Time to sit on the thinking post...

Why can decisions not all just be as easy as deciding whether or not I like peanut M&Ms (by the way that is a definite Yes!)? This is the "final countdown", and yeah that is some lame old phrase that brings an awesome and somewhat annoying tune in my head, but it is stuck there since watching an episode of this season's horrible excuse for Scrubs, anyways, this semester is the final countdown to my college life. Oh what a long 4 years it has been. I am definitely a lot smarter coming out than I was going in, thanks to some mistakes to learn from, a very knowlegeable Equine instructor, all the adjustments that come with moving 6.5 hours away from home, and possibly, the most influencing, summer spent in Wyoming. And this brings me to the reason for difficult decisions.

I have to find a job after graduation in May. The good thing is that I am pretty sure that, scratch that, I know that I want to work on a cow-calf/stocker operation. What I am having problems figuring out is figuring out where exactly. The 'smart' answer to that question is 'anywhere that I can find one'. Duh, that is a give-me. My delima is a few things. First, my family is very important to me, and like many other college graduates, I would love to move back close to home. But after the last 2 years of being home only 7 days minus Christmas break, I have decided that I can stand living long distance. Problem solved, for the time being. Second, being from Arkansas, I like, scratch that, love my warm weather and humidity with the occasional and only rare cold snap and winter weather. I just need to buck up and accept that there are places to live other than the gloriuos South where summer days are long, hot, and humid, followed by even more humid and muggy nights (Yes, I do enjoy the heat and humidity of those summer days and nights).

So, after spending last summer in Wyoming, seeing how far I could bending the lines without actually breaking them, and investigating the mystery of the Big Horn Basin and Mountains, I now realize how much I loved that place. I still sit and spend hours looking back at all of the pictures and blogs from that summer of my activities, just wishing I was back there. So why not go for it, stick my neck out there, and go for another shot at an even more awesome summer? I really want to go and do it again. Spend endless days working irrigation ditches, fighting with the irrigation pipes and pivots, riding horses and four-wheelers up in the mountains pushing cattle, making the treacherous climbs up the mountain sides to fix elk crossings, get up at 3:30 in the morning to stare at the enormity of the stars in the pitch black sky on my way to spend hours driving in circles cutting or baling hay only to miss the plume of smoke on the other end of the field at 3 in the afternoon from a fire that was caused by a lightening strike around noon and spend a while putting the fire out before the BLM fire fighters get there, spending many hours into the night listening to family stories at Hayward's, and cooking up all kinds of awesome food with the fellow interns...yeah that turned into a REALLY long sentence.

Should I just move on and go find another area of the cattle industry to discover? Or should I just ignore the apprehension and have a go at it in Wyoming?