Abraxan Mini Farm

Arizona Renaissance Festival

2011-04-06T16:33:00.000-07:00

Did you ever want to run off and join the circus as a kid? Well okay neither did I, but I always heard that phrase and now I think I may understand it a bit better. My younger son and I have attended the Arizona Renaissance Festival for the past two years. This year we even went twice, spent entirely too much money, spent about 4 hours on the road each day to get there and back, stayed from opening to close each time, returned home exhausted, dirty and TOTALLY happy with the experience.

This may be the only event in Arizona with reasonably priced good food. We did learn to stay away from the turkey legs and steak on a stake, but that's because we're from the south and we demand some form of seasoning on our meats. You're just not going to convince me they didn't at least have some salt and pepper during the Renaissance. However, the shrimp and chips were plentiful and cost less than a burger and fries at BK. Affording the food will not be an issue when you go and I want you to GO.

I want you to drop your grown up pants, don a pair of tights and a peasant shirt or something and just GO. Remove that broomstick from your situpon and use it to fly to your local Ren Fest. Truly, your face will not crack into slivers if you smile or actually laugh. I'm sorry, but someone duct taping a bunch of firecrackers to their chest, using a juggling torch to light them, and then having the audience douse the embers with water balloons is funny stuff!

This is not Cirque du Soleil, and if dressing up to go see jugglers is your idea of a grand time I sort of pity you. Ren Fest is earthy, gritty, broad daylight entertainment. There are puffs of smoke, usually from someone lighting their chest on fire with black cats, but no concealment, no dreamscape. The entertainers are real, not ghostly shapes on a stage with no personality. Well, okay the Cast in Bronze guy is kind of weird in his costume, but I'll put up with his somewhat disturbing beak in order to listen to him play the carillon. How many of you have even heard of a carillon, much less seen one being played live?? They're quite rare these days.

Many things at Ren Fest are rare these days. How many harpists do you meet outside your city symphony? Trust me, the harp is best enjoyed in the shade of a tree whose leaves are whispering in a mild breeze. How about listening to a harpsichordist on a patch of soft grass? Think heavy metal gets your heart pounding? Try bagpipes and drums that vibrate your soul. Then again, there is that carillon played as rarely a carillon has been played.

True, the Renaissance Festival has little to do with the actual Renaissance and if you want to be a snobby stuffed shirt about that, stay home, but I can think of little else that would inspire great writing, great thought and great art than some of the music you will find at Ren Fest. Exactly how much fun would it be to sit around and watch people think or pretend to compose, or, god forbid, pretend to carve the statue of David (which would be heresy)?

Rather than people pretending to recreate the great works of the Renaissance, you will instead find much frivolity and excess. They will clap you in irons if you so desire (and indeed some of the costumes did look more like medieval dominatrix garb) but there is jousting, rope ladder climbing, games of skill like axe and knife throwing, great music and entertainment. The street performers and stage performers are all friendly and make you feel part of this 30 acre town. The buildings are beautifully constructed and, if you're a Harry Potter fan, make you feel like you stepped onto the streets of Hogsmeade. This fact alone, well okay and the harp music, had me wondering how I could train one of the horses and volunteer us to wander the festival streets dressed up every weekend next spring. In essence, I wanted to run off and join the circus!

Just some fun stuff from PBR Glendale Invitational

2011-03-14T17:47:00.001-07:00

Holy flaming bull heads Batman! This is not a rodeo! THIS is the PBR! (for my friend Stockyard Queen). At least they didn't get the Border Patrol to try and ride spooky horses past the bull heads this year. When did they paint them silver?

The bullfighters of the PBR doing the dangerous job of distracting the bull so that the rider can get away safely. These fellows are amazing to watch in action.

According to my 200 some odd photos, the bulls often don't fall for the bullfighter tactics and go after the rider anyway. Here, Valderon lights out across the arena, the bull lights out after Valderon, and everyone else lights out after the bull.

It kinda looks like everyone is chasing that Brazilian dude.

You know how they talk about "the rider covered that bull"? Well, if this rider's missionary position is any indication, the bull is about to cover him (in the language of horse breeders). Darned if we didn't get home in time to watch the telecast and hear Hummer report on this ride. His exact words were "That bull had his way with him!" Great job Hummer,

you made us send our coffee through our noses.

I think Lohstroh is pretending to be a wounded mountain lion on a canned hunt.

Bet the bull is laughing.

Some great buckoffs from the PBR Glendale Invitational

2011-03-14T17:32:00.000-07:00

Bet he's good at Twister too.

What must go through a rider's mind at this moment...

Rider should have gotten points for Levitation.

I don't remember the name of the bull but it should have been Trampoline.

Some of the great bulls from PBR Glendale Invitational

2011-03-14T17:04:00.000-07:00

Mad Max

Guilherme Marchi riding Stubby

Valderon's event winning ride on Speckled Ivory

(did you hear us all BOO at the low score?!)

Dustin Elliot

(damned good ride for 7.79 seconds)

Our new blog

2010-05-19T08:16:00.000-07:00

We created a new blog about raising Miniature Horses. If you're thinking of getting a mini or know someone getting a mini, go here: http://allaboutminihorses.blogspot.com/

Dancing with the... umm... stars.

2009-05-19T21:30:00.000-07:00

Okay, now that they've voted off the people with any real claim to fame, what have we got left and what reality show would they be appropriate for in the future?

