“Honey, can you come help me? It’ll only take a minute.” Those seem to be my famous last words. If we are keeping track, I am probably the reason that we have been late the most times to church, dinner with friends or other appointments in town. The projects that I think will only take a few minutes inevitably end up turning into hour long ordeals. You can almost bet that anytime we have a deadline somewhere, there will be a problem that arises.

Without fail, holidays, Sunday mornings and the day you are trying to leave on a vacation, there will be cows out, a water tank that refuses to cooperate, or a flat tire on the car. Just this past weekend while the family and I were out running through pairs before we left for church, the generator that powers a pump in one of our pastures decided not to run anymore. I topped off the fuel and checked the oil only to find that it was about a half a quart low. Wouldn’t you know that by the time we ran back to the shop for a jug of oil and a funnel, our simple five minute task of restarting the generator had turned into a half hour long ordeal that left us hustling to make church on time.

On another occasion we were trying to leave the ranch for a little time off. Of course there was a mile long list of things that I needed to get done before we left. I spent all day long making sure that tanks were full of water, cattle were in the pastures that they needed to be in, and the car was loaded and ready for the journey. In the early morning hours as we began to pull out of the driveway, we discovered that the herd bulls decided to have fight club by the light of a full moon and were all wandering through the yard. It’s not a good start to a family vacation when you have one of those only take a minute moments. After putting bulls away and patching fence we were on our way, only three hours later than we had planned.

Those only take a minute moments are not limited to cows or equipment either. I have two children under the age of 10. My daughter is 4 going on 14. Her sass is unmatched and we are now at the age where she has to pick out her own outfits from head to toe. Each outfit has to be color coordinated from her shoes, all the way to her multiple purses that she has acquired. Her new thing is to change her outfit two or three times until she finds the one that fits her mood. God help me when she actually is 14 and I’m in a hurry to get somewhere, I don’t know if I have the patience to handle that.

Every project is one stripped out bolt, one broken wire or one uncooperative bovine away from being an all day ordeal. Any time there is a place to be or a deadline to be met, you can be assured that life will get in the way and whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. In my line of work, I have learned to expect the unexpected. I try to take it all in stride and laugh off the speed bumps. That’s all for this time, keep tabs on your side of the barbed wire and God bless.

Meinzer is a fourth-generation rancher raised on the southeastern plains of Colorado. He and his family live and ranch in Oshkosh, Neb.