Things I Am Thankful For, Part II

In an effort to get myself into the spirit of Thanksgiving, and I will admit my feelings of thankfulness have been lacking some lately, I've been writing about things I am thankful for. If you are interested in my thoughts on the matter you can read Part I here. 

6.  I am thankful that Jason will occasionally cook dinner.  Now my reasons for being thankful for this are not because the food is good and the meal is an enjoyable experience.  From time to time when we have a meal served up by Jason I usually cannot choke down more than a couple of bites and end up going to bed hungry.  However these meals are excellent springboards into the occasional intermittent fast, and that certainly helps with weight control.  (See, I am already regaining my throne as the eternal optimist through writing these posts.) 

7.  I am thankful that I live in the south.  I hate cold weather. I don't like cold weather sports.  It was in the high 60's and sunny today and I was walking around comfortably with a light coat (not jacket, coat) on. Canadian Jason finds my ability to be comfortable in a light coat at 65 sunny degrees to be mind blowing as he walks around in a t-shirt. That being said I do like to feel like I experience all four seasons, I just want to experience a limited amount of winter. So I am very thankful to live in middle Tennessee. 

8.  I am thankful that Jason conceded to my desires to have cupolas and weather vanes on the run-in sheds at the farm. I won't mention that he did this a bit ungraciously.  For whatever reason, and even I cannot articulate why, those cupolas and weather vanes make me happy.  Now, the fact that the birds really like to poop on them does annoy me a bit, but Jason at least gets a laugh out of it (whether he is laughing at my annoyance or simply laughing because there is often bird poop on my beloved cupolas I'm not sure).  

9.  I had the unenjoyable experience of being both Melissa and Jason for a couple of months due to Jason's surgery and recovery. This happened right after my father passed, and I should add right after Carter came home - as Jason said most people would have been rocking in a corner in the fetal position sucking their thumb by that point. I was up long before sunrise every day.  My daily wake up time was no later than 4am (that was if I hit snooze a couple of times), and  in retrospect I am thankful for this because I saw quite a few truly breathtaking, spectacular sunrises. Plus it makes getting up at 5:15 feel so luxurious now.  Running a farm I've seen the sun come up plenty of times.  However I've never been one to be up, outside and working at freaking 4am on a regular basis so I've never seen that many sunrises in a row.  It really made me appreciate the beauty and uniqueness that can be found in each and every day. Thus, despite the ungodly hour that I woke up to for weeks on end, and the very late bedtime that followed, I am thankful to have done so and thankful to have seen all those sunrises in a row.  They helped to revive my spirit some days in a way that nothing else did. 

10.  I am thankful for our dog Bear.  He is the best dog in the world and has inspired many people to get their own Schipperke.  To know Bear is to love him and he has a huge fan club.  Bear turned 13 a few weeks ago.  

This post is getting long so I will finish writing about some of the things I am thankful for in a future post.

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Stormy

Kennedy and Toledo

Merlin

Noble and Lightening

Lotus, Titan, Romeo and George

Hi Faune

Moe and Homer

Thomas and Hemi were grooming

the typical morning view of horses in the fog; Sam, Wiz, Dutch and Murphy

Renny and Johnny

Lucky and Thor

Hauling Trash

(post by Jason) Now there's a sexy job description and blog post title ! Nevertheless, that's exactly what I spent much of the middle of the day doing. The folks at the county dump think I'm somewhat eccentric because I often haul trash in our stock trailer. I take it this is noteworthy in our area but the truth is plastic won't blow out of an enclosed trailer.

As a farm management task trash, or more accurately trash, scrap and recyclables, consumes a lot more of my time than anyone would believe.  The monthly rounds of Smartpak boxes and supplement packaging alone is enough to bury us, much less all the empty bags of feed and other things.  Add in scrap wood, broken parts from equipment, etc. and we could easily become a junkyard as some farms do.  If you don't take the time to haul it off every couple of weeks believe me when I say it will literally bury you. If you live in an urban area you can see for yourself. The next time you drive out into the country anywhere in Canada or the US pay attention and I promise you won't have to look far to find farms where they never, ever haul anything off. I find that a little strange because some of the scrap (especially scrap steel and scrap paper) is actually worth quite a bit of money.

