll be 60 by the time Seamus graduates from High School. We really want to be able to spend some time alone with each other before we’re dead. He doesn’t want to be an old parent. Hell, I’d be an old parent too. I’m 35. If I had a baby right this minute, I’d be 53 when it graduated high school. I have other plans for my middle age than raising children.

So I’ll go to the appointment today, and I’ll have the surgery on Thursday, and that will be that. Hopefully, my subconscious will just leave me the hell alone. I’ve always preferred to have the conscious in charge anyway.

Grouse called me on something in my branding entry, and he’s right; I totally forgot the castrating step.

It was silly to forget it, since the little boys and I were having a good ol’ time playing with the ball sacks. Adam, who’s about two, was initially horrified when I handed him one. They’re really soft, and kind of squishy, and he gave me a look that said, “What is this?” But then he and Dillon and Jacob got into ball sack snowball fights and sneaking them onto each other’s hats, and we all had a ton of fun. At one point, Dillon had about eight stuffed in his pockets. We suggested that he should probably take them out before his mom found them in the laundry. I don’t think that would have gone over too well.

And what do you think we were barbecuing?

Grouse, the horses and ropes look excessive, but I really don’t think you’d get a lot of volunteers if it were all groundwork. It’s pretty easy to run them through a chute and use a calf table. I don’t know about your suggestion of mugging them by hand though. You must be branding smaller calves. These were mostly in the 400-pound range, with some bigger. Oh, and they’re too big to band.

Besides being traditional to use horses here, it’s fun. It’s the only time some of these guys get to use their horses for something besides riding around. A few of them are full-time cowboys, like Lonnie, and some do a little up in the hills on the weekends. But most of them have regular jobs, and get to go out and do this a couple of times a year. We only had six horses in the branding pen at a time, but even that was a little overcrowded. The foreman has to be careful to rotate everyone in to rope, or someone’s bound to get pissed off and not come back next year.

These brandings are more about the social event than efficiency. They get everything done, and done right. It’s a long day, but they have fun at it.

This particular branding was actually pretty low-key. Everyone got along and did their jobs. It seems that most of the time, there’s more drama than that. Someone didn’t get to rope enough, someone wasn’t doing it right, someone pissed off someone else, and someone got drunk and shot up someone else’s good hat. Heh, that actually happened the night before this one, and was the talk of the day. Bunch of cowboys can be whinier than a group of women, I swear.

We’ve had a very project centered weekend here at the Cowgirl house.

John finally finished his mission project. Yes, the one due two weeks ago. His father helped him construct it and paint it, and it was up to us to do the final decorations.

So this weekend, he painted the roof and put on all of the little details. He painted on the windows and doors, and made a farm plot and put sand on the outside. He added little plastic people and farm animals. They’re not exactly to scale, and he wanted to make the outside grassy, but when you do a project late, the craft store is bound to be out of some essentials, like green sand, so he had to make do.

This has turned into quite the expensive homework assignment; I’ve spent at least $30, and I’m sure his father has too.

While he was working out front, I was working in the garage.

I’ve had a set of antlers that my Grampa gave to me before he died.

He told me the story too: when he was a kid; fourteen or sixteen, so before 1930, he used to go with his dad as a hunting guide on some of the old family property (near the Soda Springs ski resort near Tahoe, which family owned too.)

Apparently, his dad had been out guiding some touristy sort of hunters, and they got completely skunked. He’d been out by himself, and he came back into camp that evening. He asked for help, because he’d killed a deer too big to process or haul back to camp by himself.

So they all went out, and the hunters were totally disgusted by what this kid had killed, when they hadn’t seen anything all day.

It was a monster buck; I believe it was the biggest one Grampa ever killed, and he continued to hunt until I was about three. Dad remembers the mount in the house for most of his life, but eventually the taxidermy rotted. Grampa saved the antlers, and holes drilled in the skull make me think he kept it on the wall then too.

Eventually, the skull plate broke, and they came off the wall. The antlers aren’t bleached at all, so I think this is the one rack that never found its way to the side of the barn.

Grampa gave it to me just a little before he got sick. I’d started hunting, although I hadn’t got anything yet, and he was really proud of me. I’ve kept them for all that time (must be ten years I’ve had them, moving from house to house with me.) I always meant to get a horn-mounting kit and put them up.

Well, I finally got around to getting the kit last week, and I spent a good part of the weekend putting it all together. The paper-maché′s drying now, and next I’ll be putting the leather over the whole thing. I’ll be pretty damn proud to have that on my wall.

My rule of no taxidermy that I wasn’t personally involved with going in my house is definitely going to be waived here, but this is family history.

Which reminds me; I need to track down my bear.

 
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