old school...

The farrier came out the other day to check out the crack in Murphy's hoof.

He examined the crack...



Then cleaned and trimmed,








and filed the hoof smooth and level.



Then he did the same thing on the other side (of course, it wouldn't do for Murphy to be high on one side!)

I love watching him work... his actions gentle, yet strong... doing work that has been done, probably in much the same way, for centuries..



He finished his work by bringing out a tiny bottle of turpentine and squirting some in the crack... He said it's old school, but works as a great disinfectant.

His expert word is all is good... Murphy is plenty lazy enough to not put any extra stress on the hoof as the crack grows out, and the crack isn't deep enough to cause any pain.




So now it's just a matter of rewrapping it every few days until the crack grows out (probably a couple of months...).

So, once again Murphy is recuperating from something... luckily nothing serious... but still...  If we had a year go by without Murphy needing recuperation time for something, I'd be amazed.

He is the exact opposite of an "easy keeper" like my pretty boy Tucker!



We're off today for a meeting for S, and then a neighborhood get-together in the afternoon... It should be a good, but busy, day.

the end is in sight...

The end of a super busy week, that is.

It's been one of those weeks that somehow ended up involving way more running around than works for us...

Here's a what this week's craziness looked like:

Monday (our quietest day): Home Depot trip for a little project I was working on for M, lunch out, shop for K's birthday then home and school time. The donkey farrier (yes we have two now, one for each equine!) came at dinner time to trim Tucker's hooves and freaked out about a crack R had found in one of Murphy's hooves.



Before it got too dark we pulled out the duct tape and vet wrap to make the big guy a lovely do-it-yourself boot.




Tuesday: Worked on M's project in the morning, then a quick (?!) trip to the DMV to get M a new state ID card.  (His had expired over a year ago, and he needed a current one...) An hour and a half wait and $11. got him a new ID card, then another quick (?!) stop at the Post Office to mail K's birthday gifts to Ghana. By the time we left the P.O. the afternoon was over, and we only had time for a quick (for real this time) dinner at home before the kid's RCC meeting.

Wednesday: R's uke lesson in the park in the morning, then lunch, school time, working on M's project and grocery shopping. It was back to town in the evening for the kid's RCC book club.

Thursday: Early morning doctor appointment for R, then home, lunch and leaving again to work at the thrift store... then home, dinner and leaving again for game night at the rec center. (M's project didn't get worked on and he let me know... all day long... that I wasn't working on it!)

Friday: Another early morning doctor appointment (for M this time), but first we had to lead Murphy out to the driveway, unwrap his hoof, and send pictures of the crack to his farrier. I sent a few photos, wrapped the hoof back up again, but then the farrier texted asking for one more photo. Unwrap, take picture, rewrap... run the horse to the barn, run the kids out the door to the doctor. One more stop at Home Depot for M's project, then home, school time, and finally finishing up M's little project.

Whew, I'm glad this week is almost over... Tomorrow is EARLY morning bowling, then picking up S for the weekend, shopping for the homecoming dance, and the St Joseph community get-together in the evening... I'll be wiped out by bedtime!

Want to see the project I made for M? (If you've read this far you deserve to!)

I made him a little drop down desk, from an old drawer, for his laptop.



M's room is small (no really - it's small) but he's wanted a desk for his laptop. I hated taking up prime real estate in there with a desk that would only become (another) catchall... So I made one that takes up no floor space, and will fold up out of the way when it's not being used.

(The front of the drawer is at the top, I added a couple of 1x3's to the sides to build them out to match the old shelf I used as the fold down part of the desk. I also added a 1x2 across the top back, inside, to better hold the weight when attached to the wall. There are no "before" photos since I literally made it up as I went along and had no idea it would ever turn into anything!)

 

This was my favorite kind of project, made from nothing but scrap wood...the only things I had to buy were the latch, hinges and chain. (How lovely after approximately 47 trips to Home Depot buying wood for the shed!)

Next week looks to be calmer than this week... thank goodness. I could use some time at home to get things caught up!

Horse care 102

So... what do you do when you turn your horse out to pasture and he looks fine, no lameness, everything looks great....

...and when you let him back in he's got blood dripping down his hoof and from certain angles it looks like there is a very real possibility that his hoof has started to fall off.

(Ewwww! *shuddering slightly at the memory*)

That's what it looked like at our house yesterday, and yes... it was gross. It was one of those times when I wondered why I'm always the one that has to deal with the blood... sometimes I get tired of being the one who knows what to do with the first aid kit in the barn.