More often, trash, scrap and recyclables get hidden in a far off, inaccessible corner of a farm. It's surprising how often I've found myself in the middle of what looks like a mixture of scrapyard and municipal dump in out of view places on farms that otherwise are very well kept.  One point of disclosure here is that *every* farm including our own has one or more piles of scrap wood and steel. These really aren't junk piles, or if they are let's at least call them useful junk piles. I just spent some time searching through one of my own piles to find some 10 foot lengths of weathered 2x8 boards and I found exactly what I needed.

Since we choose neither to hide our junk nor be buried by it we have no choice but to haul it all off. If you begin to let it accumulate, even a little bit, I swear it multiplies itself by factors of ten in the night. When my truck isn't at the farm in the middle of the day and you wonder what I could possibly be up to the chances are pretty high that you'll find me at or near either the dump or the scrapyard.

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Africa

Dutch

Alex and Lighty

Lotus and Romeo

Homer, Thomas and Apollo

Apollo and Tony were being goofy

 the first heavy frost didn't keep Toledo from enjoying a nap (Kennedy at the hay)

Largo napping with Oskar and Clayton behind him

Rocky and Bergie with their faces buried in the hay

The Bellwether Hay Bales

(post by Jason) Every year in late October or early November depending on the pasture situation I put the first couple of large hay bales of the season in our mare and pony pasture. This is our bellwether group and for whatever reason it is completely pointless to put hay out anywhere else until the mares and ponies are up and at it.

The ritual is always the same. For the first few minutes after the bale is out they all jockey for position and eat hay like they have never had a meal before in their lives. After a few minutes of eating like complete pigs they slowly begin drifting away. Within an hour everybody has gone back to eating grass and they have apparently completely forgotten about the bales. Over the next several days I will see one or more horses nibbling at the hay but mostly the bales just sit there uneaten. Until one day it looks like literally overnight the bales have been more or less completely devoured. That's my signal that no matter how much grass remains in any of the pastures....and in a couple of them it is literally still knee deep right now.....it's time to put out hay for everyone else. This year that day came yesterday and I spent a couple of hours putting hay feeders back in all the pastures before filling them with hay.

How much hay the horses consume is heavily weather dependent. Right now they aren't eating very much. Typically during December, January and February our average 24 hour temperature teeters right on the edge of dormancy for cool season grasses. As such when the weather is cooler than average we go through several short periods of semi-dormancy and when the weather is milder we go through several periods when cool season grasses will actively grow. At the extreme end of the scale if the ground is snow covered and if it's cold enough for the snow to last a few days we can go through four thousand pounds of hay a day. Fortunately we don't have very many of those days. More typically we feed between fifteen and thirty large bales per week depending on how much the grass is/is not available for winter grazing. The bales have an average weight of 500-600 lbs.

Now that the bellwether bales have been eaten and all the pastures have hay we'll have to switch to "winter chore" mode. This means that in addition to keeping horse clothing nearby and available we will have to keep our eyes on the state of the hay feeders in every pasture every day. It's the rural version of "As the World Turns" minus the intrigue and (thankfully) most of the drama.

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Lightening, Thor, Fabrizzio, Noble and Walden enjoying a beautiful fall day

B-Rad, Lighty and Darby

Sam, Johnny and Chili 

Oskar and Rampal

Lotus, Silver and Titan

George and Asterik

Snappy and Silky

Zeus and Winston having some early morning playtime

Things I Am Thankful For, Part I

'Tis the season to remember all of the things that we are thankful for. I will admit with the way my life has gone the last few months I haven't been feeling very thankful much of the time.  Given that I am usually the eternal optimist Jason has not quite known what to do with my sagging (and sometimes non-existent) optimism and I can't really blame him.  So I decided that as we head towards Thanksgiving I am going to write some posts about things I am thankful for to remind myself that I have much to be thankful for.  Some of them are big things and some of them are very small, but nonetheless it is the feeling of thankfulness that counts. 

