Posts Tagged ‘horses’
Sail Down
Since we seem to be on a roll lately of preparing in advance for the coming winter, we decided to take down the shade sail yesterday. By saying, “in advance,” I am referring to how we have been taking care of things while the weather is pleasant instead of waiting until it starts getting nasty outside and we are forced to do it without delay.
I’m relieved that we barely had any wind to deal with because when a slight breeze occurred, the loosened sail suddenly pulled with surprising force. I can’t imagine trying to take the sail down every time the wind appeared to be getting too strong. Luckily, Mix showed up to hold the ladder for me when I started spinning the first turnbuckle.
When I moved the ladder to the opposite corner, Mia joined us to see if she could help, too.
It’s rewarding to see the horses remain calm while we are behaving in unusual ways. Yesterday, it was our working with the ladder and gathering up the large sail in our arms right in their midst. They showed a healthy curiosity, but didn’t startle over our strange activity.
For winter storage, I decided to hang the sail by its corners inside the barn, like I had done in the beginning, before the posts and framing were in place in the paddock.
I tightened the turnbuckles up to suspend it out of the way over our heads. It helps that Cyndie and I are both short people.
Without the sail, the framing still looks pretty good to me. It’s got character.
The extended weather forecast currently mentions a 30% possibility of a frozen mix of precipitation on Saturday. Having the sail taken down frees us from any concerns about how it will fare if that happens. It also allows us to keep our attention on how the horses will be coping in the event of cold, wet, and freezing conditions.
This time, they may be getting blankets instead of the rain sheets if it’s going to get as cold as is being predicted. The high temperature on Sunday may not even rise above freezing.
Oh my, that’s almost like the normal November weather of the good old days! Bring it on. This year, we are about as ready for winter weather as we’ve ever been. It’s kind of a reverse psychology thing. If we prepare for the worst, then maybe it won’t happen.
Especially since we also always hope for the best.
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Good Life
We woke yesterday morning with a glee hangover from our amazing David Byrne show Monday night, and it lingered throughout the day. Blessed with a fabulous climate-warmed summery-feeling November morning, we danced our way through the woods with Asher before approaching the barn to feed the horses.
We found the mares luxuriating in the emerging sunlight and mellow as ever. It got me thinking about how they stand so stoically to endure the miserable conditions when the weather is gruesome, as if they are aware that it never lasts, and that there will eventually be rewarding days like this as compensation.
Lately, mornings as nice as this one was –when the horses are calmly munching their feed and the natural world is as peaceful as ever– serve as a balm, soothing and comforting us. Coming on the heels of our evening of super special entertainment, it felt like we were getting a double dose of feel-good medicine.
Asher seemed to be enjoying the unusually nice weather as well, and it had him romping playfully all over the place. When I decided to try raking some leaves, he behaved like I was making piles for him to race through and kick all over the place.
For what I hope is the last time this year (never say never), I got out the riding mower to mulch the leaves in the backyard grass. Most of the trees that drop leaves have finished doing that, so it seemed like a reasonable time to finish tending to the grass in back.
When I put the mower back in the garage, I moved the ATV to the front and parked the mower behind it, a symbolic gesture in anticipation of the change from mowing season to snowplowing season.
After that, I started picking off little nuisance tasks that had been nagging at me for a while. I drove my car to the shop garage to put air in the tires. Then I brought our three most-used wheelbarrows up from the barn to inflate tires on those. I attached a recently purchased battery manager to the diesel tractor battery. It instantly kicked into “charging” mode. That tractor doesn’t get driven enough to keep the battery charged.
Cyndie cleaned and mended horse blankets. I moved a fresh batch of hay bales from the shed into the barn. We moved her picnic “door table” and chairs from beneath the big oak tree in the woods into the barn for winter storage.
Working outdoors felt like we’d been given a gift to accomplish all these things on such a pleasant weather day. With all of our animals showing irrepressible joy and contentment, it felt like we were living the (really) good life.
If only I could train my brain to retain the sense of this goodness with more weight than it does with the challenging days of harsh weather and difficult problems, I would be ever so grateful. That would be living an even better life.