(I will spare you photos of Murphy's mess of a hoof... trust me, you don't want to see them... and post a few random photos of him instead!)




Anyway.... I feel pretty competent when it comes to doctoring Murphy's little cuts, scrapes, and the occasional minor lameness (often a hoof abscess, usually when the ground has gotten very hard....), but I had never seen anything like this before.

So after spraying the gaping wound with antibiotic spray and wrapping it up (just how much "vet wrap" would it take to hold a hoof on, I wonder?), I decided I should probably call the vet...



She came out and declared it (yet another!) hoof abscess and to do what I always do for abscesses. (Soak twice a day in epsom salts and water for three days, and he's good to go...)

I felt better when she said the first time she'd seen one like this she thought the horse's hoof was falling off too...

After she looked at Murphy, we had a nice visit... she took pictures of the pumpkin patch fence (she wants to build one like it) and R has an invitation to volunteer with her large animal practice this fall.

Although it started out somewhat traumatic, it ended up being a good (although slightly expensive) afternoon.

Soldier and Nancy ~ a little "living history"... and a brief update

We've been helping take care of a neighbor's horses lately...

That's Soldier in the front stall... Nancy in the back stall.

This photo shows their personalities... Soldier is big, bold, confident and curious... Nancy is small, shy, a little skittish and not much into things that are unusual... like a camera!



They are the dearly loved horses of a friend of ours, Mr G... a elderly man who, until some bad health this past spring, took care of them entirely on his own. Soldier was his riding horse... Nancy's a rescue he got as a companion for Soldier. Since March though, another neighbor and I have taken turns caring for them... Mr G spent a month in the hospital, and has been home for awhile now but isn't strong or steady enough to take care of them.

I might feel differently come winter but, right now, I don't mind taking care of Soldier and Nancy. You know how much I love history... and going into Mr G's tack room and hay barn are like stepping back in time.

Mr G was born in the mid-1920's and grew up on a farm in central Europe. He came here after WWII and has no wife or children... just his horses. His place looks and feels a little like I imagine a small farm in 1930/1940's Europe might have looked and felt.





His tack/feed room is nicely organized and is decorated with pictures and calendars he liked so much that some of them have been hanging on the walls for decades.



He also has a little hay barn, with hay neatly stacked on one side and this old, carefully cared for, tractor on the other. (I might try to buy this tractor when he's ready to sell...) The chains on the tires are for the snow, of course... yes we do get so much snow that even a tractor needs chains!



An ancient, well used pair of hay tongs remain stuck in an old bale of straw next to his hay.



Anyway, I don't mind going up there to do his barn work... I go early in the morning, before anyone else gets up, and it only takes 20 minutes or so.

It's so peaceful up there.... and I love seeing the "from scratch" ways his barn is set up. There are no livestock panels, electric fencing, or pre-fab stalls here.

It's all made, by hand, by Mr G.

His tools of the trade...




.... mended, not replaced, when they break.



These scissors, stuck in the crack between the wood of the hay barn, have a slightly curved blade... for trimming the "feathering" on the back of a horse's legs and fetlocks. They also work well for cutting baling twine!



Decades worth of horse shoes... Soldier only recently began going barefoot.



An antique scythe hanging in a shed...



A long piece of lodge pole pine which can be used to limit Soldier and Nancy's pasture access...



I took a lot of other pictures as well, too many to post... wanting to somehow record a way of doing things that seems to be quickly being lost...

We are doing fine with S here, by the way... M and R are bending over backwards to make things work and I'm hoping everyone's patience holds out until they find her a place to be. Her attorney (all children in foster care are appointed one) was here yesterday and S enjoyed showing her around... She (the attorney) will probably be sending her assistant to the foster mom's house on Friday to help get S's things packed up and moved out. It will be good to get that done sooner rather than later...(When we packed up a few of S's things to take with us on Monday, the foster mom told S she'd better take everything because she wouldn't keep it for her... Needless to say, we couldn't pack up a whole room at that time, and S has been stressing about the foster mom throwing her things away...) The GAL is sending her assistant to make sure foster mom doesn't start in on S or me again verbally...

Rain is good...

....especially when you live in a place that frequently deals with drought.

I took this picture this morning in the front pasture as I was waging war with the purple thistles (armed with my trusty six-shooter weed-eater)...




Don't look at my dirty old paint splattered barn coat, and don't get distracted by the sun just coming over the horizon (and my arm), instead check out the grass that is up to my waist!

