Yesterday was the Capoeira Batizado event on our ranch! The Batizado is the day when everyone in the martial art gets a little higher in the cord color. About half of the family goes to this Brazilian martial art, and, like in kung-fu, you get higher with belts. But in the case with Capoeira you get into a higher rank with cords. All the people from the Maculele group gather somewhere to get their cords. Now an event like that is pretty big....

Rudi’s final day is here. After months of free range living, eating what he wants, tipping over water buckets everywhere, it’s finally his time to be slaughtered. He’s a little more than half a year old, and we had him since he was no bigger than a small chihuahua. Now, this very afternoon, he will be slaughtered and roasted. All that fat on him will be put to a use soon! Why are we slaughtering Rudi today? Because tomorrow...

Our quarter horse foals Twitch, Kix, and Stumbles are now all 4 months old and older. Time for them to be weaned. The first foals of our ranch are turning into fine little boys. So away from there mothers they went, into the neighboring pasture, along with the small yearling Bambi and Kitty, another foal we bought recently. They’ll be there for a couple months, till they are ready to mingle with their old friends again and once their...

Having horses means feeding horses. Feeding horses means buying grains. And when you have grains, you have mice and rats! There are lots of ways to get rid of these pests. Poison, traps, catching them with your bare hands, then brutally killing them. But we prefer the good old fashioned way, which is cats! Cats will also keep snakes at bay. We have had 4 cats in the past, but the 2 toms died. It’s always them. Our remaining 2 she-cats tend...

A couple of months ago we found some large pieces of petrified wood on our property. No one knew it was worth anything. But then our fencer Jeremy told us that he once sold a big chunk of it for a lot of money. We did some research and found out that lots of people will buy petrified wood, either for decoraton, to craft something, or to try and sell it for me. Truckloads of pieces of petrified wood are lying in our forest and on our pastures....