Happy Friday, you beautiful souls!
My aunt and uncle are visiting me, and I am so excited! Don’t worry, we are being covid safe. I love having them here, prior to covid they would come a few times a summer and stay for a couple weeks at a time, this time they are staying for only a couple days but might be able to come again soon!
We got lots accomplished this week. I’m pretty happy.
First of all, my lovely mom went treasure hunting in our storage space and found something very special to me. For a little context, my parents moved in and my mom almost immediately had her health deteriorate, my brother and I moved back and almost immediately took over a lot of the day to day, so it took over a year to actually unpack and settle, and there’s a storage shed space on the farm that is basically “everything we didn’t have time to unpack at the time”. Which is why I’m still missing items almost three years on. It’s a little daunting to go in there, there’s a lot of Christmas décor, baby clothes, and just random weird nostalgia everywhere. Anyways, my mom has taken to going in there every couple of weeks and sorting a little here and there, she seems to like having it as an independent project, and she found my show bridle!
I was gifted this beautiful, hand-made bridle by my parents when I was 16. I was showing my trainer’s crazy pink paint horse (he was absolutely pink in the sunshine, and the most opinionated giant puppy dog of a gelding) and I had none of my own tack and equipment. I saw the bridle at a swap meet where I was volunteering, my trainer noticed and sneakily told my parents, and they pulled a sneaky purchase without my knowledge. Funnily enough, it never fit Wilson well, so it never got used, but I loved that thing, and it hung in my closet forever in high school and most of university. When I moved, it never made it to my senior year housing, and when I moved home it wasn’t with the stuff at my parents’ house either. I had a feeling it was gone forever. BUT! Somewhere, and I have no idea where because I hunted for it forever, Mom found it, and it fits Ro! So, my gorgeous show bridle is back in my life!
Also, I got an honest to goodness gate latch on my arena gate! I no longer need to walk around or struggle to unchain the gate, and life just got so much easier. I can’t wait to slowly replace every chain latch with an actual one hand latch. So much easier and safer. I leave the chains on, so that I can secure never opened gates, and so I have a backup should a latch break, but I hate using chain latches for day to day and am always excited to upgrade.
I cleaned up and shocked the water trough, and added a new self-cleaning bag of barley, finally folded up the giant tarp that has been taking over my tack space, and finally got the farrier out to see the girls and trim up hooves! All in between some crazy looking clouds that threatened to turn ugly. It was a crazy busy week.
While I’ve been at work (the new job is going amazingly by the way, maybe one day I’ll share a little more about what I do when I’m off being a fancy Software Dev) Mom and Dad have been cleaning out and mulching the gardens around the house. It looks so amazing! I must say, I was a little skeptical about the mulch, I thought it would be too dark and stuffy, but it really is making the beds look clean and fresh. I need to do some work in those gardens, we lost a lot of our perennials this year because of the late cold snaps and inconsistent weather… the winds haven’t helped much either. I have heard, however, that a family member is putting in a new deck and removing some of their beds, so I might see if I can re-home their bulbs. Our tulips have done well, so hopefully more of those will continue to erupt.
In other news, there’s a horse down the way from us that looks so similar to Ro, and I’ve been curious about him for a while, so you can imagine my surprise when I came home this week and said horse, with rider, were wandering along the canal road, just the other side of the canal from my corral. It honestly scared me at first because it kind of looked like Ro had, somehow, gotten out and over to the road. I think I also scared the rider because I went absolutely flying down to the corral to see what on earth was going on. But the horses name is Jack and the rider’s name is Jaime, and I think we might be good neighbors, if all he said about Jack being his best companion was true.
Well that’s all for us around here, the weather is getting warm throughout the day, so soon I’ll need to move my schedule around to be able to work in the cool of the morning outside. Summer is my absolute favorite, and I am so happy it’s starting to show.
Until we chat again, my friends!
The Farmer's Blogger 