When life is exciting...

I usually wish it wasn't. Boring is good! November was nice. Than it got cold. Initially, that wasn't so bad. The ponies ate hay and put up with my silliness.


But the sub-zero temps have been hard on equipment. Two tractors and the skid loader at the farm cocked their toes up. The tractors went down first - the skid loader, after a week or better of tugging round bales about, started spewing hydrolic fluid and died. They came yesterday to winch it onto a trailer and haul it off to be fixed.

T, bless his heart, has been feeding the horses the part of the week that I'm in Aberdeen, so he was the one who got to load the back of the pick-up with hay down at the bales and haul it to the horses.

As if the tractors weren't bad enough (and it wasn't just the horses needing hay - there's also the 200+ sheep & the cows, so little wonder the skid loader quit), the vet was out to castrate calves on Thursday. Working calves involves closing the horses out of the upper lot. Usually not an issue, as it doesn't take more than a few hours.

Unfortunately, the cold weather wasn't done claiming victims, and the hydrolics on the chute went. And unless we're working on the second three, that was unlucky event #4! Thankfully, no one was seriously hurt.

But the chute, sans lifting power and sans tractors evidently couldn't be moved, either. The good news? The sheep & cattle can all still get to the waterer which is behind the chute. The bad news? Yep, you guessed it. The horses can't.

That little blue bit back there? That's the waterer.

And that's where the chute's parked. Smack in the way.

So we're doing the bucket routine - hopefully - temporarily. Which of course meant we first had to find the big buckets, and one of them had to be patched. This was the quick fix. It's amazing what you can do with electrical tape. As T said, it's not quite duct tape & baling wire, but it's up there.


But the horses are happy & healthy, and that's the important thing, after all.