Posts Tagged ‘horse blankets’
Sound Carries
Continuing with the theme of how serene it can be in our little paradise, particularly in the early morning, Cyndie and I caught ourselves being the “loud family” yesterday on our walk with Asher on the way to feed the horses. Sounds carry, we know that. Our immediate neighbor to the south has a phone ringer on one of his outbuildings that must be out of an old Bell Telephone rotary dial model. When it rings, it seems like it’s coming from within our paddock fence line.
When we emerged from the woods yesterday morning, the cloudy sky was particularly fascinating with a dramatic swirl directly overhead. I knew a photo wouldn’t capture the full essence of what our eyes were perceiving, but snapped a shot anyway.
When we walk and talk in the morning, it is common that one of us will get ahead or fall behind, pulling a weed or vine, so the projection of our voices picks up a bit as we carry on conversations. Suddenly, I’ll become aware that we are shouting at each other on an otherwise silent outdoor morning in such a way that the neighbors and the horses wouldn’t be able to miss.
Anybody outside yesterday would have heard us marveling over the spectacle in the sky, or how Asher was about to chase after a deer that had waited until he and I were only about four feet away before it bolted off through the trees, and our boy perfectly responded to my command to “Leave It!” and stayed with me.
The kind of conversational stories that a person can be so involved in telling that one loses track of how loud their voice has become. Yeah, way too many mornings, we are the loud family marching through the woods and along the back pasture to the barn, carrying on at the top of our lungs in the otherwise blissful serenity of our little valley.
“The Hayses are up and about,” the neighbors will announce.
With a chance of rain in the forecast and verifiably chilly temperatures, we put rain sheets on the horses yesterday morning while they were eating from their feed buckets. The precipitation didn’t show up until much later, but Light had made her own decision about being covered by the time it started to fall.
Cyndie found the blanket wadded up on the ground in the middle of the afternoon, bottom straps still clipped, and nothing ripped open. It must have been a fascinating sight to witness her Houdini performance of getting herself free of that. I’m confused about whether she pulled it up over her head or down off her butt. Had to be over her head. There’s no other way.
I’m glad to have missed it. Catching her in the middle of that would have been frightening. I wonder if she made a lot of noise while wiggling and wrangling it off of herself.
The way sound carries, the neighbors probably knew about it before we did.
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Horse Happenings
For the record, my legs are feeling stiff from Wednesday’s up and down, crouching, kneeling, walking, and bending effort to clear the weeds. Just in time for a planned bicycling outing this Sunday. How soon do I get to say I’m too old for this?
I took a picture of Mix receiving a syringe of medicine in the side of her mouth from Cyndie. Mix makes ridiculous faces after Cyndie squirts the dose into her mouth, vividly demonstrating her disgust at the insult. Cyndie has taken to adding an equal amount of applesauce in hopes of masking the flavor that bothers Mix.
The reaction was less extreme with the flavor enhancer.
Maddy, from This Old Horse, was over yesterday, and she thought Mix looked like she was moving with less pain, so the icky medicine is probably helping to some degree.
The reason Maddy was here was for an appointment with a new (to us) farrier. He seemed like a young guy to me, especially considering his name was Ralph, which aligns more with my dad’s generation. Ralph came across as a man of few words, but he let his work do most of the talking. He was efficient and handled the horses’ occasional resistance with gentle patience. That is a welcome change from the previous person who was doing the job.
We were graced with a day of much-improved weather yesterday. All it takes is a clear blue sky and wind speeds of zero for the sunshine to soften the blow after a night cold enough to produce a block of ice in our rain gauge.
The low sun brought a golden glow to the dry corn stalks in the fields and cast a long shadow in the late afternoon hour.
We removed the rain sheets from the horses for a few days because of the nicer weather. As much as possible, we want to encourage the growth of the horses’ natural winter coats, and providing the artificial warmth of blankets can send their bodies the wrong signal, reducing the need for more insulation.
I don’t know if science supports that idea, but it satisfies our intuitive perceptions, so we go with it. If the horses shiver, they get blankets. In the meantime, they gotta grow more hair.
That’s some horse happenings as we reach the last week of October, 2025.
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That’s October
Now, this is more like it. Although that doesn’t mean we are necessarily enjoying it. Remember how much griping I was doing about the hot weather extending well into September and October this year? There has been a change.
That is what October is expected to look like. It is chilly, rainy, blustery, and miserably dreary-looking outside. That leads to cold and wet animals, as well as the people who need to be outdoors caring for them. Just the way it should be in the tenth month of the year up here in the Northland.