A. Shawn Johnson: Little Magilla Gorilla Jr. She's a gymnast. I'd never heard of her before I started watching Dancing with the Stars to see Ty Murray. To be a gymnast you have to perform to music. You have to deal with choreography. Not ONCE has this kid looked like anything other than a muscle bound gymnast on that dance floor. There has been no grace there and those arm movements, impressive in a gym or boxing ring, have no business getting anything greater than a 7 in a dancing competition. Perhaps they'll develop a show called "Boxing with muscle bound children destined to be severely arthritic" just for her. I have a hard time believing that her "fan base" is larger than Lil' Kim's.

B. Melissa Rycroft: The town cryer. She's a professional cheerleader (that's dance, of a sort, people). According to her own little bio video for DWTS she's been taking dance since she was a toddler. UMM.. Did I miss them change the name of the show to Professional Dancers Dancing with Professional Dancers? As far as I can tell, her only claim to fame is that she lined up with a bunch of other gold diggers (yes, that's what you call that) and got dumped on national television. WTH did she expect? You don't find true love when you're choosing out of a field of ONE so she's either a gold digger or a moron, either way she's not a star but she is a professional dancer. So, perhaps ABC will invent a vehicle for Melissa called "Are there people who stupidly think that someone can actually fall in love on command for a national audience or are they just gold diggers?".

C. Gilles Marini: Actor, at least that's what they tell me, I've never heard of him. To be fair, this season of DWTS has been my first foray into network television since my friend Cheryl's TV show got cancelled and before that Frasier. So if all the acting you're famous for is bad network TV, chances are good I haven't heard of you. I don't know how much acting training Gilles has had, but well rounded actors have had at least some dance because it's hard to get acting work and the more entertainment skills you have, the more marketable you are, and if you went to school for your acting you damned sure had dance classes. Perhaps a show for Giles called "Best Dancers Ever Beaten by Height Impaired, Clunky Boxing Gorillas" would be suitable.

Of all the trumped up undeserving pieces of garbage I have ever sat through, this one takes the cake. I should have stopped after watching Ty's Lindy Hop because once again that dance was GREAT and worth watching several times, but nooooo I watched to see Gilles take home the trophy. Never in my wildest dreams did I think little miss "OH was I supposed to be graceful??? I thought I was just supposed to out muscle Mike Tyson and then stick the landing!" win. Whatever...

Newer video of the baby!

2009-05-17T11:13:00.000-07:00

She gets stronger every day and she's giving her momma and me more grey hairs.

FINALLY! It's a girl!

2009-05-12T10:33:00.000-07:00

Dachsund Garden

2009-04-14T03:30:00.000-07:00

My neighbors, the dog ranchers, asked me to do a birthday cake for a friend of theirs. This fellow was kind enough to come over with my neighbor while I was in Louisiana last summer to help her clean out and fill the water buckets in my barn. I'd never met him. When the opportunity to do a cake for him came along I was more than happy to to go all out for the neighbors who have done so much for me in the past hard year, as well as repay the debt owed to their friend.

Here is the finished cake. I call it "The Dachsund Garden". Yes, I made those dachsunds myself. I can't blame them on my kindergarten aged child, but only because I don't have one. I'm still not the Ace of Cakes. Duff's "people" make modeling with gum paste look easy too.

Dancing with the rodeo star!

2009-03-30T21:40:00.001-07:00

I just have to put a note on the blog regarding how impressed I am with Ty Murray's dancing. I was already impressed with Ty. We've been impressed a long time with his cowboy capabilities. His sense of humor totally cracks us up. But never, nope not once EVER, did I expect he'd wow me in the field of ballroom dance.

No, he's no Gilles Marini... yet, but Gilles hasn't been a cowboy his whole life either. The physical movements of men who do hard physical labor are going to be quite different than young men who have had a softer life. We're not even going to go into all the broken body parts Ty has had in his lifetime that are bound to be stiff.

Each week Ty has rallied and improved until this week's Lindy Hop had us absolutely whooping and cheering. His score should have been at least 9s straight across. Especially if they give "Lil' Kim" (does she have a real name?) whose leaden, blubbery Tango got a 10 from one judge (that judge needs to go home and watch more old movies to know what a real Tango looks like... or just watch Gilles version). Honestly. Watching the scoring for Lil' Kim (has she got a condition that causes the weird mouth expressions or does she always have something stuck in her teeth?) week after week reminds me of some of the bloated scoring that goes on in bull riding. Melissa Rycroft (exactly how is she a star?) got scored too high for her Lindy Hop (although her other dances have taken my breath away). I saw many more bloopers in her dance than in Ty's, but, well, as bull riding fans, we know all about inflated scores.

Of course, unless the fairies of passion and grace liberally sprinkle Ty in the coming weeks, he doesn't have a realistic chance of winning the dancing competition, but he's got more try than any of the other competitors and certainly more talent and grace already than I'd have given him credit for 3 weeks ago. God knows he's got more talent than all but perhaps 4 of the other competitors including Lil' Kim (I suspect substance abuse for some of her facial gestures and expressions).

I hope Ty manages to last for a few more weeks. If he continues dancing like he danced tonight he easily deserves to be in the top 4. The sad fact of the matter is that someone like the at first amusing, but now stomach turning, Steve Wozniak has legions of geeks out there repeatedly deleting their cookies and casting millions of votes for Team Geek. Not because he's trying as hard as any of the others to improve or to actually learn, but because they think he's a geek like them. Got news for you geekmos, he's no longer a geek. He's just rich. I can see the competition coming down to a war between the Gilles fans and the Geeks.

Ladies, get your scissors and go after their computer cords.

Still not the Ace of Cakes

2009-03-24T23:22:00.000-07:00

BUT I graduated my second cake decorating course tonight! I had to make a flower basket cake and about 100 flowers. Okay, not 100. It just felt like 100. After the first 50 who the heck cares if it's actually 100 or not?

