I am part way to becoming a South Texas rancher.  That is a person owning 20 or more acres of scrub brush in the brush country of South Texas.  These ranchers normally go out to their land holdings on Saturday or Sunday, build a nice charcoal fire and butcher a goat.  A day of drinking beer, eating tortillas and carne guisada and then they forget about the goat and it ends up burnt.  If the beer is cold enough they don’t really care about the goat.

My wife came from a ranching family and had little desire to even go to the ranch.  She has consented to me buying one of my own.  Now how do you explain that?  Must be love.  Makes no matter the reason cause boys I am happier than a pig in “you know what”.  I have been traveling to Sanderson Texas for the last 15 years to go “hang out with the boys”, doing a bit of cooking, a bit of drinking and generally having fun.  It was a brutal 8+ hour drive and we finally had to give the place up because of the distance.  We will now have a place 1 1/2 hr from the house, with cell phone coverage and a real house to sleep in.  One temporary inconvenience, no bath room.  No shower.  There is one of those little houses with the moon in the door and it even has a real commode seat instead of just a hole in the wood.  Guess what the first addition to the house will be.  A real bathroom.  One can only be so primal before good sense takes over.  I have always had a deep-seated fear that my wallet would fall thru the hole in an outhouse.  Do you think a psychiatrist would think something about that fear? 

It will take a couple of weeks before closing on the place but that gives me plenty of time to make detailed plans of what chore to tackle first.  However, I think cleaning the outhouse will be real high on the list.  Mowing the cockleburrs down will be right behind it.  Then its time to fire up the pit and kill a wild hog and sit by the fire and eat pulled pork and drink ice tea.  Retirement cant get much better than that.

I have two types of western hat.  I have a straw that looks like one that LBJ would wear and I have a panama.  I havent decided which look I am going to adopt.  The blue bibbed overalls farmer Brown look has been somewhat vetoed by a higher authority.  The higher authority just doesnt seem to understand just how much room is in the seat of those overalls. 

Chuy the goatherder