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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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Foggy Scenes
Blocking out any problems in the world, life at Wintervale is filled with beauty, even when the weather conditions are frosty and foggy.
Ice crystals created an attractive white border around the edges of the leaves.
Did I mention it was foggy?
Despite the horses continuing to show fondness for the old willow tree in the small paddock, there continue to be signs that they are chewing it to shreds.
I used to think they were going to push it over by rubbing against it, but now I’m inclined to believe they will give it the beaver treatment and chew through the base.
Silly horses.
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Unplanned Accomplishments
We expected yesterday to be a rainy one, so I didn’t have it in my mind to tackle any big outdoor projects. In the middle of the morning, I grabbed a pruner and took Asher for a walk in our north loop field to trim a sprout of growth that looked like a willow tree in bush form. I am trying an experiment to see if I can cut off the outer shoots to push that energy into one main trunk to get it to become more of a tree than a bush.
That took mere minutes, as anticipated, allowing my attention to turn to Asher so I could burn off some of his energy before we got stuck indoors while it rained. However, it didn’t rain. After some running around and tug-of-war, we hung out and watched the horses taking a rest out in the hay field.
After lunch, I came out thinking I’d head to the shop to work on some heart carving, but it was nice enough that I decided to hop on the mower. I’ve been wanting to make one last pass around the inside of the fence lines this season, and just needed a time when the batteries were charged and the rest of the grass wasn’t the higher priority.
Bang. Check that off the list.
The horses spent most of the day out in the fields, so there was hardly any manure to clean up in the paddocks when we showed up to serve their afternoon feeding. I took advantage of that and moved my attention to clearing out a dormant compost pile. That is another task that is rarely urgent and thus lingers in wait for an opportunity to get around to it.
We often hear comments of wonder over how we are able to take care of all the work that needs to be done around here. It occurred to me yesterday that all of the things I accomplished were unplanned, and that becomes the secret. Take small bites of the large pie of things that need doing whenever the chances arise.
The rain finally showed up after dark while we were snugged in watching the 4th game of the World Series. I was smugly enjoying unexpectedly getting multiple things done and checked off the mental to-do list.
It’s a little sweeter because none of that was in my vision when I started the day.
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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Horse Butts
The two photos I have for today are the reason for the title of this post, but the vet visit was about much more than just Mix’s butt. It’s just that I happened to snap the image while Tom was taking Mix’s rectal temperature.
Tom, from This Old Horse, has worked with Dr. Magnusson for many years, and their cooperative attention to Mix was an interesting thing to witness. There was a lot of pressure point analysis to detect where Mix was most sensitive. Dr. Magnusson also drew blood samples to be analyzed.
Mix clearly revealed she was experiencing pain in reaction to certain probing, and showed she wasn’t bothered by others. However, they weren’t able to make a definitive diagnosis of the root cause of her discomfort. After seeing the results of the bloodwork, the vet hopes to be able to rule out some possibilities.
You know how doctors can be about naming symptom causes that haven’t been confirmed, but he did whisper a couple of things that could be happening. Could be an ulcer. May be a chance of Lyme Disease. Might simply be arthritis from old age.
We have a new regimen of pain relief meds to give Mix for now.
Luckily, she is not being incapacitated by pain. When we finally released her from being fenced in, she took off running to get back with the other three horses who had wandered out to graze in the hay field.
After being gone for a few days, there was a lot of manure to clean up in the paddocks, so I rolled the wheelbarrow out to tidy things up. Mia likes it when I bring the wheelbarrow out, where she can back up into it for some reason.
I tried asking nicely for her not to knock over the wheelbarrow, but she didn’t listen, so I reached out with the manure scoop to push her in the butt.
I found out Mia likes it when I push on her butt, so I turned it over and gave her a combing massage with the tines. I half expected her to startle when I poked her with it, but Cyndie was watching and reported blissful expressions from Mia.
It made me think of the Svjetiq multi-tined head massager and how good it felt the first time someone demonstrated it on me. I raked Mia’s butt long enough that I got tired of it before she did. I eventually talked Cyndie into using the rake I had with me to keep Mia happy while I moved the wheelbarrow away so I could get on with my paddock cleaning duties.
