CrossRoad Farm: Do you know rodeo?

In the interest of air conditioning, I am trying to spend as much time as possible inside today.  I am using this time to go through the pictures in my camera. They have been there since the beginning of July, and really, I forgot what was in there. I know, I can't help it, and I make no excuses. It's just the way I am. To those of you that I bombarded with emails, full of pictures, sorry.

I did find pictures of a rodeo that we attended earlier in July. Some of you may go to rodeos. Some of you may go to rodeos weekly. Some of you may have never gone to a rodeo and have no idea why people do this crazy stuff.  We frequent several rodeos yearly, and mostly, we are fans of the Timed Events. Timed events for those of you who don't know, are Team Roping, Barrel Racing, Tie-Down Roping, Bull-dogging or Steer Wrestling, and Bull Riding. Those are the timed events, and the fastest cowboy or cowgirl wins!

As a personal preference, I really love Team Roping, Barrel Racing, and am becoming a bigger fan of Bull-dogging or Steer Wrestling. When it comes to Bull Riding, I usually bet on the Bulls. I love, love Bulls. I can't really explain it, but I just love them.  They are huge and muscled and a little scary, and I have often thought that I should be running a bucking bull operation. The Man in Charge agrees that there is money in it, but usually doesn't engage in the conversation too long. My problem is that I would have to learn how to weld first, because who is going to build all of those pens? Not to mention all of the other things that go along with such an operation.  I don't see this in my near future, but maybe when I grow up.

I do love driving by a pasture of cows and watching the bulls, and I really love a bull that lives down the road from me. I often see him lounging under a big tree, or sometimes he has his head stuck in a round bale. My all time favorite is when he is standing at the fence bellowing at the cows across the highway. I have seen him in the corner, as close as he can get to those cows, screaming his crazy head off. He bellows so hard that bull snot and slobber are blowing straight out, six inches from his nose. My Full-Timer thinks it's gross and she thinks I am crazy, but what else is new? I always have to slow down when he is out there. I just love him. I am going to have to ask his owner if I can get some pictures of him.

I did capture these snapshots of a nasty, little guy...

FYI - If you double click on the pictures, it should enlarge them quite a bit and you will see a lot more detail. Then just click the "back" button on your browser to return to this page.

Look at the clown's face...he is thankful that the bull went after the other dummy...

Love, love, love it!

I am not a fan of Tie-Down Roping or you may know it as Calf Roping. There are too many things wrong with this event. To start, you have a grown man, a grown horse, and a baby calf. How is that fair? In calf roping, you have a calf running for his life because a horse is chasing him, and then he gets jerked off the ground by a cowboy's rope. The little calves are often crying as they lay there tied up, and there have been instances when the calves get injured. It is just wrong, and I don't think a lot of spectators want to see that. To top it off, if you were a rancher, and you had cowboys working your calves, and they treated them like that...they would be fired. There is not a single rancher that would allow his calves to be jerked off the ground like that. Those babies are money standing on the ground, and they are handled with care.

All of this is my own personal opinion, and there are a lot of ropers out there that would disagree with me, but this is my blog, not theirs. So, too bad.

As much as I love the timed events, I have no pictures of them. I did however get a few shots of a Saddle-Bronc rider at a rodeo we went to in July. This poor guy, he had me rolling. You want to talk about an all-over-body-work-out!

He starts off pretty good...