A Good Weekend

In spite of Mike coming home at 10:00pm on Friday evening and then getting called back out Saturday morning before breakfast or anything else, this is shaping up to be a good weekend. Mike and I have had nothing but snippets of time together for the last month, a night here, a night there. We talk on the phone at least once a day though, usually in the evening before bed, and I get to hear about all of the frustrating and often funny things that happen when a well is being drilled. It's a tremendous amount of stress for Mike because he is usually the one responsible for huge amounts of clients' money in seeing that the well is drilled where and how it's supposed to be on the well plan. I really think he should start a blog about rig life but the vocabulary of the rig hands would have to be severely edited for general consumption. And he is always wonderful about calling to let me know he arrived somewhere safely...thank you so much for that Mike!

Griton, I can still see you, you big lug!

The reasons this is turning out to be a good weekend, even though Mike isn't home to share it, are these:

I got up this morning and my right knee no longer feels as though it's about to bend sideways instead of straight. And, my back is continuing to get better, allowing me to sit here and type this. I showed up at my neighbor's to pick up hay yesterday wearing both my back brace and my knee brace. I did the same at the feed store and the person who helped load feed sacks was also wearing a brace of some kind. Face it...age hurts!

And, this is the weekend when I usually drink a beer to toast my lost friend, Susan Angelo, who was killed on Memorial Day weekend 1985. I will still drink a beer for her but I seem to have released my sadness after all this time in these two posts: I awoke last night to the sound of thunder... and Bob Seger on the radio. It's not that I don't still miss you Susan, I just don't feel so sad anymore.

Go fast Besol!

But more than anything else, we have been promised sunny skies and warm temperatures for the rest of the weekend. Tomorrow I have to work in the shop to get some orders ready to mail on Tuesday; but today is mine and I intend to give it to the horses who have already been at play all morning.

Duffy enjoys a nap in the morning sunlight.

Update: once again the weather guys didn't have a clue as to what was going to happen up here. Around 11:00, I heard the thunder and clouds started rolling in over the peaks. It might clear out again but I'm not holding breath for it.

By the way, Fionna finally discovered the new catnip crop is up...

Fun Foto Friday...so okay, I'm a day late!

For at least a week now it's been alternately raining, hailing, sunny, then it starts all over again. Planning for anything has been a challenge and today I got horse feed and hay in between thunderstorms. Really nice skies though.

Now what could this be? Gray horses get lighter each year, going from solid colored to steel gray, then dappled gray, white and finally flea bitten gray. How fast this happens depends on the individual horse. Griton became very dappled last year and this star shaped mark began to appear on his shoulder. I like to think it's Star's blessing on my goofy gray horse.

And should we forget that we really and truly do live in the desert...it still surprises me to find blooming cactus in the middle of a pine forest at 7,600'.

I found this lovely pool on the land we hope to add to Star's Rest. It's about four feet wide and surrounded by ferns. I'm sure the boys will be pleased to dip their hooves in it once they can roam over there. The interesting thing about it is someone placed the rocks around the curved lip and even cemented them in. There is nothing up here so it's odd to wonder who or why it was made. Nice though, to find this little pool of water on a rocky mountainside.

And finally, my boys Griton and Corazon, hoping I can come out and play. Yes, Corazon is really that fat, sort of a bouncing blimp as he gallops across the mountainside. Gotta love that sweet dark chocolate face though.

Rewards.



It seems most of the blogs I regularly visit, including my own, have gone on spring hiatus. Even if back pain wasn't still making sitting at my computer difficult, I would much rather be outside in sunshine after a winter of wading through deep snow to take care of chores. I'm doing my best to get in some serious walking everyday to bring down my pain levels, and I am trying to work with two horses each day. As a reward, each horse who has a job for the day gets to go into the very over grown orchard to eat grass for a bit. Since the orchard has the only grass on our land, that is indeed a huge reward envied by each of the horses who didn't work that day.