1.  Although I cannot really find much to be thankful for about losing my father when he was far too young, I am thankful his suffering was short lived.  We watched him go through a dramatic downhill slide in a matter of 8 weeks instead of watching him suffer for months or years.  I am very thankful he only suffered for a few weeks.

2.  I've never been a bathroom/toilet reader as I tend to be rather quick about such things and am in/out of the bathroom too quickly.  However Jason tends to keep the "throne room" well stocked with reading material.  I randomly picked up a National Geographic catalog Jason had left in the bathroom as I occupied the throne earlier today (yes, TMI I know but unfortunately relevant to this point). As I flipped through the pages I saw that they had not only waterproof gloves for sale but also waterproof socks.  I own waterproof gloves, a waterproof coat and pants, etc. but until today I somehow managed to remain unaware of the existence of waterproof socks.  Today I am thankful that Jason likes to read on the toilet as I am most excited about my discovery of waterproof socks.

3.  I am thankful for my farm.  The truth is it is nothing but a giant, black hole that is determined to bleed our bank accounts down to the last penny and keep us continually overworked and short on time as we attempt to keep up with the endless maintenance and projects.  Don't ever kid yourself that owning a farm is going to save you time or money, trust me on that one!!  That being said I'm still quite fond of it and love when I have a few minutes to leisurely stroll our almost mile long driveway and enjoy the beauty that surrounds me.   

4.  With today being Veterans Day I am thankful and proud to come from a family with a strong history of service to our country.  My brother-in-law is an air force pilot (I know, he's super cool) and my dad retired as a Lt. Colonel.  Two outstanding men in my immediate family have served the country they love and I am thankful and proud to claim them as family members.

5.  I am thankful to have two hay barns full of hay.  Nothing is more comforting than a full hay barn, much less two of them.  Hay is at a premium this year (it hurt to write those checks this year!!) and I almost feel the need to pat the hay and speak tenderly to it whenever I walk by.

I think for now that is a good start for reflecting on things I feel thankful for, I feel better already.  More to come in future posts.

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Romeo, Lotus, Titan and Faune

Elfin and Leo were being silly

Cuff Links, Cinnamon and Traveller

Homer and Chance

Baby and Moe

Lucky

 O'Reilly

Slinky, Noble, Fabrizzio and Walden

That Time of the Year

My least favorite time of the year has officially arrived.  We actually put sheets on a few horses a couple of evenings ago.  They only had them on for 24 hours but still - sigh - we've officially pulled out the horse clothing.  As always I was not quite ready for this to happen.  I was not ready in the figurative sense simply because, as everyone knows, I don't relish dragging around dirty horse blankets and I REALLY don't like cold weather. 

I also was literally not ready.  We had done the first step of blanket season preparation.  We had all the blankets piled in the appropriate locations, ready to be sorted and made somewhat easy to find.  However I had not yet gotten to the actual sorting part so we had to resort to sifting through the piles to find the sheets we needed. 

Sadly I'm still not 100% organized with the blankets yet and still have some piles to sort and more labeling to do.  Every year I go through and relabel the blankets with a sharpie as the names fade from being exposed to the rain and the dirt, and then fade more after the blanket is washed.  As I worked my way through some piles today sorting, labeling and trying to find a good way to organize them all, I wondered how many hours of my life I have spent marking names on horse blankets.  Then I wondered how many hours I've spent dragging piles of blankets to and from the pastures.  Then I decided I didn't really want to know the answer to these questions!

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Merlin and O'Reilly

Johnny and Lighty

Trigger and Leo

Alex and Africa

Johnny, Rampal and Oskar

Murphy

Sebastian

Renny (and Johnny)

Romeo, Titan and Lotus

George, Winston, Silver and Zeus