I've decided that cake decorating is a lot of fun, but it's not nearly as much fun as people make it look on TV. I can tell you why it's not that fun. Duff, The Ace of Cakes, has "people". Duff's "people" even have "people". Therefore, they can all sit at their clean, roomy, work spaces while someone else scrubs bowls, spatulas, tips, couplers, pans and mixer attachments and takes out their trash. Heck, they even have their own baking guy that does all the oven watching for them.

I, on the other hand, have people that leave half eaten pizzas, empty milk jugs (the trash can is less than three feet away), dirty paper plates, etc. ON my workstation. Thus, not only do I have to toss my own trash and seal my own icing leftovers, but I have to throw away other people's trash and bag up other people's leftovers.

Roomy my workspace is not. Somehow all of my projects seem to require every tool, tip, book and ingredient I have. I have to keep moist towels, baggies, decorating bags, couplers, 60 plus decorating tips (and whatever project I'm working on is guaranteed to need tip 104 for use with at least 4 different colors), 4 spatulas, 2 boxes of gel color, paint brushes, fondant iron, parchment paper, waxed paper, plastic containers, plastic wrap, the stand mixer, 2 flower nails, and my tool box leave me with about 1 square foot of free space to actually decorate a cake or make decorations. The counter tops in back of me are filled with freshly washed bowls, spatulas, plastic containers, mixer attachments, tips and couplers. The sink is filled with unwashed bowls, spatulas, plastic containers, mixer attachments, tips and couplers.

One day I'd like to walk unannounced into Charm City Cakes and see if there are at least smears of daffodil yellow icing in anyone's hair.

Not Quite the Ace of Cakes... yet.

2009-02-25T20:46:00.000-08:00

When my husband's appetite was lost due to his lymphoma, we started watching The Food Network. We hoped that seeing delectable delights might perk up his digestive system. We have watched little else since October. In that time I became addicted to watching Ace of Cakes. That addiction quickly expanded to the various cake decorating "challenge" shows that the network airs weekly. By January I was surfing cake decorating websites and at the beginning of February I found that a local craft store offered decorating classes. I signed up. There were about 12 people the first night, but we were down to 8 by the third night. Many of those had other obligations this week and our final class boasted 3 warm bodies other than that of the instructor.

In those 4 weeks I have learned that the beautiful piping designs we see done so effortlessly on TV, are not effortless. I'm not sure when I sprouted so many thumbs. My kitchen smells like sugar and vanilla. I smell like icing. Pink, purple, yellow and white smears of hardened icing can be found on nearly every surface of the kitchen. The dogs police up any cake droppings, so thankfully we don't have pink, purple, green, yellow and white footprints throughout the house. Half the "dust" in the air, is probably not real dust, but rather confectioner's sugar. Can one get white lung disease from sugar?

At any rate, the last class of the beginner's course was last night. I'd fought pink icing roses for 4 days trying to get them to look smooth and uniform like the photographs in the manual. While my flowers looked like roses, they looked like roses that had been attacked by hordes of aphids. Rather than smooth, rounded petals, my roses had the lacy look of carnations. I tried stiffer icing. I tried thinner icing. I tried firmer pressure on the piping bag. I finally gave up in absolute frustration.

When I got to class last night, I explained my problem to the instructor. I told her I was failing miserably in getting the icing consistencies correct because my petals all looked chewed. "NO NO! It's not you! It's the Crisco! I'm sorry. I should have warned you!" Apparently, when Crisco removed the trans fats from their shortening the change sent ripples out through the pastry decorating world. One of those tsunami sized ripples wiped out butter cream icing roses.

Thankfully, next session we will be moving into Royal Icing flowers and leave the Crisco cream decorations behind. Also thankfully, the only cake we have to bake is for the final class. For the past month I've had to produce at least one cake per week. I sure don't need to eat this much cake, William's appetite isn't recovered enough to eat cake and the only one here willing to eat a couple of pieces a day is John. Even as I type I have a practice cake in the refrigerator that is only half eaten and an entire cake full of lacy pink roses that I decorated for our final class sitting on the dining table. Having a month off from eating and storing cakes is going to be FABulous. Although... I'm willing to bet I'll just HAVE to bake one just for "practice" at some point during that time.

My best friend, Daphne, went through this course a few years ago. She sent me much of her decorating equipment when I told her I was going to try my hand at the craft. I didn't want her to send all these things because she was so brilliant at the art of decorating, I didn't want to have all her stuff if she suddenly decided she wanted to start making cakes again. She told me that no one wanted her to ever do cakes again. She was making cakes all the time. Daph's cakes became like my zucchini. People would shutter their windows, lock their doors and not answer the phone if they saw her car. She was even taking gigantic decorated sheet cakes to her fitness center every week!

I can see how this could happen. I have already told everyone I know to sit down and write a list of at least 10 people they know that they can hand off cakes to when they get sick of them. I don't visit a fitness center, but there are a lot of people who work at William's Oncology clinic. If nothing else, I have 11 hooved family members who would LOVE a sugar coated carrot cake from time to time.

Here is a photo of the final cake in my beginner's class.

HAPPY MARDI GRAS!

2009-02-24T10:35:00.001-08:00

Bourbon Street at about 12:30pm Mardi Gras day. I have been in that crush of humanity before. In order to break free of the throng you have to be arm in arm with several friends and burst through at the doorway of whatever club you wish to enter.

Earlier I watched a Nola.com video cast of the Rex Parade on St. Charles. Been there, done that too. At 10:00am and already fairly well lit my friend Zelda and I found ourselves walking along side by side with Pete Fountain and his Half-Fast Marching Club. He shared a Popeyes Chicken leg with me when I asked him to throw me something. Being fairly well lit, I accepted. Shortly thereafter we were asked to leave the Marine Corps Marching Band by sabre point.

Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez!

Glendale Invitational

2009-02-23T08:55:00.000-08:00

First off, I do hope y'all noticed the two bulls whose hometown was listed as Wittmann, AZ., ULURU and Snake Farm. I've mentioned going to the local bullriding event two blocks from my house on occasion. Both times they've bucked some truly (I mean truly) NICE bulls. Last time we were there for a benefit bull ride and they bucked both ULURU and Snake Farm causing us to catch flies in our gaping jaws because these were two bad assed bulls.

At the event we saw "Snake Farm" come up on the big screen and sat there like two dummies trying to figure out where we'd heard that name before (DUH! I blame our collective Chemo Brain). Snake Farm didn't have as good an out as we've seen here in the "hood", but it was enough to unseat Cody Campbell.

When ULURU was announced, the name is so unusual and he was such a memorable bull at the local event that we sat there wondering aloud "Is that the same...?" "It must be!! How many bulls are gonna be named 'ULURU'??!" "OH COOL!!" and then "HOLY SHIT! LOOKIT him GO!" ULURU did not make Austin Meier's life easy for that 8 seconds either. Austin was working for every second of that ride.

I know Luke Kraut and his Dad were proud of their bull. We were too! He is a fine, fine animal. I kept telling everyone we were seeing some damned good bulls buck on our street. We got nationwide proof last night. You go boys!

Note to Justin McKee: The bull's name is ULURU, pronounced OO-LUH-ROO, not "yewlaroo". Not your fault, but just so's you know next time. I want our hometown boys names known.

We were sorry to see Clayton Williams having a tough time. He won here last year. Year before last it was Robson Palermo who won Glendale and it was, I think, his first BFTS event win. Perhaps the Glendale event is good luck for first time winners?

William's latest side effects had abated and he was feeling good. We were so happy about that one fact that we were predisposed to enjoying the hell out of this event so we did. All the habitual comments we have adopted in our home viewing became all the more amusing because of our elevated moods. Our customery call of "Hey Dustin!? It's only 8 seconds! How hard can it be?!" and when Luke Snyder was announced "It's the Schnoz!" (the young man has the largest nostrils I've ever seen on a human and the camera people always seem to shoot him from beneath that nose. Note to Luke: Better keep that nose hair trimmed buddy or the nation will know.)

Bryan "PeeWee" Hermann made a GREAT ride and we were terribly sorry it ended so badly for him. We like ol' PeeWee, now the eldest of the riders. Cool toss though dude. You should have at least gotten a complimentary highball on that first class flight.

Chris Shivers and Guilherme Marchi rode with seasoned determination and were absolutely thrilling to watch in both rounds. I'd so much rather see the end of the year finish in a tight battle between these two young men, than the two cocky little pishers in the lead at the moment.

Note about White Magic: The bull had an excellent out, but if he doesn't take off about 300 lbs he's going to need his name changed to White Whale. When we saw him bucking a couple of years ago in a PRCA event his kick was almost perpendicular to the ground. If his butt makes it past 45 degrees now it's a lucky shot. He can't lift his forequarters more than 8 to 10 inches off the ground anymore.

When White Magic burst onto the BFTS scene early last year he had so much drop before that all mighty high kick that it reminded me of Bodacious because the bull was hauling riders forward and down into his horns. He'd already started flinging his head up to meet them, just like Bo. Then he was either injured or became ill, I can't remember which, and when he came back he was a blimp. His fat rolls jiggle like jello when he bucks for crying out loud. He was a bull to fear early last year. A bull that should have made a rider's stomach flip when drawn. Now he's just another good bull among many good bucking bulls. I don't look for that to continue. If he continues to get blubbery, he'll be a round 1 bull by the end of the year and out of the picture next year.

We missed Cord McCoy. We thought about attending the infamous "After-Party" again, but figured without Cord hauling every pretty girl to the dance floor for a twirl, it wouldn't have been as entertaining as last year's party. Since, watching Cord was really the only entertainment at the party last year and since we were so appalled by our own blithering in the presence of Marchi and since we really didn't want to push our luck with the chemo side effects, we decided to just call the evening good and go home in time to watch the event on TV.

Caution: Desi At Play

2009-02-14T20:27:00.000-08:00

PBR Baltimore

2009-01-04T12:05:00.000-08:00

I'm blogging live during the NBC presentation of rounds 2 and 3 of the PBR Baltimore event because I got ticked off before the first commercial break. Of course, with William so sick, my patience for idiot buttheads is non-existent.

Basically, I'm noticing that although it's a new year, it's still the same old bullshit. The Point Fairy already struck, but at least her arrival was announced. "OH by the way, Travis Briscoe's score was upped from 90 points to 90.50." I suppose I should be hopeful that since they've decided to let us know when they jack up a score after the fact that one fine day they might deign to give us an explanation for that jack up rather than implying that they can change scores on a whim and we can just go jack off. I don't want a generic explanation either. I want to know what led them to add to or take off points each time they do it.

God's gift to psycho, blood lust, tiny pricked assholes, aka Kody Lohstroh, received an 86.something for a ride in which he spent probably 2 seconds in correct position on a crummy bull and finished the ride on the bull's butt whereas Guilherme (Who?) received an 85 for being in perfect position on a relatively decent bull matching that bull move for move in a beautiful "How to" visual aid.