We don't see that much in our part of Colorado...

The grass is so long you almost can't see the deer walking through the front pasture...



Here they are again, coming out into a place with shorter grass.



Needless to say, Murphy and Tucker are being spoiled by all the grass in the back pasture...

A little rain now and then is lovely.

Pig in the Pumpkin Patch

By anyone's standards we live a pretty boring life.... not much happens out here in the boonies. So we've learned to take our excitement where we find it.

Like this morning, I went out to feed and found a pig... in a coat... rooting around in the pumpkin patch.



We see a lot of different creatures around our acreage ... deer, coyote, foxes, hawks, snakes... are everyday things. Mountain lions passing through are even regular occurrences... (although not every day, thank goodness!)

But a pig in a coat is unusual... even for here. (So of course, I ran in and got the camera!)



This pig is not a stranger to me however... His name is Ernest.



I know this because he's my neighbor's pig... He's a teacup pot bellied pig. (Who knew there was such a thing!!)



And he seems to like horses....

But he's not great at reading donkey body language....



... continuing to snuffle his way along the pasture fence while Tucker snorted warnings to him to get away. Tucker is, apparently, afraid of very small pigs... and thinks it's his job to run them off. But he's a cautious donkey... no sense getting too close to this scary new thing.

Ernest eventually snuffled and rooted his way back home again...



... and I came back in the house, and Tucker finally relaxed and went into the barn to eat his breakfast.

Just another exciting morning on the farm...

our not quite spring weather (and an update)

Yesterday's snow is almost gone already... We went from having an icy wonderland outside the window in the morning, to sticky mud everywhere by afternoon, to, in the evening, the ground already starting to dry out.  We lost no branches during the storm, but the fruit trees were just starting to bud and I'm hoping the hard freeze didn't finish off my harvest (again!) this year. (We didn't get a single apple off the trees last year thanks to a late freeze...)

The pastures are greening up, Murphy and Tucker are losing their winter coats, and I've planted pansies in the little trough/planter out front...but I'm pretty sure winter isn't quite done with us yet. 

It didn't look too spring-y the other day when I took this picture of R, in snowshoes a neighbor lent her, making her way across the front yard.

I didn't intend to be cryptic when I wrote in last week's daybook about the results of M's CT scan. Unfortunately, the results of the scan are confusing to me... I can't seem to track down enough information (that I can understand!) to feel like I have a good picture of what's going on.  So I didn't post anything about the results, hoping to have a better understanding first.

They only scanned his lower back, so the CT didn't give any new information about the mild scoliosis in his upper back found on the x-ray. The results of the CT scan show something called "focal sclerosis" at his L3 and L4 vertebrae (this is instead of the spondylolysis, not in addition to it). This type of sclerosis apparently causes an abnormal hardening of the bone. I don't know what impact that hardening has on his spine, the long term prognosis, etc.. I haven't been able to find much of anything about this problem, especially in a young man, online.

I emailed his PCP on Friday asking her to clarify the results... but haven't heard back. M has an appointment Thursday with the orthopedist who did his second hip operation... hopefully I'll get more information then (and probably a referral to the UCHSC Spine Clinic). 

So that's the latest... hopefully I'll know more by the end of the week.

Murphy('s Law)

Our big klutzy horse has done it again...

Remember the lovely new warm coat I bought Murphy at the beginning of the cold snap we had a couple of weeks ago?

The one that cost more than my winter coat? (Probably more than all my coats put together?!)

Here it is, just in case you forgot...



It lasted eight days...

It made it just barely over a week before he broke the latch holding one of the leg straps... meaning it was no longer very practical, as it seemed to take on a life of it's own and was no longer content to just sit on his back, but kept trying to slide around here, there, and all over the place... everywhere except where it was supposed to be.

Equine coats can be tricky things when they don't have all their straps... as evidenced by our sweet donkey Tilly's (Tucker's mama) dilemma one cold, windy, spring day back in 2009. (This coat was missing the leg straps, but had the belly strap... I have no idea how Tilly ended up like this...)



Murphy's (first) coat lasted longer than Joe thought it would... he only gave it two days.

We probably should have started a pool...

But anyway... he broke it so back to the store it went. Fortunately, it came from the BIG (chain) feed store in town... the one that gives refunds.

And off to the other (little) feed store we went to replace it... because they had their horse coats at 25% off.

So I ended up with a better coat for less money.



I really hope Murphy doesn't destroy it... the little feed store won't take it back if he does. (They have his number!)