We have successfully completed our most essential winterization steps while it was still comfortable outside, making days like yesterday much easier to endure. The pump was removed from our landscape pond on Monday, and the water line down to the labyrinth was drained and blown out with my air compressor.
The horses all have on rain shells to give them a thin bit of added protection from the battering wind-blown rain showers. There is little that we find sadder than a sopping wet, shivering horse. The rain shells do prevent that result, at the very least.
This blast of real October weather has allowed me to become more sloth-like than usual, and I am taking full advantage of it by doing little to nothing that could be construed as useful or productive unless one considers napping in a recliner as being useful.
At this age, I find that doing nothing produces less guilt than it did when being responsible for raising children or working for someone who was paying for my time. I’m sure that Cyndie would rather I stay as busy as she is every day, but since she sets such a high bar of comparison, I long ago proved my methods fall far short of the examples she sets.
If there are two ways to do anything in this world, Cyndie and I will always choose opposite methods. It makes it all the more special when we succeed at things as a couple. We rely on the magic (flexible) thread of love to keep us together after banging heads trying to execute any version of a metaphoric two-person lift.
The end goal always tends to be the same for both of us, so that helps.
Thirteen years after moving here, our end goal has blurred a bit. Wintervale never became an income generator that could help us cover expenses like we originally envisioned. October has a way of feeling like our beginning, but it also always ushers in the end of so many things growing outdoors.
It’s hard to think about ourselves and the big picture of another year at Wintervale when videos keep surfacing of masked thugs uncontestedly kidnapping people in broad daylight in US cities, while portions of the White House are being demolished by heavy machinery. Rather symbolic of a very scary future for our country.
I wonder how business is going at the inflatable frog costume factory these days. If Cyndie and I were going out for Halloween, we’d probably dress as a masked thug with a military vest handcuffed to an inflatable frog.
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Available Shade
It’s there when they want it.
At different times throughout the day yesterday, I spotted a horse taking advantage of the shade now available. It’s hard to describe how rewarding that is for me.
It was a relief to get their rain blankets off them first thing in the morning. They were rubbing up against everything around, and I noticed one of the metal latches on Light’s blanket catching on a hay net. Thankfully, it let loose before ripping the net apart. Seeing that, I got my explanation of how in the heck they had ripped down a board the night before.
On my last walk of the night with Asher, I spotted a hay net on the ground. I picked it up and carried it back to the overhang, where I found the board it had been attached to lying on the ground. At the time, I had no idea how or why they had pulled hard enough to yank the six screws that had been holding that board. If that net had snagged on the hardware of one of their blankets, I can easily imagine them using their weight to lurch free. That’s more than enough to pop the board loose.
It’s interesting to imagine the brief drama that must have occurred, and how startling it probably was to the horses, since they were all so serenely hanging out in the vicinity as if nothing was amiss when I showed up.
They were all standing around acting as if there wasn’t a board ripped off the wall for all the world to see. None of them moved a muscle as I picked up the long, heavy board and wove my way around them to take it away.
If I were to show up carrying our Wintervale banner flag, their panicked reaction would make you think it was the scariest thing they’d ever seen.
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Weather Wallop
We got smacked to a degree I didn’t anticipate yesterday with a combination of multiple inches of rain in uncomfortably cold temperatures while strong wind gusts blasted us mercilessly. We still had the small paddock closed off, which constrained the horses to having access to only one side of the overhang for shelter.
Just to keep things from being simple to deal with, on Monday, Cyndie got a COVID vaccination booster that had her feeling poorly by yesterday morning. That left it to me to tend to the horses in conditions that were teetering on completely out of control.
The poor girls were shivering desperately and very anxious to get their servings of grain to take their minds off the misery. Serving them became a crazy ad-lib as I tried to maintain some order and control while moving their serving stations on the fly to try giving access out of the rain for each horse.
Thankfully, they were moderately cooperative as they were well aware of the predicament we were all in. After doing my best to give them the bare minimum comforts available in the moment, I took Asher back up to the house for his breakfast.
A short time later, our new person from This Old Horse, Maddy, showed up with doses of dewormer for the horses. She picked up where I left off in trying to find a way to give the horses some advantage against the weather. I joined her and we decided to try moving them inside to the individual stalls.
We got them in, but we couldn’t get Mix to settle down. The other three seemed to figure out they were out of the wind and rain, they had food and water, and no other horse was trying to invade their space. Sadly, I got the impression that Mix was triggered and having a major PTSD reaction to the confinement.
