I won a major award!

Yes, it's true. I'm the proud recipient of the Worst Blogger of the Year award!

Sunflowers already!

Just kidding, I guess. I'm kicking myself a bit for missing a few days. I've been busy, but not that busy.

"Dude! What is this thing?"

On the busy front, I've been tearing out an old, busted corral in preparation for installing a new, hot corral.

This is a project which has been hovering near the top of the list for at least a dozen years but has always previously been shuffled into the "next year" stack.

Part of the reason is that the corral is so seldom used. It's really only at branding and weaning that we ask it to hold cattle, and then only for a couple of hours at most. It's been patched with steel posts and wire so often that essentially none of the original corral remains. It's become nothing but scar tissue.

It's been doing its job well enough -- which is to say just barely -- for the last few years, serving less as a holding pen and more as a (partially) fenced passageway. I decided to change all that by erasing the whole thing and starting over.

The first chore was to remove and sort the hodgepodge of barbed wire, which has grown to most resemble the Peleliu Airfield perimeter on September 15, 1944. Untangling, sorting, re-rolling the good wire and discarding the bad -- that's been a delightful chore. And I say that like I mean it.

That first part of a fencing  renovation is long on work, sucks up a lot of hours, and doesn't show much progress. But it's done now.

Today I'll rip all of the steel posts out, as well as the few remaining wooden posts. Then I'll lay out locations for new (replacement anyway) posts, get the holes bored, and hopefully get the posts tamped into the ground. That'll just leave panel and new wire installation. I'll re-use panels I already have, as well as several giant rolls of "sheep wire" which I collected during a previous fencing renovation some 20 years ago.

Well, best get to it...