When I began to seriously work with Besol I came to realize just how afraid he has probably always been of people. He is a sensitive and intelligent horse who was very likely trained with insensitivity and domination. Just like with Griton, I have been working to establish a relationship of trust with him and he is blooming with the positive attention. Many of the 'natural horsemanship' trainers follow a very small herd behavioral segment as if it were the only way of interacting with a horse. Dominating a horse in a round pen under the name of 'joining up' or 'hooking up' is seldom the best course for a sensitive or fearful horse.


There are some trainers who teach that a horse sees humans as predators and that is the only way they can see humans. In my experience, a horse does not see a human as a predator until we teach them to. The problem is you get very fast and consistent results with the usual format of round pen domination and so it remains a popular training method, at the expense of horses who submit and then shut down out of self preservation. Besol has quickly gone from a horse who avoided humans, was suspicious and cranky, and extremely fearful under saddle, to one who joyfully comes to meet us to see what today's adventure will be.


And look who I found hiding down in the plum thicket...Nicodemus, otherwise known as 'The Invisible Cat' since Mike and I are the only humans who are ever allowed to see him. Sorry Nicodemus, the world knows you exist now.

But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.

Rainer Maria Rilke – Letters to a Young Poet

Happy Anniversary my love...has it really been six years since this photo was taken at our wedding party? Back in the days of Texas heat, a tiny house, three greyhounds who are now buried in the orchard, and the over crowding of Austin. A few more pounds on me; but you, the resident hunk, are still as cute as ever.

These were my vows to you then, and they are still what I would say today ~

"Mike, some part of me must have always known that if I just kept moving forward and kept my heart open, eventually our paths would cross and I would immediately know you. You are my friend, my lover and my family. I am continually awed by the joy I feel at knowing our future lies together. I love your goodness, your strength, your playfulness and your amazing creativity. I promise you these things: I will do my best to not only listen to you, but to hear you; I will make your needs as important as my own; I will be compassionate when you are hurt and I will feel joy as you grow and heal and find your own truths; above all, I will always be kind. I can imagine no greater blessing in my life than to continue the journey that we have started into a future that is brighter than any dream I dared to have."

I had planned to pick out photos of the many wonderful things you have brought into my life but there were too many to choose from and they all reside somewhere on this blog anyway. I love you and thank you for our life together in this magic place with three new greyhounds, five horses and two cats.

Foto Fun Fridays

I'm thinking of making Friday a day to post photos I've taken during the week that don't fit in with anything I happen to be writing about, and yet for some reason I like them enough to want to share them. The following series of photos were taken yesterday when the horses were celebrating a break in thunderstorms by galloping down into the arroyo and competing for the best sandy spots to roll, rubbing off the last of their itchy winter coats.

Mike told me they were down there and I was standing up on the yurt deck with the camera. What I couldn't clearly catch through the trees was Valeroso joyfully pawing and splashing in a two inch deep puddle of runoff water. Or Besol bucking and galloping across a slope steep enough I have to walk very carefully with my poor two legs. They have a happy life, these boys of ours, and I always feel blessed to share it with them.

“Happiness is having a scratch for every itch.” ~ Ogden Nash

Rainy Daze


We're having a bit of an early monsoon experience this spring with chilly temps and thunderstorms. Just last week I told Mike I had unpacked his shorts and we sat on the deck enjoying the warm afternoons. My second class for the summer riding school was yesterday morning and while it was chilly and damp, we did get through before the rains started.


As we were leaving we saw heavy smoke on the ridges to the north of us and drove towards Taos to find the source. On a calm rainy day we knew there was little chance of a fire spreading but it never hurts to be certain. It turned out to be a controlled burn by the forestry department on the ridge above the house we leased when we moved here.

So what do you do on a cool rainy day? Annoy the animals of course...

Besol and Valeroso playing 'I'm going to bite your face!'

Oh no! A killer chipmunk has attacked Ellie!

It looks like it's too late for Duffy...

And Ellie has gone on to a better place...

My handsome lumberjack.


