It’s become an annual affair to go back to my son Greg and his wife's ranch where they have a rustic cabin that’s very comfortable. After some snacks and a big drink of water it’s time for the reason all 20 or so of family and friends have driven for about an hour from the V6 to the cabin which is only 15 miles away, it gives you some idea that this ranch road is not made for any car that has only seen White Lines and Stop Lights. I’m thinking, do I really need this hour long hike to the Waterfall that most all of the family does every year? Jack your almost 88 years old.

The grand finale for the week will be the grand opening of the Middle Ridge Sound Studio. Cian has come from Ireland with his wife Lauren, John and Barb’s oldest daughter. Lauren met Cian while she was studying in Ireland.

One of the magazines I subscribe to is Bloomberg Businessweek. It explores a wide range of subjects that will both raise your hopes for the future of our planet Earth with new technology. Then on the next page a different journalist will try to convince you that armageddon is just around the corner.

Our power is out here at our house as is everybody else’s in the Cholame Valley. It goes out fairly often as we’re at the end of the PG&E line but it’s usually a quick fix. But this time the fix wouldn’t be quick as snow started falling about 5:00 P.M. on February 24th and it’s snowing clear down to Parkfield at 1,500 feet elevation. The weatherman said it would be just a dusting but at this moment what I see is a sky full of great big wet snowflakes.

Good question, I have finally made my peace with the idea that it's alright to do nothing. Obviously, all the things that it takes to stay alive don’t count. So Jack, what’s left? Well, I get to observe and to ponder.

So whatever dream a grandchild might dream or a city kid from downtown Los Angeles it can come true. But for it to happen it will take passion first then commitment and persistence then the work part will come easy. And to those that worry, that a Cowboy might become obsolete on the V6, rest easy as there will always be horses to ride and cattle to be gathered on The Cowboy Side of California.

Zee and I just spent the nicest day at Lily and Mike’s calf branding; our daughter and son in law. Calf brandings are a necessary and fun part of the cattle business. The necessary part is the hot iron brand that is put on each calf to show ownership.

If there’s nothing new under the sun I don’t know what to write about but I’m really in a writing mood. So, I guess it will have to be about what hasn’t been discovered yet.

So it wasn’t long before, with Bill driving and I watching how he shifted gears and at a stop the balance it took to lift your left foot up (the clutch pedal) which would engage the engine that would start the Ford moving but at the same time, you had to press down on the gas pedal to speed the engine up. This coordinated movement of my right and left foot at the same time ended in a lurch of the Ford leading to a dead stop.

I don’t know how many years in the past that I awoke to the realization that the V6 was not just another piece of real estate to be sold with no regrets. What came to mind was the word abhorrent and in my next breath loathing was vile enough to describe the idea of selling the V6. It amounted to the same as selling one of my children which was not going to happen.

I think I’ve always been a control freak to varying degrees of severity. Today was a wonderfully rainy day that brought almost two inches of rain according to my rain gauge that I have zero control over.

So Cal Poly has served my father in the early 1920s myself in the middle 1950s our 4 children in the 70s and 80s and 3 of our grandchildren in the 21 century thanks Cal Poly. 

With your imagination you will find me sitting in my dentist “chair of pain” where my childhood days still hold sway in my mind, that there would be a fair amount of pain that I had to look forward to.

But we humans think we have devised better ways to live with Mother Nature that are based on convenience and necessity at the cheapest cost possible so our convenient society can function as though nobody should ever have to sweat or toil.

 It’s now about 2am in the morning and it has stopped snowing. What a relief but calves were still going down, but at a slower pace. We weren’t saving them all as we had a pretty good pile of dead ones. At around 4am Tom and I looked at each other and I said “I think we’re going to get out of this wreck alive and Tom said I think your right partner.” 

Our new neighbors told us that we paid way too much and the rumor was that we would probably go broke, that was 61 years ago. In my mind, as I gaze at the mountain view from our bedroom window, the V6 just keeps getting prettier each year.

My mother rolled her eyes again and said “okay anything for the war effort” as she had just lost one of her three brothers while fighting in Europe. So with a little furniture rearranging and some help from some of his friends at work, it took no time at all and the shop in the garage was now in mom and dad’s bedroom. From time to time I would awake when he would be using his lathe and something was out of round. That's when the clumping sound and vibration would wake everybody up. As for my mother, she was a gamer and never complained as long as it helped the war effort and got our family back to California.

For a brief moment in my life I wanted to be a stunt pilot.

The year was 1945 and the Second World War was just about over, making gasoline and the rationing cards required to buy gas, a little bit easier to come by. I was living with my parents and sister Lorna in Garden City, on Long Island, New York.

What’s important is that we humans decided to throw common sense out the window and not use forest and rangeland experts and those who live in these fire-prone areas to help our lands. Instead, we choose to follow a cartoon character that has now rallied several generations of people into believing that our forests are okay and that it’s up to “we the people” as the only ones that can prevent forest fires which couldn’t be farther from the truth. His name is Smoky Bear and his legacy in California alone, in the last decade are millions upon millions of acres up in smoke, plus thousands of homes and a couple of towns gone and some folks who didn’t get out of the way in time.