My Amazing Man (Part One)

As you may have guessed from the previous Randy post, I LOVE MY HUSBAND! So I am going to brag a little more about my amazing man.

Instead of paying a counselor or therapist, when his first wife left him he built a tractor.

From scratch.

In 6 days.

It’s SO COOL! It’s a ¼ scale Rumley and when he fires it up it makes the most wonderful noise… sometimes he talks about selling it but I won’t let him. We've had it in a couple of parades and I hope to do that again someday.

He was having some work done on the engine not long ago so took the roof off, but I think you can actuall see it better without the roof anyway.


He loves antique engines and tractors and he doesn’t get near enough time to spend on his hobby, but he doesn’t complain about that either. Lucky me!

And lucky him, he actually WON a custom saddle in a raffle. Since the saddle didn’t fit him or his horse, the saddle maker took it back and gave him a credit towards his own custom saddle. He became intrigued with the process and spent hours and hours at the saddle shop, and got to help design and build his saddle.
He also made a matching breast collar, and a horn bag that was a bag on one side and a holster on the other...
Then he spent more hours and hours and built a second saddle, a McClellan reproduction.

He had to build his own because the one he found on e-bay, an actual antique saddle, was way too small. Guess both people and horses back then weren't as as big as they are now. So we hung the "real" McLellanon the wall.

He also was intrigued by river rafting, and our friend Wayne who is a river guide took him on a trip in the Grand Canyon... that was a LONG two weeks for me, at first we thought we would have NO communication at all but one guy did rent a satellite phone so I got a few short calls, and 2 postcards from Phantom Ranch :) (he loves me too!)





Even before that trip, Randy wanted his own river raft. After some research he decided he’d rather have a drift boat than a raft, and actually found one, over the internet, that was originally a Grand Canyon boat. Here it is upside down in the workshop area.
It needs some work so it’s another project he hasn’t had time to finish, but someday he will make his dream come true.

I have no doubt. I’ve seen him do it time and time again. His imagination and skill are boundless.

For instance, not long after we got married, we looked at motor homes, because the girls and I do a lot of horse camping and due to his back injury from the service, it’s much better for Randy to sleep in a real bed, not an air mattress or the ground. To purchase a motor home that would sleep the 7 of us and be strong enough to tow a horse trailer would have cost more than our house. So Randy says to me, what do you think of buying a school bus and building our own? I thought it was nuts, but you know what – WE DID IT. Well, we started anyway, and had done quite a few amazing renovations to that old bus. I have some amazing pictures on the computer but they are from our very first digital camera and for some reason blogger won't recognize them - they are not jpeg!?!?

Anyway I’m sure we could have finished it but our direction kinda changed. When we moved from town out to the ranch we got more horses, which meant a bigger trailer, and the new one was gooseneck, not bumper pull, so the bus couldn’t tow the trailer. There’s no stopping Randy though, we are now working on building our own living quarters into the front of the trailer and he still amazes me constantly with what he comes up with.

Stay tuned for more…