I have actually been doing things other than playing with my fancy new internet connection.

1. Prize and the soon to be baby – This horse is going to be the death of me. She shows no signs when she is in heat. So I have to figure it out so I can take her to be bred. In theory this is not so terribly difficult. In reality it is making me pull my hair out. I tried to palpate her ovaries. She was so tense that I ended up with bruises and no information about her cycle. Next I’m going to try to monitor changes in her ce*vix (take that, porn searchers!) to see when she is coming in. I’m sure there is something terribly wrong with this plan too.

In a perfect world, Spirit would cooperate. He is the world’s greatest teaser gelding. Teasers are males who are not aware that they can’t breed anymore but who will love on a mare and make them show signs of heat. Spirit can make the girls swoon just by looking at them. He also used to take mares in heat and physically separate them from the rest of the herd until they were out of heat. The problem is that Spirit doesn’t like Prize. The first time she came into heat when they were being boarded he took her around to the other geldings and tried to give her away to anyone who would take her off his hands. That’s the only time he’s even acknowledged her cycle. But this morning I explained to him that I really needed to know. He didn’t need to be nice to her or anything. If he could just look at her and then tell me, I’d be appreciative. I led him to her stall, which is the opposite way from the pasture. That made him mad. She reached out and snapped at him. He spun away and headed for the pasture towing me behind him. I yelled back over my shoulder as I tried to regain my footing, “You know, if you weren’t such a b$#%^ sometimes, this wouldn’t be so hard.”

2. We are fixing up the back pasture. It went to hell in a handbasket last year when I wasn’t mobile enough to keep up with the maintainence. So there is mowing and weedkilling along the fence line going on now. Tomorrow we are pulling down all the old wire, moving some posts around, and restringing it with electric rope. We are also cutting the pasture in half. There is a little hill that divides it. On the other side of the hill I can’t see the horses from the rest of the property and that makes me nervous. It is also harder to maintain electric fence over there so Prize takes advantage of the lack of visibility and poor maintainence and escapes on that side. Now I’ll be able to rotate with the front pasture. I think I’ll do about 2 weeks in each field and then move them to the other one. That will give the grass time to grow back without getting over grazed.

3. The husband and I went for a walk today. He’s all excited about being able to do this stuff since losing 60 pounds. We hadn’t been on these paths before. They start going downhill so you just know the end of the walk is going to be a killer. Then we saw this hill up to a nice platform. A sign said overlook trail 0.3 miles. That seemed like a good idea. That hill was brutal. It didn’t seem that bad looking at it from the ground. I made some flippant remark about it being good exercise. I thought I was going to die. They need a bench halfway up it for recovery purposes but we trudged on up it and collapsed at the viewing platform. On the way back up the trail we stopped at a bench positioned just before the final climb to the parking area. A guy went running past us and we watched him. He didn’t seem to be familiar with the trails since he kept reading signs closely. So we watched to see if he decided to run up the crazy trail. He wasn’t in good enough shape to run up that so we could have called 911 for him. But he was smarter than us and stayed down on the flat.