As William predicted last year, one of the new fan attractions this year is Fantasy Bull Riding. I have a fantasy, but I doubt it's what the PBR is looking for. After hearing about Kody Lohstroh and his other small penised, psychotic, blood lust buddies that think slowly killing an ancient lion in a canned hunt was funny, my fantasy is that Lohstroh will draw Blueberry Buckle. In that fantasy, Blueberry buckle will break both Lohstroh's legs so that he can't crawl away. Then for 5 minutes Buckle will roll and toss that sleazy bastard all over the arena so that he knows how that old, sick, crippled miserable lion felt. I don't want Lohstroh dead or even permanently crippled. No. I want worse. I want him to feel the pain and fear of that lion. I want him to literally piss and crap himself. I don't want him let off the hook by death. If Blueberry Buckle and all the other bulls in the pen can laugh like Kody and his buddies in the video did, all the better.

I would also like to complain about the spelling of bull names. I didn't mention it last year. I just rolled my eyes a lot. "Optimist Prime" sent me over the edge though. IT'S OPTIMUS PRIME for god's sake. He's a Transformers character. Perhaps y'all should GOOGLE a cool name before you use it? Ya think?

In retrospect, I may have to wait until the chemo really starts to heal my husband's cancer before I can watch PBR with any sort of patience for human bullshit.

The Tales of Beedle The Bard Collector's Edition

2008-12-08T16:30:00.000-08:00

IT'S HERE! My collector's edition of The Tales of Beedle the Bard arrived via USPS today and it was not only worth the price, but also worth the wait and two aggravating phone calls to amazon.com. The packaging, the prints and the gorgeous collector's edition book are spectacular. These photos really do not do them justice.

All I need is a coffee pot.

2008-11-30T07:14:00.001-08:00

Current technology had obviously left me far behind. I knew this. I have no idea how to use all the features on my cell phone. The idea of an iPod that plays movies is totally lost on me, "I can't read a book without two pairs of glasses, how the hell am I supposed to watch a movie on a 1 inch by 1 inch screen??" Thus, while almost everyone else in the world moved on with advances in home technology, I stayed happily where I was, in the world of the 80 gigs of computer memory, 8 gig iPods, an office without a fax machine and a land line phone (even though I mostly use my cell).

Elder members of my family would have considered me quite the "geek". There are a few elderly people who still don't have cell phones or computers, but with the passing of my father, that group is even more limited. Geeks, however, look at my cell phone and chortle things like "my god, it's the kind with screws! I didn't think there were any of those left." My cell phone was only 5 years old when it died for pete's sake. It's not like it was an antique. In geekdom, however, technology which is 4 years has hit "classic" status.

Replacing my old computer with this laptop, therefore, has been a really big deal for me. I started a new hobby. Rather, I wanted to start a new hobby. My old computer was failing and even in it's prime wouldn't have served my video editing well. In it's failing state, however, my old computer wouldn't even run the little "Windows Movie Maker" program it came with without freezing every 1 to 3 minutes. The little movie I made of Handsome a few posts ago, took about 8 hours spread over 3 days to get done because I was constantly losing information due to freezes and restarts. The last day of editing I was trying to beat the program to the draw by saving and exiting the program every 2 minutes. I'm not exaggerating.

By the time I replaced the old computer, it had one working USB port, it's cd/dvd wouldn't open, and it had lost 3/4 of it's RAM. I'd log onto the web and feel like I was back on dial up again. Even my email wouldn't open in less than 15 seconds. It was losing it's memory and all of it's abilities. As a friend of mine told me "Sounds like me". Yeah, me too, but let's please not go there.

Another place I really don't wish to go right now is the land of 4 years from now when my spiffy new laptop becomes "a classic". By then the geeks will laugh "Good god, I've never even seen a computer with only 4 gigs of RAM." and "Only 320 gigs of space on the hard drive!? Dang!" or "Dude! No solar panels, do you believe that?"

I was all excited about being able to do away with the rat's nest of cords that ran my old puter, and all the external peripherals I was using to replace all the things that puter wouldn't do anymore. "Hermione" only used two cords. Power and DSL. Bless her. Then our friends Barb and Sean came to dinner and Sean gave me an easy to understand tutorial on setting up a wireless network. I'm down to ONE cord now and can work without that for about 3 to 4 hours. Thus, as behind as I still am in technology, I'm giant leaps from where I was and I'm damned excited about that.

Perhaps if I can manage to save about 500.00 a year, in 4 years I'll be able to afford the 120 gigs of RAM, the 800 gigs of dedicated graphics memory, and the 10 bazillion gig hard drives, all run wirelessly via solar power that will surely be available next week. But, for now, all I need is a wireless, portable, coffee pot.

An Evening In The Life

2008-11-27T21:11:00.000-08:00

Sheesh, beware when clicking buttons to see what they do on a new computer. I just spent the last 5 minutes in Microsoft hell just because I clicked a button in the toolbar that LOOKED as if it was the full monty of an Office version of Word. NO. It wanted me to set up a trial version of Word. There went 5 minutes of time that I could have been typing from the comfort of my own soft bed.

You see. I have a new laptop. We’re in the middle of a horrible storm, complete with dime sized hail that soon made the entire desert look snowed upon. For the first time in my computing life, I didn’t have to shut down the computer and twiddle my thumbs for several hours until there was no longer a danger of power outages and power surges. I could still play solitaire. I could still play Diablo II, albeit in single player mode. Heck, I could pop a movie in the DVD player of the laptop and watch a movie if I so desired. But no. I decided I’d put my time to more creative uses and write a bit. I didn’t realize I’d spend 5 minutes of comfy, writing time trying to get the heck out of a set up program that doesn’t allow a person to exit until the final page where MS finally provides a CANCEL button. I also didn’t realize that on top of that 5 minute trip through set up hell that I’d feel compelled to spend another 5 minutes bitching about it.
Hell, the storm is over now and it’s getting damned hot in this bed. As Charlie Brown would say, “Good Grief.”

