Feb

26

Forgotten…

Filed Under family, horses, sisters, tennessee walkers | 1 Comment

Sometimes people forget their sunglasses at my house.


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And then I forget that I documented the adventures they had without their rightful owner until said rightful owner showed up at my house to reclaim them.

“Oh hey, I have a surprise for you sometime,” I said.

“Ooh!” the rightful owner said excitedly.

“Oh, you won’t enjoy it,” I assured her.


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Speaking of things forgotten and refound, here are some pictures I snapped several weeks ago while the horses were enjoying some snowy outside time. They’re various detail shots that most people probably never see or pay attention to, and horse people see them so often they just overlook them. However, when you’re trying to be artsy and the only poses your horses all look like variations of this –


– you must improvise.

Feb

24

Five Links for “Friday”

Filed Under 5 Links for Friday | 2 Comments

It’s been forever since I actually did my Five Links for Friday, and last week I was all excited because I was actually doing it and then I promptly abandoned the post, left it as a lonely little draft in Wordpress, and neglected it until today. That’s because I’m inconsistent and lazy, or as I like to say “otherwise occupied” and “busy.”

Enough about me, onto the links!

#1: Saddlebred in the Making — I’ve “known” Leah through various Saddlebred message boards for a number of years. We got new (and young and nice) horses at about the same time, leaving behind us the oft-tempestuous relationships with our former steeds. I love reading about her new adventures with Louie, especially since I haven’t ridden Santana since last summer. Ugh, winter.

#2: Swag Bucks — I do lots of searching every day on the internet. Sometimes I search topics on which I need more information, sometimes I forget who an actor/actress is and search for their name. So I signed up for Swagbucks, which gives you a swagbuck every few searches. You accumulate them and they can be redeemed for tons of various prizes and such (electronics, gift cards, etc etc).

#3: Chester the Nurse — Nin recently adopted to adorable kittens who are brothers. Toby is fighting a serious illness and Chester is looking out for him. Great pictures of adorable kittens. And keep little Toby in your thoughts!

#4: Hair Thursday — Today I received a nice compliment about my hair and I realized it’s been exactly 2 months since I got it done last. It’s doing its swan song Week of Niceness before it turns into a birds nest of nastiness, signaling that it needs to be cut, STAT. I’ve been trying to decide what to do with it (highlights, lowlights, cut, etc) and Hair Thursday has all sorts of fun stuff. I tried to use Lil as my own personal version of Hair Thursday… Didn’t work.

#5: Twitter — Most people know about Twitter, but if by chance you don’t, the scoop is this: you’ve got 140 characters to say whatever you want. You “follow” people, which means all of their updates show up on your twitter page. I’m actually a pretty terribly Twitterererer (I know, right now you’re gasping and going, “YOU?! Bad at updating something?!” Suspend your disbelief for a moment.), but I follow interesting people. My updates show up on the upper left hand side of this page. If you want to see my twitter page/follow me, it is right here.

Feb

12

Lame Duck

Filed Under dogs, horses | Leave a Comment

I bet you thought I’d been eaten by a bear, didn’t you? I haven’t been, in case that wasn’t obvious. I dare say Olio is even doing SLIGHTLY better at being a guard dog, probably because he feels so much peer pressure radiating off of the internet. Though now that I think about it, I walked up to the house after my traditional 1:30AM horse watering/stall cleaning (the horses LOVE me when I wake them up, flip on the barn lights, and go poking around their stalls at that hour) and found that Olio had been chillin’ under the porch instead of keeping watch out by the barn. Oh well. Baby steps.

My life took a very exciting turn a few days ago when it reached SIXTY DEGREES! The snow melted, the ice melted, and the sheer quantity of mud (coupled with my knee-high rubber boots) made me wonder how the hell I was EVER going to outrun a bear if need be. I was not the only victim of the mud, as a certain young horse of mine took a wrong step while being a dork out in the pasture and has pulled a muscle. Now he’s stuck in a stall until he’s healed, which you can be sure puts him in a VERY pleasant mood, which in return puts me in an EVEN MORE pleasant mood while dealing with him.

Maybe the aforementioned (pleasant) mood is why I apparently attempted to take out my rage on a cough drop. While viciously crunching it, I felt an extra crunch — and not a good one — and promptly spat out pieces of a tooth. I like to think that maybe my jaw is just super buff, but in reality I think that my teeth or so chalk-like that it would have exploded had I chomped down on a pad of warm butter. I was hoping that it was just a filling that had fallen out, but a trip to the dentist assured me that no, the filling is there, “hanging in midair,” as my dentist so creatively described it. That tooth had a terribly uneven filling-to-tooth ratio, which evidently led to the tooth crumbling dramatically when a Halls cough drop depleted its will to live. This tragedy necessitates a crown (and not the good kind with the jewels and gold and matching scepter), which is kind of absurdly expensive. I mean, for the amount it costs for them to make one little half fake tooth thingermajigger-type crown and install it, I could probably get a little gold one made, maybe with some tasteful emeralds and sapphires, and have it embedded into my gums.

Feb

4

I Heart Faces

Filed Under horses | 4 Comments


(Click the button to visit the website.)
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iHeartFaces, a very cool photography website, has now expanded their contests to include pets. I’m pumped! This week I’m entering this picture of a hunt seat Morgan headed into the show ring.

Feb

3

Inner Turmoil, the Horrors of Horse Ownership

Filed Under horses | 1 Comment

Lately, my Inner Cheapskate has been battling it out with my Inner Person Who is Grossed Out by Gross Things. It’s not really much of a fight, since the former gets so much exercise and the latter really only makes appearances when there’s hair in a drain (ew ew ewwwww I can’t handle it).

But the Inner Cheapskate has really been working over the idea of the big annual vet visit which is coming up pretty soon for the horses. We get all the horses’ health needs knocked out of the way every spring: teeth, vaccinations and a little something called sheath cleaning.

Sheath cleaning is something that can be avoided one of two ways:
1) Don’t own a gelding.
2) Have the vet do it.

What can I say, I seem to get along best with castrated males, so geldings are my favorites. And we have paid the vet to do it, but this year I decided to tackle the job myself and save the $25 or so it costs.

I did it. And I remembered why sometimes it behooves you to just pay a professional to suffer through this kind of thing.

Maybe you’re all “Pssht, whatever, I’m a mother/ER doctor/poop smith/[insert other job involving horrific grossness], surely it couldn’t be that bad.”

Yeah, well, just remember that this is coming from someone who has no qualms about AI’ing or preg-checking cattle (and then blogging about it… in detail), so when I tell you it was disgusting, just trust me on this one.