Relative Something

The person who installed our horse waterer works for the excavating company that delivers rock and gravel for our needs. Yesterday, we accomplished two goals that have lingered all summer through his delivery of river rock to finish our landscape upgrade and then his replacing a cracked valve in the waterer.

We started our landscape project in the spring and it has dragged on for months. It is very satisfying to finally have the rocks delivered which puts the completion of this project entirely in our control.

When the rocks poured out of the tilted truck bed, they created a cloud of dust so thick I couldn’t see the truck anymore. Their supply of river rocks had sat collecting all that dust for more than a month due to the absence of rain that would normally provide a periodic rinse.

Due to the incredibly wet spring and summer months this year, it wasn’t obvious that the waterer in the paddocks was leaking. With the arrival of our current drought, the ground dried up everywhere except the area around the waterer.

I don’t like knowing that the cracked valve that was found yesterday is probably related to a freezing event (maybe the first time the barn lost power) and has been leaking for half a year.

The Ritchie waterer needed to be disconnected and removed, and water pumped from the hole in order to confirm the cracked valve and replace it.

Of course, like so many projects of this type, the fix required a trip to the hardware store for parts, which prolonged the time the waterer was out of service to the horses.

I had closed gates to keep the horses out of the small paddock while the repair was underway, but they had full access to the fields through the large paddock. When they wandered in from grazing and showed interest in getting a drink, I hustled to provide a large bucket under the overhang that I filled from the spigot in the barn.

The repair was taking much longer than I expected. Taking advantage of the waterer being disassembled, I was able to scour moldy nooks and crannies that were otherwise unreachable, making good use of time while our favorite repairman was off buying parts. I looked up from my scrubbing and found all four horses lingering around the bucket like a bunch of people bellied up to a bar. Cute.

With Asher napping patiently in the barn, I’d spent the entire afternoon until horse feeding time on this project. When the valve had been replaced and the waterer reassembled, my feeling of satisfaction doubled for the day.

Even though it’s sad to see how dry the ground is in most places around here, I’m really looking forward to the wet spot in the paddock finally drying up for the first time all summer.

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