We had a good day yesterday. We had planned to take Llego and Besol over to the neighbor's arena for a practice day and decided to let it be a trailer loading practice day for Llego instead. Last week we received Llego's BLM title application which means as soon as the form is received and processed, he will be legally Mike's. I can't believe it's been almost a year since he arrived here on the mountain, and that same length of time since he has been on a trailer. I don't imagine he has been on a trailer more than three or four times in his short life so when he willingly walked on, settled down and looked for food, then walked back off without any real problems, we decided that was a good lesson for one day for this young and formerly wild boy.


After everyone was fed for the evening, Mike suggested we walk around on the twenty-five acres we hope to buy this summer to see if we could figure out the boundaries. It was a bit of a grueling hike for me with my back in its current state and I have been paying a price for it today. It was worth it though. This new piece of land is truly beautiful and will be a paradise for the horses and for us. We even found an elusive horse trail we have been hearing about that leads up into the National forest. It's hard to imagine we will soon have access to 500,000 acres of forest out own back gate. We were very pleased to see aggressive thinning happening on the plot of land next to what will be ours, certainly a better situation than with our neighbor to the south.

Because of our altitude, snakes are rare here and we have never seen a poisonous one. When we find one of these little guys, we protect them as an essential control for rodents and other pests.

Today Mike is back working on our fire safety/forest health plan. His understanding of physics and just how to set cuts to get a tree to fall where he wants it still amazes me. I knew it would be hard to see trees go down that we have lived with for five years now, and yet as the space has opened up I realize they have also made me mildly claustrophobic. Our patch of forest that we have taken responsibility for will soon be both healthy and safe with a good chance of surviving a serious fire.

"Now where do I want this tree to fall?"

Time to start cutting...

Timber!

Trimming up the logs.

"What is he doing up there?"

Horse love / Horse lips

We have a friend in California who is currently taking drawing classes. She informed me that along with dog paws and cumquats as her drawing subjects, she is infatuated with horse lips. So Jeanie, these are for you along with a few of my own personal favorite parts...

And my own favorite, a big huggable gray horse butt.

Gobble. Gobble.

Very, very early yesterday morning I was awakened by the sound of a a flock of wild turkeys just above the yurt. Usually they move right across the mountain but there must have been something interesting that detained them this time. Ellie and Vannie didn't care but Duffy was quite excited about the noise and whined and growled to be let out. Since it was too dark to take photos and I was cocooned between memory foam and down, I wasn't inclined to indulge him and guarantee myself the end of sleep. When I got up an hour or so later, I found myself to be inexplicably sad.


This sort of thing happens every now and then and is nothing like the black hole of depression I used to live in, where even the tiniest glimmer of light or joy or hope was sucked down into darkness. This is much more a melancholy of the spirit. Through the years I've learned to run through an internal checklist to see if there is some real life situation to attach the feeling to and usually there isn't. I tend to be sensitive and empathetic (a very good reason for shunning cities and living on a solitary mountainside) and I sometimes wonder if I am responding to someone else's life situation.


I had already planned that yesterday would be laundry day so after packing up the truck with bags of clothes and detergent, I armed myself with a three inch thick copy of the 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy. I haven't read it since high school and decided it was a perfect time for a grand and tragic adventure. I want to visit the Ents again, ride Shadowfax, be somewhere that eternity can be given up for love and one tiny person can continue on through unimaginable fear and pain to do what must be done. By the time I headed home with bags of fresh, clean smelling laundry, I was back to my peaceful self once again and could enjoy the beauty of this place of grace.

And thanks to Janet, I was tagged for a MEME...

7 Random Facts/Habits About Me

1. I hate celery. Such an innocent vegetable but when I was a child and my father had all his teeth removed in preparation for dentures, during the healing period we all ate soft or 'creamed' foods. One of those was creamed celery...think clumps of slimy strings in the mouth of a six year old and you might see how I was forever traumatized.

2. I love sushi. Just thinking about popping a chunk of raw fish thoroughly dipped in wasabi into my mouth is enough to make me salivate. Oh, and that delicious rush as the wasabi shoots through my sinuses...and here I am living in a landlocked state, far from any ocean.

3. Shopping anywhere but online or from catalogs gives me hives. Thank god for Mike the careful shopper. If it weren't for him, I'd still be walking into stores and telling the salespeople 'Just sell me something so I can get out of here!' That's how I wound up with a very bad computer some years ago.