Subsequently, Mix’s prolonged stress, demonstrated in kicking the walls, biting boards, and general flailing about, began to UNsettle the others. We tried changing the horse next to Mix by swapping the positions of Swings and Mia, but it didn’t make enough difference in Mix’s tantruming.
Instead of drying out, Mix was lathering up in her own sweat. We ended up putting blankets on them and letting them back outside after I strung another temporary barrier that at least allowed them access to both sides of the overhang.
A little over a week after setting up fans to cool them in high heat, we now have the horses wearing blankets in the latter half of May.
A windy, rainy, 40°F weather wallop, indeed.
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Bright Morning
The water line in the Ritchie fountain needed a brief shot of hot water to flow this morning, but that will probably be the end of our water worries for a few days. The temperature is climbing swiftly this morning, and we will be heading out to pull off horse blankets as soon as I finish this post. It is easy to see travel patterns now that we’ve had plenty of days without new snow.
Here is the difference between one time down a trail and a frequently used path:
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I’ve pointed out many times the icy patches in the large paddock that the horses avoid. Here is Mia soaking up the morning sun where you can see the horses cover a lot of the ground except for where they don’t:
That manure pile is my attempt to build a mound over the drain tile from the barn water spigot to keep them from squishing it. The water that drains from it creates that icy patch that the horses know to avoid.
This morning, I caught a shot of Mix’s grain mustache when she looked up from cleaning the spillage on Swing’s placemat.
It’s a pretty cheery day here in our oblivion, sequestered from any gloom or doom related to the evils of this world. It makes me feel a little guilty about how nice we have it. I don’t feel any guilt at all about making the horses’ world as blissful as possible for them.
For now, we are taking care of each other.
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Coping Well
When it gets extremely cold with dangerously low wind chill temperatures, schools cancel classes and communities postpone events, but nobody cancels walking the dog or feeding the horses. Eighteen below zero Fahrenheit doesn’t keep us from donning our “space suits” to trudge out into the harsh conditions and carrying out our duties the same as every other day.
Asher needs to get out there to freshly mark his territory, and the horses need us to make sure they can get a drink of water and feed them grain and hay. Finding the water isn’t frozen in the morning is a huge plus in having things go smoothly for the early feeding. All four horses appear to be coping well with the biting cold, which also goes a long way toward allowing us to enjoy life here in the Arctic conditions.
While I was standing idle in the morning sunlight, waiting for the horses to finish their grains, I noticed some pigeons were on the waterer. They weren’t satisfied with simply getting a drink. One of them jumped in the water like it was its personal hot tub.
I have no idea how they avoid getting frozen when they step back out into the -18°F air. I would expect them to become pigeoncicles. They have been leaving a lot of pigeon-poopcicles on the horses’ placemats lately that are almost impossible to scrape off. I would say the pigeons seem to be coping with the cold better than all the rest of us.
We are starting to count the days until we can pull blankets off the horses to free them from that annoyance. As soon as overnight temps quit dropping below zero and daytime temps are hitting the 20sF, we will offer the horses some relief. The blankets are helpful during cold snaps or heavy snowfalls, but the horses would prefer not having them matting down the hair on their backs for days on end.
They have done a good job of coping with the necessary evil this week. I’d think they would appreciate having the blankets fluffed and recentered on their backs, but they tend to act non-cooperatively most of the times we try.
We just need to cope with getting a little push-back and reposition the blankets anyway. Having the blankets hanging off-center may not bug them, but it bugs the OCD tendencies in me when I see it.
That’s an area where my coping skills could use a little work.
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Excited Morning
It was not a quiet week in Wintervale this morning. It is cold out there, but not below zero yet. I took Asher for a walk, and Cyndie headed straight for the barn to minimize her time out in the cold. Just as Asher and I popped out of the woods, a noisy truck could be heard up by the house. The dog was only mildly intrigued, and I was able to quickly deduce the neighborhood coyote hunters were busy at it.
Cyndie had a chance to check in with them near the barn, telling them we had seen the coyotes on our night camera a day or two ago. She told him she would keep our dog in the barn while they were in the vicinity.
Much to my glee, we returned to the ordinary orientation for feeding the horses this morning. Mix and Mia on the same side together, and Swings and Light on the other.
Mia is doing well and consuming much closer to her regular amounts of grain again. We are back to watering down her servings, which is a hassle in the extreme cold. If it prevents Mia from having further problems, it’s a hassle we will endure.
