Real live horses!

Happy New Year!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and that 2012 is off to a good start!  I spent some time with my sister and her family out east over the holidays, and had a wonderful time.  We saw some crazy decorations - only a few days before Christmas...

and these folks were still adding lights - see the ladder?  Their neighbors, and the electric company, must love them!

Out finishing up the last of my Christmas shopping I spotted this license plate.

I want one!  Vanity plates galore out there - of course it's wall to wall people, too.

Speaking of lights, is this not cool?  Unfortunately, other than the huntsman's mount, my niece's pretty ponies and her rocking horse, and the carousel we rode at the mall (and not on the horse, she likes the teacup spinner), I didn't see a single horse.

It was, however, a lovely carousel

Unfortunately, I caught the cold/flu bug going around and spent the last few days of my visit hacking, sniffing, and mainlining cold medicine.  It was a wonderful trip, but it's good to be home and finally feeling better.

While I was gone it snowed, and T got the tank heater in. The ponies are round and fully fluffed

I hopped on Sunny for my first ride of the new year - a quick 5 minute slog around the pasture - trailed by Cat 1, who doesn't mind the horses in the least.

He's determined to walk between my feet, and seemed equally intent on getting himself flattened under Sunny's.  

Not much new here, and I have yet to catch back up on my blog reading, so I'm off to do that! 

Absenteeism

You know what they say about time? Well all of it's true! For some reason last month just vanished. I've been a bad blog parent.... So here's what's been doing lately:


The ponies are fine - as you can see the pastures are starting to green up.

But at the moment everything's still pretty wet, so they're locked in the lot eating their heads off and looking longingly out at the new grass.

No riding yet, although I'm crossing my fingers for this weekend.

We hit the SD Horse Fair in Sioux Falls mid-March. Very disappointing turn-out horse-wise. In past years there've been horses wall to wall. This year there might have been maybetwenty? Five or so Arabs, a pony, a couple of POAs, a couple of Morgans, four or five QH studs & a couple of paints. I'm sure there were lots of horses there for the ranch rodeo on Saturday evening, but had to feed, so we didn't stay. It was mostly vendors. And the one horse clinician I did get to see spent a lot of time trying to sell his stuff. Although the lady with the sheep herding dogs was cool to watch.

Spring cleaning took up another weekend - 'nuf said on that front. Ugh.

We spent Easter with T's relatives in Kansas. It was a beautiful drive - and you know that green horse post? Scroll down if you missed it. Well, we actually passed a truly green horse (the color, not the state!) out in a field somewhere slightly north of Spencer, Nebraska.

I suspect someone got a wild hair for St. Patrick's Day, because they had a couple of solid color horses, and then one a lovely shade of Mt. Dew bottle green that was slowly fading back to its natural white. I meant to take a picture on the way back, but we ended up coming up a different route, so I missed my chance.

Otherwise the trip was uneventful. T tried out his new fly fishing rod. (I napped in the car, which was nice and warm - it was a wee bit chilly outside and I was feeling lazy.)


One of T's sisters made a giant bunny cake - it got decapitated and mostly consumed before I managed to get a picture, but it was impressive (and tasty!).

The kids all declared themselves too old to want to hunt Easter eggs, so we deviled the hard-boiled ones, played a lot of cards, napped, yakked and generally relaxed. And of course ate way too much.

Sunday this came home with us.

That's where she started the trip, anyway. She wasn't thrilled to be in the crate, but she wasn't too vocal about it. There was the occasional plaintive "meReOw" from the back seat, but I've ridden with worse.

We found an open Family Dollar somewhere in northern KS - I thought we'd have no trouble locating a harness and leash (that's how Mabel made the trip) to stick on her in case she tried escaping, but no luck.
What we ended up with was a cat collar, a small, buckle dog collar (you can't see it, because it's buried in fur, but it's just behind her front legs) and a flexi-lead. Run the clip on the flexi through the ring on the dog collar and snap it to the ring on the cat collar, and Presto! cat harness.

Meet Nu-Nu

(I was told she was named after
a cat character in a children's book...
Being curious, I attempted to locate it.
Ummm - well, let's just say if anyone knows
what the book is I'd be happy to hear it,
because what I did manage to find
wasn't exactly children's material.
Maybe I'm spelling it wrong?)

Being strictly an indoor kitty - she's absolutely terrified outside - she had no interest in leaving the car, but better safe than sorry. She spent the rest of the trip on either my lap or T's, depending who was driving.

And that's the news for now.

Can it just be spring now?

(wails)
I wanna complain about MUD now!

I gambled on a trip home this weekend. It's never good when it rains in SD in January. Which is what it did on and off from Wednesday until Saturday last week. Thankfully, it was warmer than predicted, and what Mitchell got was, for the most part, spitting wet and almost no wind - not enough to soak the horses through, and not really raw.