R forgave him his awkwardness...



I'm just praying the new coat lasts longer than the last one.... If it doesn't he's going to be a cooooold horse if the Arctic air makes a reappearance, because this is his last coat for a while.

It's a good thing he's so cute...

Baby, it's cold outside!

Denver broke a record last night... it got down to -13.

I'm not sure how cold it was (is) here, but it's cold.

No, I take that back... It's COLD.

It's so cold that when I was out doing the barn work this morning it felt like my eyeballs were going to freeze...

Brrrr.....

The few things we had on the calendar yesterday were cancelled, and we spent the day at home.  We got a lot of school done, and I started a little Christmas decorating...



`



`

I had a nice fire in the fireplace...



... so the living room was toasty warm.



R and I made multiple trips out to the barn yesterday. When it's cold like this Murphy and Tucker need extra hay and more frequent feeds to keep their body temperature up... We fed them 5 times yesterday (versus twice on a regular day) and they ate roughly twice as much hay as usual. So far they are doing ok with the cold... Tucker is a little tank, with a super fluffy thick coat. I did break down and buy Murphy a coat this year though. He's getting older (he'll be 19 in the spring) and it seemed like it was time. He's a little skittish about his coat (I don't know that he's ever worn one before) but does seem more comfortable in the cold.

Doesn't he look handsome?



`

Murphy scratching his neck on the fence I worked so hard to repair after he tore it up... It's looking like fence repair/re-stretching will be part of my spring chores again this year.





Today will be more of the same... Joe wasn't able to plow the driveway last night so we'll probably be home for the day. I'm not complaining though, we've done so much running around this fall that it's very nice to be "grounded" for a few days.

Stay warm! :)

morning barn chores...

Each of my days starts exactly the same way... in the barn doing the morning barn chores.  It makes me happy to start each day with my "boys" Murphy and Tucker, we have nice little talks in the morning and I never get tired of the rich warm barn sights, sounds, and smells.

Here is a peak into my morning...

Murphy waiting at the gate... as soon as he sees me he starts pawing the ground to make sure there is NO doubt in my mind that he is hungry... No matter how early I go out to feed, in his mind I'm always "late". :)



With his ground pawing message delivered, he heads towards the barn... sure that I will follow and feed him. Tucker usually hangs around a little longer being sociable... but then he too heads towards the barn.



More ground pawing, this time in his stall... This morning, when I didn't feed Murphy right away, and took some pictures instead, he started  moving his hay bucket from side to side with his head, banging the big empty bucket on the stall walls. He communicates quite well despite his lack of words...



The ground pawing, hay bucket rattling and banging both stop the instant the first flake of hay lands in Murphy's feeder... He's happy now, I've done my job (and I'm free to go, thankyouverymuch!).



Tucker's hay gets tossed into the feeder in his stall next, but he waits... I'm acting differently this morning... I'm taking pictures. Tucker doesn't like "different". He waits outside, looking away from me and the different thing I'm doing but with his ears pointed towards me... he's not looking at me but he's acutely aware of what I'm doing. Just a moment after I took this picture he looked back over his shoulder at me... unable to look away any longer, too curious about what I might be doing with the strange little flashing box I brought to the barn.





A look back at the barn. I love the way the warm light makes the barn glow in the dim early morning...



Next I fill the water troughs... Tucker also stays well clear of that process, he hates water and would rather go hungry than chance getting wet. Murphy, on the other hand, lets nothing keep him from his breakfast....





By the time I'm closing up the barn, Murphy has already scattered his hay looking for and gobbling down the "best" parts... Tucker's hay is still untouched, and if he doesn't hurry Murphy will (after eating all of the "best" parts of his own hay) head next door to Tucker's stall and eat the best parts of his.



Morning work done, I head back to the house... As soon as I start walking back, Tucker heads into his stall to finally eat his breakfast. Such a creature of habit, he always takes that first bite of hay then turns around and stands in the stall door, looking out while he chews. (Surveying "his" pasture... he's all about keeping track of everything that happens there.) I knew if I waited by the fence he would look out...

It didn't take long.



I love early mornings... it's so beautiful outside and is such a blessing to have the grounding of taking care of the animals each day, keeping me in tune to their wants and needs, their gentle strength, the quirkiness of their personalities, the way they live entirely in the moment. They waste no energy in worrying about what's going to happen tomorrow, or even 10 minutes from now. They both just trust that hay will land in their feeder, water will be refilled, and they will be taken care of.

It kind of puts things into perspective... you know?