Yep, it’s Fall in Texas, time for gatherin’ the herd and strippin’ the weanlings off to ship, and winterize the herd. I can almost smell leather, coffee, and bacon. And I hear in my mind the strains of the old song.

“When it’s roundup time in Texas, and the bloom is on the sage…”

Indeed our Texas purple sage is blooming. It’s actually not sagebrush, but Cenizo, a semi desert plant with ashy green leaves that blooms purple in response to rain. Well, I say it’s Fall, it’s Autumn on the calendar, but yesterday it was so hot we worked horses in tee shirts, and today it’s supposed to go down to the thirties at night! We seem to average out Fall by having winter one day and summer the next. Like our rainfall, which is stated to be thirty five inches a year, but it might come all in one month! 

So planning our roundup in advance is dicey. Our crew comes from all over the county, and even from out of state. We guess at the weather. The prognosticator says it will be sunny, and cool. 

I’d sure like to have a job like that where you can be wrong half the time and still get paid! With us it somewhere between the Texas Ranger’s motto,”know you’re right and keep on coming”, and rescheduling as we allow sanity to prevail. But we can’t procrastinate too long lest the brown stomach worm, Ostertagia, get ahead of us and we have to nurse skinny Corrientes through the winter with extra feed. So we’ve got a deadline to meet, and we’ll have to “cowboy up” and deal with adversity and “gitter done”. Of course we could take the hitch hiker’s point of view,”I love deadlines, I love the whooshing sound as they pass!”