It’s Thanksgiving evening. I should never have waited this late in the week to clean house. I have at least one guest coming to dinner tomorrow when we have our traditional Thanksgiving with recognizable foods, in the country where we can sprawl outdoors. At least, I hope we can sprawl outdoors tomorrow. The weather has been fairly nasty for two days.

Anyway, I have to clean furniture, mop the floor, straighten the office, do dishes, dust, dump the litter box and cook a turkey, dressing, peas, rolls, mashed potatoes, and sweet potatoes. Oh. Also need to make iced-tea. Somewhere in all that time I also need to doctor the feet of the horses that have had to stand in sopping muddy stalls for two days. One of those horses already had a foot problem before his stall flooded. All in this life I want to do right now is sleep off the in-law family Thanksgiving dinner I ate this afternoon. Again, good grief.
------------
Well, that was entertaining. I went outside to invite a little fresh air inspiration and heard the otherwise “dry” wash not running, but roaring past. As I was registering that problem in my brain synapses, our neighbor Doug called, “Are you alright down there? I have 6 inches of water across everything up here.” These are not words I want to hear. Doug's property isn't adjacent to the main wash. I'm where everyone elses water runs AND I'm adjacent to where the main wash makes a 90 degree turn.

Now, John had been out to check the barn and the horses and the runoff situation just after the hail stopped. Everything was wet, there was hail in poor little Godric’s stall, the muck was just deeper in the two already wet stalls, but all the horses were dry. If the wash was running, it wasn’t running enough to be audible. The rain stopped, we went about our business, until I went back outside searching for inspiration. Be careful what you wish for.

After the call from Doug, I sent John out to check the wash. It’s topped the bank behind the back corner paddock and is pouring into Handsome’s playground. The only thing keeping two stalls in the back barn from flooding is the dip William dug to lead other people’s roof runoff floodwaters through the back of the property and out into the wash. I’m afraid I’m going to find not the usual three fence lines undermined in the morning, but rather multiple undermined areas in 4 lines of fencing.

Yanno, I’m thinking that when the housing market rebounds I’m going to plop a For Sale sign in the front yard and head for higher ground. This sucks Beavis. Next time anyone tells me how much we need rain I may spit in their eye.

John has gone down to Doug’s house to see if he can help down there. At this point, there is nothing anyone can do for us except loan us a few horse trailers to pull our hooved kids to higher ground. We’d sink any tractor we tried to get out there right now.

What I need is a damn dam damn it, one made of concrete. Yet again, good grief.

The Gods Painted Him Black

2008-11-17T23:06:00.000-08:00

Could this week get any better??!!

2008-11-08T20:59:00.000-08:00

Congratulations 2008 PBR

World Champion

Guilherme Marchi!!

(we shook his hand!)

A good man, a good husband, a good father, a great bull rider, and with immeasurable quantities of loyalty and sportsmanship, you have always been a Champion to your friends, colleagues, family and fans.

(did I mention that we shook his hand?!)

YES WE CAN!

2008-11-05T09:05:00.000-08:00

We thought we could we thought we could we thought we could and by damned

YES WE CAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

more later when I can write about this without choking up from

the sheer joy, relief, pride and HOPE.

"Rejoice, for You-Know-Who has gone at last! Even Muggles like yourself should be celebrating, this happy, happy day!"

JK Rowling, from Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone

(Jo? WE DID IT!)

I voted early, I voted for Obama, I'll tell you why.

2008-10-30T19:11:00.000-07:00

I don't expect some of you will agree with my vote. I do, however, expect you to respect why I voted that way.

I was born in Memphis in 1956, grew up half-way in Mississippi, grew up the rest of the way in Louisiana, and matured in Montana. My grandmother lived in the Mississippi Delta back when Tunica was little more than a whistle stop on the way to Memphis. On her property lived a black couple named Hannah and Golie. My grandmother and my parents pronounced it "Goalie". It's very possible that his name was "Goldie" or something but had been distorted by Mississippi accents. For my purposes, he's Golie because that's how I learned his name as a tiny child.

Hannah and Golie took care of my grandmother, Mammy, and my grandfather, Pop. Hannah helped Mammy around the house, Golie helped with outside work. I remember Hannah always had a big hug waiting for me when my parents took us up to Mammy's house. I didn't see Golie as much when we visited as I saw Hannah, but he was an important presence because Mammy could hardly carry on a conversation without mentioning something that Golie had built, repaired, needed to fix or would be called on to help with, especially after Pop died. When Mammy walked in as her home was being burglarized by a young black man and was knocked unconscious, it was Golie who found her. He and Hannah got her to a hospital and called us. They shared our worry. I cannot remember my grandmother's wonderful old house and it's magical yard without remembering Hannah and Golie.

I attended Sykes Elementary School during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. We had fire drills, we had tornado drills and we had bomb drills. Fire drills, we were sent outside in lines. Tornado drills we crouched in the halls next to the walls. Bomb drills we curled up in tight balls under our desks. Another bomb drill was that we had to walk home from school one day in case of a missile attack. I was terrified. My mother met me about 6 blocks from school. She said if there ever was a missile attack she'd make it that far even if she had to crawl over rubble. We actually got a light snow that year in Jackson, but we were warned not to eat any of it because of fallout danger. Is it any wonder that I don't remember blue sky in my childhood? My memories all seem like every day was overcast and grey.

