I have spent the last twenty years (on and off) working on my memories of my ‘cowboying’ days and how I supported my family and hobbies by working in the mines as a heavy equipment operator. For thirty-two years, I worked shift work and at the same time helped my father-in-law run 125 head of mother cows and farmed 960 acres of alfalfa hay. I would use my weekends and vacation time to operate the ranch, keeping a pair of boots with spurs attached in my horse trailer and my hardhat at the front door for whatever shift at the mine I happened to be working that month. This created a dilemma of what to put on with each waking day and is why I called the book Spurs and Hardhats.