This is what I do on weekends.

People often ask me what I do when I arrive home from Pittsburgh on Saturday afternoon.  Here is a snapshot from this past weekend, raw and unfiltered.

By the time I arrive home after the Strip District on a Saturday it is late enough in afternoon that I can accomplish just a few tasks before dark, as long as I don’t stop to eat or talk to my family.  A flaw still exists in my grazing program: infrastructure lacks to such an extent that I cannot effectively plan ahead for a departure, which leaves me constantly scrambling to keep up.   Darkness curtails my efforts, so the work spills into Sunday and interferes with family plans, church plans, and leisure plans.  Most of the time I can just squeak through, managing a breathless moment here and hour there to do something other than tend cattle.  The precariousness of the whole situation is stressful, as one wrong move on my part can disrupt the entire day for my family.

Such was precisely the scenario on Sunday morning as I stood with one leg through a pair of pants and stared through the window with my mouth open, watching as impatient cattle tore out a gate and made the whole of the farm their domain in an instant.  It was immediately obvious that my hopes of going to church and lunching with Gina and Henry after the service had evaporated, and dismay welled up inside me.  “Can’t these dang things just wait for one hour while I try to have a life?!” I shouted through the house as I hurriedly re-adorned my work clothes.  (The answer is no.  Cattle are not patient.  If their routine is thrown off, they take it upon themselves to remedy the inconsistency.)

I called my cousin Taylor, who is reliable and capable help, and we put the animals back in their paddock, at which point I set about finishing the work I was planning to complete later in the afternoon.

With the cattle back on schedule and my plans sufficiently destroyed, I stood contemplating the fact that almost exactly twenty-four hours prior I was describing the joyous zeal of managing a herd of grassfed cattle to a couple fully enamored with my bright descriptions.  Throbbing knuckles, a byproduct of some tension release carried out on the sheet metal of the pickup, and my state of total frustration were not a part of the story.

Life isn’t always tailored for Facebook, is it? Mine mostly isn’t, but it’s a good life anyway.