I was taken out of Sykes Elementary after 2nd grade when my mother started a school called Southside Academy. Southside was a private school located in the Sunday School rooms of, what was then, Alta Woods Presbyterian church. The year was 1964 and Civil Rights violence was high in Mississippi. My mother and father were politically active in the Rubel Phillips campaign. I had no idea why my mother started this school or why my parents were so totally passionate about Rubel Phillips or Barry Goldwater. I only knew that I enjoyed the school, the occasional news reporters at the house were exciting and, later, the cases upon cases of "Gold Water" stored in the laundry room tasted great. I didn't realize that all of these things had to do with denying people like Hannah and Golie their civil rights. Rubel Phillips campaign slogan was K.O. the Kennedys. I remember John F. Kennedy's funeral procession on TV. Not a whole lot was said about it in my house.

Southside Academy didn't last and I was sent to Marshall for 5th and 6th grades. There were three teachers in each grade level there. In 5th grade every teacher was a woman and each of those women was her own special brand of bitch. Mrs. Henley was the worst of the three. She corrected my reading one day when I pronounced San Joaquin as San Wahkeen. She fussed at me and said it was pronounced San Joe-ah-kwin. My mother had to go speak to the principle.

My brothers attended Whitten Jr. High School (It's now Whitten Middle School). Their school projects were fascinating. They were learning Latin and building things in shop class. We knew the Art Teacher, Mr. Quinn, and if I had a love almost as great as the one I had for horses, it was for art. I'd looked forward to going to Whitten since I was 5 and was told "when you're a big girl you'll go there just like Robby and Mike". I finally got to Whitten, got into Mr. Quinn's art class, and a year later was taken out and sent to a private school outside town called Council McClure. I was told it was because black children were going to be coming to Whitten and it would be too dangerous there now. Council McClure's art class was mostly crafts and English was the only language taught. It is where I met my closest Mississippi childhood friend and I'm glad to say I'm still in contact with her.

Council McClure is also where I broke my hip when my friend and I were trying to catch a stray kitten. When I was in the hospital for surgery on my hip, my roommate was a black girl named Margie who had just been diagnosed with diabetes. When my mother couldn't be with me, Margie's mom would sit by my bed and watch over me just as she watched over Margie. She'd bathe my forehead with a cool wash cloth and Margie and I became friends. She was from Tougaloo Mississippi, home of Tougaloo College and center of the civil rights movement in Mississippi. I didn't know that at the time either. I only knew that I really liked Margie and her Mom. Margie and I wrote each other for several years, until my dad, who worked for Chevron, was transferred to New Orleans and we left Mississippi for Louisiana.

During the late 60's I watched the news and, thus, watched the footage from the Vietnam War. Back then we were allowed to see what happened in wars. We saw the mangled bodies. Most of us were utterly horrified by what we were seeing and the youth stood up, eventually MOST people stood up and said "Enough." Like most inconvenient truths, that's not remembered very well now. There'd be a lot more people standing up now if we were being allowed actual news and proof of the actual blood cost. Of course, that's why we're not allowed actual news and proof of the actual blood cost.

My mother was terrified of living in New Orleans so we bought property in what was then the only gated, exclusive, subdivision north of the lake. There was one way in, one way out, a sheriff's deputy at the gate, sheriff patrol 24 hours a day and 3 residents had to vouch for you in order to buy property there. This effectively prevented black families from residing there. I can hope that's changed by now. Most of the kids where I lived, went to the private schools in town. Most of the kids where I lived were pretty darned snooty to be honest, except for my two best friends. The town was small enough that it didn't think having a working train track running down the center of one of two main streets was anything unusual. It was southern enough that the black part of town was across those tracks.

The black part of town was poor enough that most of those houses were little more than large wooden boxes. It was still that way when I left in 1991, except that there were more businesses out on the highway. Even in 1992 there were not many good jobs offered to the black residents. Only city, Parish, State or Federal jobs were available to them and you can just imagine the competition for those jobs. In 1989 my office manager freely admitted she'd die before she hired a "niggeh" to work at our doctor's office.

My best friends did not go to my high school. I went to a public high school. I rode a school bus so many of the kids from the poor areas who went to my school didn't want to talk to me because I came from that ritzy subdivision. My two best friends went to the local Catholic girl's school. After we'd been best friends for 5 years, Zelda finally told me she was a lesbian. After a "wow. What did you just say? Are you sure? Okay that was dumb, of course you're sure." My attitude was "Well, okay. Fine by me." That's when she started taking me to the gay bars in New Orleans. That's when I started having a damned good time in life. I'd been so sheltered I didn't have a clue there were gay people. "Lesbo" and "Queer" were just nasty names the kids in school called people they didn't like. I didn't know what they meant. Also, back then, John Travolta hadn't ruined Disco yet. We were "Doing the Hustle" and dancing to "Lady Marmalade" under a disco ball LONG before Disco got perverted by the mainstream.

We'd go to the apartments of our gay friends and have too much to drink and then fight for space at the bathroom mirror before we'd all go out en masse to the gay bars. We'd jitterbug, bump and hustle the night away with the boys and laugh so hard we couldn't breathe. Back at an apartment on Esplanade we'd all sit around with drinks and watch movies, talk, gossip, and gripe about how hard it was to find a good man. They were beautiful, smart, funny, kind, wonderful young men and I loved them. Most of them are dead now. We lost them in the 80's to "that gay disease" that Reagan would never mention and didn't want to fund research on because it didn't affect good people.

It was in the 80's that I had my sons. They laugh and tell people that they were raised by lesbians because I had so many gay friends. My best friend and her partner treated the boys like royalty. At the time, my friend was singing in New Orleans with a band comprised of off duty musicians from the Marine Corps. The Marines were the "guys" in my sons lives. I laugh and tell people the boys were potty trained by the marines, which is exactly true. One show and tell from a Marine works much faster than 10,000 or so words from mom. When my mother died in 1983, if it had not been for gay friends, the Marine Corps, and a three month relationship with Jim Beam I don't know that I'd have survived. Even after I left ol' JB in the dust, the Marines and the gay friends kept my little family afloat by keeping me laughing, keeping me feeling loved and therefore, keeping me somewhat sane.