They weren't cold, or at least they didn't seem to be. And with plenty of hay and a windbreak they weathered that portion of the week just fine.

But unfortunately my gamble didn't pay off. By Sunday we'd had about an inch of fluffy new snow. Marginal, you say? Oh, but that inch of snow hasn't actually hit the ground yet. It's rampaging its way around the eastern end of the state. Visibility is somewhere between an 8th and 1/4 mile - sometimes under. The road underneath may be dry, but seeing where the road is, now there's the challenge.

So I'm working from home today. I had a web meeting via Skype (kind of cool, actually) and cleaned up cat yak in between updating library resource guides. H didn't have school today either, but she hibernated until one of her friends called about 10 minutes ago. Lucky her!

The horses got extra hay last night (and they will again tonight) and they're sheltered from the worst of the wind, so with the temperature staying in the 20's they're in good shape for now. And tomorrow is supposed to be better. I hope so!

Views from Saturday

No riding this weekend. :(

On the productive side of things, we did reinforce a gate - several of the more adventurous idgits discovered that one of the gates at the west end of one divided pasture was not live - unbeknownst to me, since in general G does the moving around of pasture-grazing areas. He ran a single wire across, and didn't connect the electricity for whatever reason. Of course, once they determined that they could get under without getting zapped, that's exactly what they did. But could they walk back under to get out? Nope.Instead, they walked to the east end of the field and waited at that gate to be rescued. Sigh. So we added a couple of wires and some plastic bags, and they seemed to be discinclined to revisit the issue. (We need to sink a new corner post up there as well, which is why we didn't just make the gate wire hot.)

Reunited with the three that stayed on the right side of the fence, the gate crashers were very happy to head up for a drink. After we did the gate thing and the fly-spray thing, we left them to resume grazing and headed out to do a bit of fishing.
Sunday we wormed, which was ever so much fun, since it was windy and storm-threatening. Out of the eight, three were good - as expected. One who is usually not at all fun was a breeze (shock!), and four could have been a lot better. I really need to spend a couple of hours doing the syringe with applesauce thing. On the plus side, I only ended up wearing a tiny bit of wormer this time, and not most of a tube like usual.

And that's the horse activity for last weekend. I am informed that T has been riding and checking on the four-feets, and all is well thus far. Darn, I hate being horse deprived during the week!

School has started for H, and M is back in CT with his mom, so no more fishing and riding with the boy until next summer :( Hopefully, he'll still be as excited about it then! The house is going to feel awfully empty this weekend with one less person in it. (Teenage girls occupy lots of space, too, but the area around them tends to be rather more drama filled!! LOL)

It's raining, it's pouring...

No one's snoring here, though. I just discovered the living room wall is running water. The roof is on the agenda this summer. I think it just moved up to the top of the list. Bleh.... When it slows down a bit I'll have to go check the gutters on that side.

So... my packing for Sunday is mostly accomplished. I have to figure out what work clothes to take yet, and double-check my list again. I'd hoped it would be nice today and we could get Rufus moved, but instead I'm staying busy with house cleaning. The cats are thrilled - NOT! They migrated downstairs to get away from the vacuum.

T & kids headed for Kansas to spend the 4th. Sure has been a lot of packing & unpacking going on here lately!

But I had a nice treat to break up my packing & cleaning - a friend from... wow, kindergarten on (!) and her family stopped by on their way back from the Black Hills. Her boys are getting so big! They couldn't stay long, unfortunately, as they had a long drive ahead of them, but it was great to see them, and the boys had a chance to let off some steam from hours in the car.

Yesterday was garden day and new shocks for the Blazer. And I mowed. We also got Rufus wormed. He needs a 4-way and his West Nile, too, but the vet clinic was closed by the time we headed that way, and TSC was out of 4-way again. Rufue was very polite about the wormer and continues to not mind being sunblocked. Amyra was not thrilled to have her coating applied. I suppose it must smell bad, although it doesn't seem to me to have much odor.

Sunny, Thunder and the girls are all fat and sassy. I think Sunny was disappointed not to be heading out for a ride, as he whinnied after me as I left.

You know, it really sucks
to finally have two horses ready to go
and not be able to ride when I want!!

Two days, three states

Rufus update -

Lovely boy - horrible background

As you cans see, he's not at all sore on it, and it can't be too painful, as he relaxes completely while we doctor. But he does have a nice bump.

With salve

Okay, not great pictures. Too much shadow, but you can kind of get the idea. We've been hosing with cold water and then salving. I think the proud flesh is pretty much gone, so tomorrow I'll probably just hose it and then let it be.

