Day after the rodeo

The pics today are mostly just portraits, but they deserve a click anyway.

Ahhh, the peace and quiet of the morning light dawning on a horseless and high school kidsless  neighborhood. No more neighing,  whinnying, blowing their noses, stomping their feet, and kicking the side of their trailer... And the horses are pretty noisy too. Just the peace and solitude of an empty boondocking area, with nary a sound.......

....Except for all this construction equipment working about 200 yards away.

I slept late this morning, so I'm all rested up now. Spending that much time at the rodeo and seldom sitting down was difficult, but since I enjoyed doing it, it wasn't too bad. There's supposed to be another rodeo coming up next weekend, but I can never tell for sure until the horse trailers start showing up.

I wish this last rodeo had a better way for the spectators, like myself, to know what events were coming up and when. I know they can't tell exactly when an event will start, but giving the spectators a paper with even a wild guess on it would be better than not knowing what's going on at all. Instead, I had to sit through lots of uninteresting roping events to ensure I didn't miss any of the, more interesting, rough stock events.

I can't believe the time is flying by so fast, it feels like I just got here, but I've been at the Fairgrounds since before Christmas. I'll be leaving the end of this month, which is less than two weeks away now and heading for Wilcox, Arizona, in search of the thousands of Sandhill cranes that are allegedly in the area.... I can't wait.

But I shouldn't say that. I try to live life every day and enjoy each and every day without thinking about what's coming up in the future. So I feel like if I'm looking forward to two weeks from now when I'm going someplace else, I can't properly enjoy all the fun things I'm going to be doing during the next two weeks while I'm still here.

When I was working for a living, that's how life always was, I wasn't very happy working every day, so I was always looking to the future to be happy. But I put all that behind me when I retired and decided that every day would be a happy one, so I didn't have to wait for some future time to be happy; I was going to be happy right here and right now.

And fortunately since happiness is in my mind, it's not difficult for me to be happy in all the great places I can go.

Theboondork

No action pictures today, in celebration of my newfound solitude today there will just be what I call "portraits."

Junior high school Pole bending contestant, threading her way through the poles.

Either a junior high school bull rider, or a junior high school kid requesting to go to the bathroom.

Well knock me down and call me Sally, even the bull fighters are wearing GoPro's now.

I can tell by their saddle horns these junior high kids are Ropers. Their sitting on their horses watching the bull riders wow the crowd, wondering what it must be like to be one of those cool kids.... And yes, the bull riders are the cool kids.

A high school pole bender. Tomorrow I'll have some Pole Bending pictures. Pole Bending requires all the same skills that barrel racing requires, so the girls that do the Barrel Racing are usually Pole Benders also.

High school Roper.