Relative Something

At least it hasn’t been snowy on the ranch the last two days. It has been rainy, however. Wednesday night we experienced a thunder and lightning storm that had me sounding stressed in my slumber. Cyndie spoke soothingly and I recall hearing her voice, but not what I had been dreaming at that moment. She said I quieted right down and my breathing soon returned to normal sleeping mode.

When we stepped out in the morning to feed the horses, I asked Cyndie if she had arranged the rocking chairs under the tree by our driveway.

She said she hadn’t touched them. That meant the way they were laying in the image above was accomplished by the wind. Previously, the chairs were upright, sitting side by side, and facing downhill.

The chilly rain is keeping the horses under the overhang space where they can munch hay while staying out of the wind and keeping dry. When they aren’t chomping bites of hay from the net bags, it appears they are using them as a surface to rub against. I found a mat of horse hair coating the outer surface of one.

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This serves as a good incentive for us to get our newly braided strands of old-cut twine wrapped on one of the posts for them to rub. We are making decent progress in converting individual lengths to reusable bundles!

It’s not as fun to do braiding when it’s so cold and wet but while waiting for the horses to finish the food in their pans, I twist up a section to pass a few extra minutes. When it is sunny and warm, sitting under the overhang braiding while the horses watch is a lot more fun and we get a lot more done at once.

Before the rain got intense, Cyndie and I stepped out to pull our custom netting from the top of the landscape pond. It’s proved to be a convenient way to keep leaves out of the pond over the off-season.

I hadn’t gotten around to putting the pump and filter back in before the rain picked up. I ended up moving on to something else and the pond stuff sat out in the rain for a couple of days before I remembered about it all and moved the buckets back into the garage –after pouring out the water they had collected. It reminded us to put out our rain gauges.

The last few days of spring weather have been messy, limiting our outdoor accomplishments, but at least none of the precipitation coming down on us has fallen as snow. Thank goodness for that.

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