The high winds in our forecast had not started yet, but when a breeze hit me and made the air biting cold, I suggested we blanket the other horses sooner rather than later. Light was not interested in accepting a blanket and danced a few circles while we made several attempts. About that same time, the hunting dogs started howling in our vicinity. That put Asher in a tizzy of barking in the barn.
Soon, we heard shots being fired in the field next door, and the horses went on high alert. About the time things should have calmed down, one of the hunters could be heard calling his dog pleasantly. That quickly changed from pleasant when it became obvious the hound wasn’t obeying. Cyndie saw the pup slip through the growth on the edge of our property and sniff around one of her gardens. Asher kicked up his barking to a new level.
One of the hunters drove up our driveway to retrieve two of their straying dogs, and we all lived happily ever after.
We left Light blanketless and headed up to the house for our breakfast, tolerating Asher’s unrelenting urge to continue barking throughout our meal. I’ll be interested to see if Light will be a little more accepting of her blanket as the temperature drops throughout the afternoon.
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Two Skies
So, if I didn’t want to use a cliche that perfectly conveys my meaning, do I just choose a different series of words? My, there can be such a big change in conditions from one day to the next. [see “what a difference a day makes”]
On Saturday morning, I checked my weather app before stepping out the door to see what we would be walking into. It indicated a 12mph wind, but looking outside, I could see there was none. The air was still.
However, when we got to the barn, our local conditions caught up with the data being reported on the app. The wind picked up with gusto.
As the day wore on, the sky became filled with a remarkable depiction of the waves blowing the air, shaping the clouds in the upper atmosphere.
Yesterday couldn’t have been more different. Even though there was nothing up there to focus on, I felt drawn to snap a photo of how it looked when I lifted my eyes to the sky.
It doesn’t look like the kind of sky that matches a holiday gift season that advertisers are trying to persuade all of us is in full swing. It’s a never-ending beef of mine. I saw Christmas gift-giving prompts before Halloween.
Seems like we should probably be seeing Valentine’s ads pretty soon based on that timing. Get ready to buy chocolates, flowers, and jewelry soon!
The skies won’t look too friendly this afternoon based on the forecast. Cyndie aired out the horse blankets yesterday in preparation for chilly precipitation due to arrive. Wearing blankets is not one of the horse’s favorite things so we try not to put them on sooner than necessary.
At the same time, we’d like to get them on before the mares get soaking wet. It becomes a challenge of timing it just right to keep all of us happy.
Unlike the timing of certain holiday advertisers…
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Saturated Snow
The weather played out just like the forecasters predicted. Overnight Sunday into Monday the snowflakes flew with an unrelenting intensity. I woke in the middle of the night and saw it was piling up to an impressive depth on the deck railing out back.
It started to change over to a mixture of rain and snow a couple of hours before sunrise. I knew the moment I stepped outside yesterday morning the snow was the consistency of wet cement.
Two of the horses stayed totally dry. The other two looked totally wet. They all appeared to be coping just fine.
I grabbed a shovel and headed down toward the road. I wanted to see how deep the snow was on the driveway and check on the mailbox that usually gets blasted by snow shooting off the blade of the township plow truck.
Just as I stepped out of the barn, I heard the truck coming. I was not going to get there in time to save the mailbox. Luckily, it wasn’t an issue. The driver was working at a controlled speed to push the slop to the side, not throw it well off into the ditches. The mailbox was fine.
The snow depth on the driveway was borderline worth plowing. The challenge would be all the water saturating the bottom couple of inches.
I decided to try running the Grizzly ATV up and down the driveway to disrupt the sloppy covering of snow, half hoping it might be enough to make it easily navigable by cars.
The ATV tracks made it look easy enough to plow so I went for it and lowered the blade at its sharpest angle. I don’t know that it made it any easier but the pavement cleaned up nicely in just a handful of slip-sliding passes.
I wasn’t going to even try the plow blade around the hay shed. I made multiple passes to break up the snow and called it good enough. When we went down to feed the horses at dinner time, there was standing water in many of those tire tracks.
Based on evidence on the ground in the paddocks, several, if not all of the horses, did some lying down in that soaking wet mess with their blankets on. Well, blankets mostly on. Swings managed to fold hers over off her butt.
You can see her back foot standing on the dragging blanket making it hard to move forward. That area just beyond the overhang is even more like wet cement with the combination of sand and saturated snow. The back corner of Swings’ blanket is a mud-saster.
Too bad she’s not one to stand out in the rain. Some precipitation might help rinse off all the muck.
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Relative Something 