Thus ends this episode of “These Old Horse Butts.”
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Early Return
Graced with a deceivingly pleasant October day of moderate warmth and plenty of sunshine, Cyndie, Asher, and I enjoyed a leisurely Sunday free of any responsibilities. I wasted some of it watching NFL football on TV, but when the game wasn’t going my way, I distracted myself with a jigsaw puzzle.
Cyndie rewarded me with photos from her first walk of the morning with Asher and their last walk of the evening.
When I took him exploring in the middle of the afternoon, I found the sunlight and the lake surface were far less captivating. During the weekend, we reached a point of successfully allowing Asher to romp off-leash, with the e-collar for prompts if needed. At the lake, since he hasn’t spent a lot of time here, we are cautious about how much freedom we are comfortable granting him.
Since the presence of other unleashed dogs is always a possibility that we don’t control, it’s a different gamble to have him running loose.
After dinner, while we were binge-watching the first few episodes of Season 3 of “The Diplomat,” Cyndie received a message that one of the owners of This Old Horse would be coming out this morning with a veterinarian to look at Mix. The cause of Mix’s occasional slight gimpiness in her hind end has yet to be confirmed. We both want to be there for the visit, so we initiated preparations for an early departure from the lake place before going to bed last night. The sooner we can get on the road this morning, the better chance we have of getting home in time for that.
It was a fun, uneventful getaway for a few days that gave us a chance to employ the two newest UWRF students who responded to our help-wanted post for feeding horses when we are away. Now it’s time to return to attend to all the activities on our weekly calendar of events.
Somehow, I have let the date of the anniversary of our move to Wintervale pass without fanfare. October 18, 2012, was supposed to be the day, but signing the paperwork was delayed by a few. We can now say we are entering our 14th year here.
It’s been a pretty good run. A lot has happened in the last 13 years, and it’s all been captured here in my ongoing memoir of a daily blog: the fun, the sad, and the embarrassing.
Here’s hoping the coming year will be filled with more fun than sadness. And lots of love, too!
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Silly Horses
We give them this fabulous sail that casts a large shadow and filters 95% of the UV rays, dropping the temperature by an easy 10 degrees F, but they can’t give up their affinity for that damned willow tree.
Gotta love ‘em.
Maddy, from This Old Horse, came by yesterday because we reported Mix was looking like she was hurting again in her back end. The consensus is that it isn’t one leg or the other, and it isn’t either foot. It’s possible her issue is arthritis, but Maddy felt it seemed more muscle-related. She massaged Mix around her hips and butt and lifted her hooves to do some stretching while I held a lead rope attached to a halter.
We decided to start giving Mix the same pain management dose that Light has been getting each morning to see if it will provide some relief. All we can do is watch to see if she appears to start moving a little easier. They’re all old horses, though Mix is the youngest of the bunch at 21. They all tend to move like old creatures at this point. The fact that they can behave so spry most of the time lulls me into forgetting they are justified in having age-related aches and pains.
I should probably say, spry when they aren’t napping, since that is how they like to spend most of their time.
Yesterday, I had a wonderful exchange with our friend, Patty, who astutely observed a curious sight in the photo of Cyndie and Mix between the fence boards. I noticed it, too, upon seeing the image on my computer. How many of you other horse-savvy readers spotted something? If you did, can you identify what it is?
Patty guessed correctly.
Here is the image, again, for your reference:
If you have no idea, click here for a clue.
What could that be?
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Sitting There
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From my spot in the grass outside the small paddock, I took two pictures of what I was seeing.
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I like them both.
Framing the primary subjects of Cyndie and Mix in the background between the two boards of the fence in the foreground produced a result that I am very pleased with. The added features of the two metal gates being aligned so perfectly parallel, and the visible weathered textures of the two wooden boards, add a lot to the appeal for me.
Asher’s distant stare with his stoic posture from his position in front of the barn was definitely portrait-worthy. The propped-open door contributes some life to the image with an implied reference to ongoing activity underway. He is not alone, but he is in charge of himself in this moment, free from the constraints of a leash.
And I was just sitting there, close to them both, taking it all in. It’s a tough life, but I’m doing what I can to get by.
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Relative Something 