I ran T down to the airport in Omaha on Saturday. He's flying out to bring the kids back for the rest of the summer :)

We had a bit of time free once we got down there, so we drove over to the new walking bridge spanning the Missouri between Nebraska and Iowa. The Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge is a 3,000 ft suspension bridge (you can feel it flex and sway when you're standing on it) connecting Omaha and Council Bluffs. You can check out a webcam here. It's easy to find - right down by Eppley field, the Omaha airport.

Major suspension

Nebraska side

Missouri River - Party Boat Central

Standing in two states

Iowa side

That's all that's new from here at the moment. But more riding updates soon.

Not-quite-Friday Book Review: something from up north

Once again, I've missed Friday. But since I slacked last week, I suppose I'd better not this week.

We get Canada's weather down here in SD quite a bit, so what's more appropriate than a book from up there?

The Phantom Roan by Stephen Holt

Great old-fashioned Western-style coming of age novel. A young cowboy sets off to fulfill his dream of becoming a vet. Hitchhiking across Canada, he rescues a mangy, injured, outlaw roan with a nasty attitude. Against the advice of his new employer, he nurses the horse back to health, and befriends him. A side story covers the issue of mange management and the government-required cattle dousing that many ranchers attempted to avoid.

The main action kicks in when the outlaw roan's former owner, a rodeo livestock promoter, reclaims the horse with plans to return him to his former career as a vicious outlaw bucking horse. Very exciting stuff.

Growing up, for some reason I always thought this story was set out west somewhere like South Dakota or Montana. Which I suppose isn't so odd - there are a lot of similarities between Canada's "west" and ours. In any case, this was one of my favorite books - and after reading it I spent lots of trips scanning the ditches and creek bottoms we'd drive past for mysterious horse shapes that I could rescue.

The closest I ever came to a "road rescue" - other than returning a the down the road neighbor's escapees occasionally - was on one trip up to visit my folks. Driving along in the pitch black night, somewhere in WI I rounded a corner to see the taillights in front of me light up and something that was not a deer scampering across the road.

It was a burro. I pulled over, chased him back through the farm gate and, since it was two in the morning, closed the gate and stuck a note to it explaining why.

Of course, when I came back by a week later I discovered that the fence attached to the gate I'd shut was decorative, and only ran for about a 1/4 mile. It was open on both ends. But the burro was okay.

Still here...

Okay, I haven't fallen off the planet, really I haven't. It's been a hectic week getting H packed and off to CT for a couple of weeks with her mom, cleaning house in the aftermath and preparing for my sister to arrive for her visit.

Not much new horse-wise to report. After playing phone tag with the farrier, the ponies have a manicure scheduled for Saturday a.m. at 9 o'clock. Which is good, because Sunny's feet are long enough I've been worrying about him overreaching. And a couple of them are clicking pretty badly.

Nose flies have arrived - BECG, you just had to send them this way, didn't you :)

And it's been raining for the last 5 days. Not a bad thing for the hay situation, but not good for riding.

Other than that... quiet is nice.

Friday Book Review: How many thousand miles?

I ran across this book weeding the library shelves early last week, and I was immediately hooked (needless to say, the book isn't going anywhere!).

I'm not usually a fan of travel literature, but the sheer magnitude of what this particular traveler set out to do is... mind-boggling.

Tschiffely's Ride by A.F. Tschiffely

So basically, it goes like this: In 1925 A. F. Tschiffely, a young Swiss instructor of English, set out to do what no one had ever done - and the majority of sane people thought to be impossible: ride from Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina to New York City. He would take only what supplies could be carried by his two horses, Mancha and Gato, and his dog. (The dog's company lasted only hours into the first day, and was something of an adventure all by itself.)

In all, bu the time he decided to conclude his ride in Washington D.C., Tschiffely rode over 10,000 miles in around 2 1/2 years, all of it on either Mancha or Gato, two teenage Argentine Criollo horses he'd acquired from a supporter only a few weeks before the start of his ride. (Tschiffely's reason for breaking off his trek? He was concerned for his horses' safety as motorcars were increasingly prevalent and their drivers often did not respect his right to travel the roadways.)

What's truly amazing about Tschiffely's account is as much what isn't written as what is. In spite of the hardships and dangerous situations in which he found himself, he writes mainly of the people and places he encounters, glossing over many incidents which must have threatened to derail his trip entirely.

The book has a few black & white photos, mostly not of the horses, unfortunately. But I was somewhat surprised when I checked online for more information about the breed to find that a) there isn't much out there that's really credible, and b) as pictured, they aren't exactly.... Well, let's just say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It's quite obvious that they're tough, hardy, and possessed of rare endurance, however they look!

When I think of the many reasons I've been known to postpone a ride..... An amazing story, even if you're neither a horse person nor a fan of travel literature.