The Show And Shoot Sunday Extravaganza

One fun thing about following people on a blogging platform is getting a glimpse into the world they live in. People like to get to know other people, as we all tend to find something we share with each other. You know, a love for paddle-boarding, or a mutual dislike for chocolate dipped breakfast cereal.

That said, the world I live in tends to bathed in the fragrant aroma of bovine excrement and shotgun smoke.

Yesterday was one banger of a day. Our family does a lot of our activities together, but as our kids are now in high school and coming into their own regarding their unique interests, we all often have to diverge for events.

And that's how I found myself crawling out of bed at 5am on a Sunday morning. Thinking about how awesome it is that offspring grow up and can eventually start tending to their own stuff. So that in the future I didn't have to herd everyone like a scheduling nanny cow of feeling's soothing logistical excellence.

For you see, my daughter had a jackpot cattle show to go to on Sunday and my son had to go to his sporting clays state score qualifier match. The cattle show alone is a logistical wonderland. Imagine having an 1100 pound toddler who needed to go to a ballet recital. Yes, my daughter's steer has a blow dryer, among other things.

In order to go to a jackpot show, you have to take a few supplies, it's not like going to a Park and Rec soccer game where you just need cleats and shin guards and a few snacks. Nay! You need to load a 7.5 foot aluminum grooming stanchion on the truck, plus, feed, water, the show box (which has the blower, grooming equipment, clipper, etc.) a generator (to run the blower), and oh yes, the steer.

Then you have to make sure you have your show clothes, brand inspection, snacks, fuel, etc...It's quite a thing. Also, my hubs and my daughter are the same person when it comes to personality traits, so I had two hateful creatures who rub each other in all the triggering ways to get into the truck and out the door without passive aggressively killing each other with wry sarcasm and grumpy looks. It was a good time.

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I joke. Well, a bit anyway.

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As we had gotten everything prepped and the truck hooked up to the stock trailer the night before, the hubs and the daughter were on their way to the Kootenai County Fairgrounds for the 208 Qualifier by 5:30am, which was pretty great as it left me with some time to feed the animals, shower, and do my morning Listnerds reading time before the boy and I had to take off to Landt Farms Sporting Clays in Nine Mile Falls, Washington for his shotgun match.

My son shoots on a competitive skeet and trap shotgun team. He really loves the sport and is the youngest on the team which cracks me up. Sporting Clays is pretty challenging and fun, so he was definitely looking forward to the event. I was too, because I was getting to hide in the car for two and a half hours of quiet time. My book bag was laden with reading enjoyment happiness!

Landt Farms Sporting Clays is a 90 minute drive from our house, so the boy and I had a fun drive ahead of us that included lots of singing and weaving our way through Spokane traffic, but our trip went by amiably and soon we arrived.

Shotgun sports require a fair amount of equipment too, just on a smaller scale than cattle shows. You have to have a shooting jacket, ammo, and your firearm, not to mention snacks, water, and your mom's checkbook so that ammo can be purchased from the club's leader because she gets a few pallets of it every year for the kids to buy. I hate the price of ammo right now, I am so thankful for my boy's coach!

It was while I was reading a Tim Ferris book that the most amusing moment of my day occurred. A huge tactical van of the most gleaming white paint color achievable rolled into the wooded parking lot I was sitting in. I had backed my car underneath a giant Ponderosa Pine and was reading happily, my serenity punctuated by the soundtrack of thirty shotguns randomly reporting. I glanced over to the van that had parked next to me and witnessed a man whip out his nether regions and beginning to pee on his own tire.

Ol Tire Pee McGee's super tacti-cool vehicle

I quickly returned my gaze to my book, but I will admit that a giggle escaped, especially since there was a fully functioning bathroom about thirty feet away. People...lol!

Later, as I was fully immersed in some quality music on my headphones and scratching out this week's schedule, a paper suddenly flew through my cracked window. My son was done! And he had beaten his whole team. It was nice!

To celebrate, I drove him back down the road, through Riverside State Park and into Airway Heights. There we pulled into Mod Pizza for a little lunch celebration before we hauled flintlocks to Coeur d'Alene to watch my daughter finish showing.

I had never been to Mod Pizza. It's a wonderful pizza place that kinda works like Subway. You pick your size and then they slide your thin crust chunk of dough down the line and you tell the super perky workers what you would like on it. They had pesto! And marinated red peppers! And a really, really cool pizza oven that you can watch your creation bake in!

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Can you tell I like the place?

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After eating some super tasty thin crust gloriousness, we hurtled towards CDA. Yesterday was one of those amazing days where everything just sorta came together with limited annoyances. I am trying to learn to rejoice in the tribulation days too, because I know that means I am alive and stuff, but I'll be honest, I adore the smoothly flowing existential timelines of fun!

We arrived at the fairgrounds right at my daughter was going to begin her quality class. In livestock showing you have quality classes which are solely about the animal (confirmation), and then you have showmanship classes which are about looks and human-animal partnership.

My daughter's class got delayed because the show's organizer had scheduled a surprise for the showmanship champions, a helicopter ride. The look on my daughter's steer, Pumpkin's face when that helicopter flew over was priceless, poor little guy lol!

She ended up doing really well, but to be honest her attendance at this show was solely for desensitizing purposes for her steer. It's good to expose your animals to all sorts of stimuli as you are raising them to show, and her calf isn't going to be finished until late July. She was happy with how they did, and considering that she was competing with national show circuit one percenters, I was proud of them both.

Because to be perfectly honest, I absolutely despise cattle showing. I was a beef 4-H leader for three years, and as much as I love cattle and working with kids, the show world is kinda disgusting, bordering on abuse in some of the cases. But boy, oh boy, do I ever find multitudes of things to write about when I wander through that realm, and to be fair, some of the people are super sweet.

In fact, the lady that put this show on is a friend of ours. She got tired of the show cabal that dominates the area making it hard for kids to just enjoy the experience of showing, so she organized the whole thing. I enjoy people who put their actions where their principles are.

I enjoy being home on the farm even more, so I was super happy when we loaded Moo Jr. in the trailer and took him home. He was pretty happy too, and after getting a bath and a blow dry he settled into his pen for the night contentedly munching hay.

All in all, it was a rather glorious day. I am proud of the work my two kids put into their chosen activities, I was also pretty proud to slip on my fleece pj's and snack on my leftover pesto pizza of awesomeness. Kat's are pretty easy to please...

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And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's ready for a bit of time at home iPhone.