Hi, Nicky.
Thanks very much. We're doing well; my beautiful wife and children are healthy and happy, and my meds have the leukemia under control. Our oldest is formally a teenager now, and very much involved with sports at her school; her volleyball team has gone undefeated for three years. The older of the boys is turning into quite the soccer fiend, and his little brother is learning, as well. And, the baby will be two later this month, so she certainly has her own ways of keeping us busy. God continues to be far kinder to me than I deserve.
I managed to get a picture of me with our three oldest kids horseback (well, one of the boys likes his mule, so I guess horseback and muleback...) last year.
Foaling season started this week for us; we have a bay (maybe gray) filly and a paint colt on the ground so far, and have six more mares from which we're expecting babies this year. We have a couple young studs that we're excited about using more heavily this year, including our Real Gun son. He covered about ten mares between ours and our partner's last year, and we're pretty excited to see what that colt puts on the ground. We also will be breeding a gray homebred stud more heavily this year, after showing him then covering just a couple mares with him last year.
This is the Real Gun son:
This is our homebred gray stud; he ran with a bunch of bred mares all fall at a friend's ranch, and is now back up in a pen at our place so he can cover some of our mares:
We also partnered on a young show stud with the same fellow with whom we partnered on the Real Gun stud; the colt is two this year and being fit for a May show. We're pretty excited about him, and God willing we will be breeding a couple mares this year to him (and hopefully more in the coming years). And, we're playing a little bit in the running horse world with our race bred stud; he's had two fillies run well south of the border, and we're planning to run a three year old colt of his north of the border this spring.
Calving season is year round for us, so we're always happy to find a new calf on the ground. The expansion into the Red Brangus seed stock (from being a Charbray-only operation) is going well, and both the bulls and heifers are in demand in our neck of the woods.
The bulls look like this:
And their girlfriends like this:
They're a different type of cattle than what the ranch had been producing, but they're breeding and calving well, and the commercial growers in the area sure seem to like them.
In the meantime, I've managed to do a better job sharing pictures on the ranch's Facebook page, which is built exactly for that. If anyone would like to take a look, we're at
http://www.facebook.com/RanchoLaChimenea/.