4. I went to a total of eleven different schools in six different states.

5. Thirty-six years later, I am still friends with my first college roommate.

6. When I was a very little girl, I told people I would be an artist and a cowgirl when I grew up. No cows in my life but I was pretty darn clear from the very beginning about what I wanted and was good at.

7. I have been a happy morning person all of my life. I like watching the sun come up and the quite hours to think while the rest of the world still sleeps. And I am annoyingly cheerful to people who haven't had their coffee yet.

I tag... Austin, Velvet, Patsy, and The Wizard

Bits & Pieces


I've been having a lot of trouble with my back for the last couple of months. I can't quite figure out what is causing the problem; but I do know sitting at my computer makes it much, much worse. So obviously I've been limiting my computer time. I had a lot of Mother's Day and graduation gift orders to fill over the weekend and the workbench (which produces income) won out over this blog. Otherwise, just so you know all is well, here are a few updates...


Vannie is a restored dog. Amazing what having the right diagnosis and treatment can do. She is tossing toys, chasing her tail, and running with the kids. She still has some weight to gain back but that will happen slowly with her new low fat diet designed to prevent chronic pancreatitis attacks.


Duffy was up patrolling the fence line, looking for stray horse poop that had rolled down into the yard. Yes, they eat it. He thought if he hid behind the tree I wouldn't know he was up there. No one ever told him about horse poop when he lived at the racing kennels.


And Ellie is...well...Ellie.


As for me, I'm drinking a beer to fortify myself to be able to sit at the table and get all of these waxes sprued and ready to ship tomorrow for casting.

Are you going to Scarborough Fair?

Parsley...

Sage...

Rosemary...

and Thyme.

With amused thanks to Simon & Garfunkel

Cooking tip of the day: these are chives; more specifically, this is the bud of a chive bloom. Spring is absolutely the best time of year because the chives produce these delicious, nutty little buds that turn your average stir fry into something magical. Go forth! Plant chives and put their tiny, tasty buds into a glorious batch of stir fry!

Critter update: Vannie is home from her second trip to the hospital. Her acute illness Wednesday night let the doctor finally diagnose what has been troubling her for at least the last year. Now that we know what the problem is, hopefully we can keep her strong and healthy.

Griton's foot is completely well, much to the annoyance of the other horses since he is back to pulling tails and generally bugging everyone.

Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby. - Langston Hughes

It has been raining since about 1:30 yesterday afternoon, a highly unusual event this early in the year. I am certainly not complaining though...we had another small fire here on Monday, just a ditch fire and right behind the fire station less than a mile from us. When I went down to investigate after a neighbor called, I found out the forestry and fire management folks are very concerned about our side of the mountains. They feel we have been dodging a bullet for a long time now and it's just a matter of time before a big fire occurs here. So yes, unusual spring rains truly sing me a lullaby of calm and time bought for continuing our fire safety project.

Yesterday was the first class of an adult summer riding school I've been wanting to do for a long time now. I'm really happy about the people who signed up, all motivated folks with a real desire to ride better and to have a deeper connection with their horses. We'll be meeting twice a month through the summer covering a progressive riding program and it will end with a fun playday/schooling show and pot luck barbecue Labor Day weekend. I'm hoping they have so much fun that next summer I can do both a beginner series for new folks and a continuing series for this group.

Miss Vannie is continuing to recover, making up for the food she didn't eat while in the clinic. I started her slowly, a few spoons at a time, and now I'm basically feeding her on demand. She demands a lot! In one day she ate five cans of a very good grain free dog food as well as one of her normal RAW meals. The only problem we're having is she is a bit of a compulsive licker and if I don't watch her every single minute, I find her muzzle and everything else covered with blood from worrying her wound. So yesterday she was my teaching assistant. It was probably the best thing I could have done for her - she sniffed butts with the resident dogs, wandered around with them eating horse poop, and then turned her attention to the students insisting each one pet her. She didn't touch her wound even once and was so happily tired when we got home she actually let me sleep through most of the night. The best part was getting up to find she had gone through the night without licking.