An evening with Ragtime and Tigger. Warm, a nice breeze. Apparently I have to fill the opening paragraph space or it won’t say “read more” and let you progress to the pictures. That’s a bore. And it won’t show any pictures unless I do; it just compresses the before pics and after pics text. I don’t know how much fluff I have to stick in here, but the evening these pics were taken was the kind of evening you can’t stay tense and anxious in, if you’re outside watching horses crop short grass and walk in and out of the late sun and long shadows. Let’s try it again.
That’s all. Take deep breaths, relax.
Thank you.
We need some peaceful horses in the fields to counterbalance the awful headlines.
Kathryn, they’ve kept me as sane and reasonable as I am (however sane and reasonable that is…) through the Trump years, the Covid years, and now this crisis. Nothing is as soothing to me as a healthy horse grazing, or munching hay, or slurping up a mash.
thank you, I’ve missed seeing your horses. I discovered a site on youtube: Robert E Fuller, a wildlife painter in Yorkshire. He does wildlife rehabilitation and rescue and has built next boxes on his property that are inhabited by owls and kestrels. He has a live stream of two different sites with various nesting sites. A pair of barn owls are laying this week and two pairs of kestrels have hatchlings. A pair of tawny owls were unfertile, but two owlets were rescued after a nest was destroyed, so they fostered the two owlets. Those little ones fledged over the weekend… so if you need more palate cleansers, find Robert Fuller, wildlife painter. lots of videos of other animals too. It’s also fun to watch a lovely sunrise as I’m getting ready to go to bed.
Iiiiinhaaaaling!
Exhaaaaling!
🙂
Eh, my Mocha girl had been left to her own devices for several days while Human did Human Things. So she was very happy to see me, and gave me the long lecturing nicker chiding me for the shortage of Apple and Oat Cookies. Plus peppermints.
Then she got to SNORT at the new pigs on the ranch (she doesn’t like pigs). We went for a road ride and she got to snoopervise several neighboring cow herds, including one with bulls. She got to SNORT at the parked white dump truck with empty flatbed trailer attached, but yawned at the roller truck and the grader.
Ended up with a SNORT at a bucket of water, then drinking water from a puddle in the field. A good day for a bored senior chestnut mare, in other words. Lots of SNORTS to issue.
Rags and Tigger are discovering that R- can be a source of food. He’s practicing feeding them because I’ll be gone for four days next week (actually he’ll have only 3 evening feeds to prepare) and the horses are a little, um, different with him in charge. I’m still observing. He’ll do an alone feed probably Saturday to see how that works with no one there to remind that you don’t open Gate B until Gate A is shut and latched. Gate A is the human gate–but horse-wide–from the corridor between the feed/tack room on one side and the tool/equipment room on the other. Gate A has been left open occasionally by someone other than me, with the result that a previous horse figured out how to escape and return without being noticed, mostly. Mac checked out out every night, and if he found it open, or the chain not properly secured, he’d wait until lights in the house were out, tiptoe through the back yard, around the east end of the house (no clopping across the driveway!) and then wander around the neighborhood eating lawn grass and whatever else he could find. We know this because on the way back in, he would sometimes forget and blubber his lips going through the east backyard gate. And I heard the noise early one morning, shortly before dawn, and then recognized the cadence of his hoof-falls in the grass. We’d found his hoofprints in the front yard of my mother’s house (or some horse’s) but when we checked, Mac was in the horse lot grazing and the aisle gate appeared closed, the chain around the post. He may have been the only horse I ever knew that could open a barrel snap or maybe he just worried it until the sliding part broke so it could fall open if shaken just right.
My guys have discovered peppermints. They are of the opinion that peppermints should always be in my pockets, in quantities sufficient for their appetites, but I am a bad owner and never carry enough. (There are not enough pockets in the entire town to hold as many as they’d eat.