still warm, still nice, yada yada.

don't forget to click the pics

This poor kid, I made him ride around for half an hour just to get this perfect bucking horse pose.

That's a Pickup Man in the background, you can tell because of his armor plated chaps to protect him from getting kicked when he's riding beside the bucking horses.

As expected, I haven't been doing anything useful or interesting today, and also expected is a few thicker than normal clouds in the sky, which limits the time I spend on my big laptop so I don't run my house batteries down, especially since this cloudy weather is supposed to last till next Wednesday.

I could solve my solar panel problems if I tilted my solar panels so they faced the sun instead of laying flat on the roof all the time, but I hate dealing with the hassle of the whole tilting thing, especially the thought of driving off and forgetting to put them down. And in a place like Quartzsite, where 99% of the people are serious long-term boondockers, and all of them have solar panels, it is fairly common to see forgetful people driving around with their panels tilted.

The good news is it's still warm. It got up to the mid-70s today, but by early next week, it's supposed to get down to the 60s for a high, and the cloudy weather will bring the humidity up high enough that the 60s will feel like the 60s.

I know I'm mostly talking about the weather, but that's all I've got to talk about. I'm not doing anything and not going anywhere, so the weather is the only thing that changes around here. Now I do have several camper projects that I need to start or complete, but those things will only get done once I can scare up a tiny amount of ambition to motivate me enough to overcome my procrastination.

So here I sit, basking in the sunshine, completely relaxed, without a care in the world... Mostly because I don't care if I complete any camper projects or not. But somehow, strangely, missing some of the busy times I've been having. I miss walking around the lakes and taking pictures of the Sandhill cranes. I miss watching the boats on Elephant Butte Lake. I enjoyed walking in the hills around Rockhound State Park and especially climbing around the boulders at City of Rocks State Park. I got in a lot of desert walking in Colossal Cave Park and enjoyed taking pictures of the rodeo.

But now I have nothing to do but relax, and relax I will until some mystical force comes over me and tells me it's time to go. It could be tomorrow, it could be next month. Oddly enough that mystical force that tells me it's time to leave doesn't tell me where to go and I think it's because where I go seldom matters; the freedom to go is what's compelling, and it always has been; I just never had that kind of freedom before.

Theboondork

And this is a classic pose for a bucking bull. I think the only reason some of these kids stay on these bulls is the fear of what happens to them when there on the ground.

Now this is a classic pose for a bareback rider, and yes he's supposed be laying on the back of the horse just like you see. He has no stirrups to keep his feet in place so laying down on the horse helps keep him from falling off.

There were a few junior high school riders at this rodeo, and even though this is a terrible photo, since I chopped off the top of the pickup man's head, I think it shows how young some of these bronco riders really are, as the pickup-man snatches this young rider off the back of a bucking horse.

Another classic pose for a saddle bronc rider....Warning! useless information ahead

If they're not sitting on their horse how can you tell the difference between a bareback rider and a saddle bronc rider? It's easy, you look at their feet. A saddle bronc rider has stirrups on the saddle,  and to keep his feet from accidentally getting hung up in the stirrups when he falls off, he wears oversize boots so his foot can slip out of the boot if it's hung up in the stirrup.

But the bareback rider has no saddle on the horse and therefore no stirrups to hang up in. So,  just like a bull rider, he ties his boots on with leather straps so his boots don't get flung off while the horse is bucking.

Just think about how many blogs you would have to read to find a bit of information as utterly useless as that.