After the Marines, one by one, left the corps or took stations elsewhere, my friend took a singing partner named Daphne. Daphne's girlfriend was Becky and Beck was an absolute riotous good time. Back then, I had no clue that they'd both become such important figures in my life. I was busy working and raising the boys, Zel and Daph mostly sang in New Orleans, but would perform on my side of the lake once a month or so. If I could snag a very cheap babysitter, I'd go get toasted with Zelda's mom, listen to the beautiful combined voices of my friends and laugh until my stomach muscles were sore for days with Becky. Those once a month evenings were my only outlet for fun. This was the Reagan/"trickle down" era and the only thing trickling down on my head was watery and yellow colored. I worked to pay rent, pay utilities, buy food and pay daycare so that I could work to pay rent, utilities and buy food and pay daycare...

At the same time we had the beginnings of "family values", but as always, those "values" only extend to a certain style of family. Dan Quayle was at war with Murphy Brown. Women, after all this damned time, were expected to be married if they were raising children. I was a single parent. The divorce from the abusive, alcoholic ex-husband had given me my maiden name back, but I wasn't allowed by society to use that name, legal or not. Anyone that had any dealings with my children, from the school to their pediatrician, called me by their last name and Mrs. regardless of how many times I corrected them.

Another absurd myth was being spread back then too. The myth of The Welfare Queen. Supposedly they were everywhere. Black women, giving birth over and over again just to increase their welfare payments. I can tell you where that started because I was there. I was in Louisiana when Grand Dragon Duke and his followers started that myth and it spread through all the country's bigots like a brush fire fueled by santa ana wind. I'd had anywhere from 3 to 4 surgeries per decade after breaking my hip in the 60s. In the 80's I had the be all/end all of hip surgeries and I was out of work, so sick I could easily have died, could no where near pay my rent, bills and food, but I did get a small 400.00 per month from interest on some stocks after my mother died. That measly 400.00 per month kept me from being able to get Welfare.

I was in that welfare office on many occasions appealing, and never once did I see a "Welfare Queen". The people trying to get welfare were just like me. I couldn't work, I wasn't permanently disabled, I made too much money to be on Welfare. My rent alone was 400.00 per month and it's not like I was in a luxury apartment. I didn't even have central air conditioning. But that 400.00 per month kept me off food stamps, medicaid and welfare. If a struggling mother so much as went to work at McDonald's she'd lose her children's insurance, so why in the names of all the god's would she do that? No one was having more children just to get Welfare. NONE.

I finally did get back on my feet after that surgery. It took a couple of years, help from my dad, help from my friends, help from my aunt and my brother loaning me money to pay my electric bill because it always came due the week before my paycheck came so I'd have to get a loan from him until I could pay him back a week later. It's not about "pulling yourself up by the bootstraps", it's about someone at least tossing you a damned rope to pull yourself out of the hole.

In 1991 I sold most of what I owned, handed the Ryder Truck company $1250.00 and asked "How far will that get me from here?" I loaded the truck and the boys and I headed for Montana where I lived joyfully on an "Open" Reservation for 4 years. "Open" meant that the land had been set aside as a Reservation and 3 different tribes had been told to move there. When the white folks decided the indians weren't farming that land they'd so graciously given them, they changed the laws and started taking over big wads of that "unused" land. It was, of course, being used, just not in the manner those good town folks had in mind. Hunting and gathering isn't using the land. Of course, it's not using it up either.

On that reservation I was able to go to college and be taught by the best professors I've ever had the pleasure to sit in a class with. Salish Kootenai College was the small community college just a few blocks from my house. Through student loans, my small monthly interest check, a small grant, part time work as a peer tutor and lots of fishing, potato picking and abandoned orchard harvesting, we lived warmly and happily. I made more great friends and fabulous acquaintances. I found true spirituality in the natural beauty there and felt whole for the first time in my life.

I met my husband online while I lived in Montana. He lived here in Arizona and we would talk for hours on end. Literally. AT&T mourned when I moved to Arizona in 1995. We trucked along, building our life together. The boys grew up. It was my eldest son that woke us up on 9/11, sobbing into the phone, telling me to turn on the TV because something really bad was happening, planes were flying into buildings and no one really knew what was going on, but they thought we were being attacked.

We turned on the TV just in time to witness the second plane strike the towers. I wasn't even fully awake so it didn't dawn on me that there were passengers on the planes. I was horrified enough at the thought of the people in those buildings, but when my brain began to comprehend the full scope of what was happening and that there were innocent victims on those planes that had known for who knows how long what was about to happen, I nearly threw up. Who could be that cruel?! That inhumane?! My stomach churned as it had churned watching the footage of the atrocities in Vietnam.

I had not voted for George Bush. I voted for Al Gore and there is no doubt in my mind that he'd have been 20 times the President that G.W. has been. But in the days after 9/11, with my little hand-made memorial wreath on our front door and our flag flying, I was willing to follow our President, along with every other citizen in this country, to find the monsters that had done this heinous thing to those innocent people.

The President said it was Osama bin Laden. He said the Muslims hate us for our freedom. Of course, that wasn't true but I did not give a rat's ass what reason bin Laden had for doing this and I still don't. You have a gripe with the government, you take it up with the government, you don't kill innocent mothers and fathers and children and grandparents because of something their government did that they had no control over. You Just Don't.

So, we needed to go to war against the Taliban because they were harboring bin Laden. Fine. Get the bastard. But three months later, we corner the s.o.b. and then tell his sympathizers to go in and get him?? WTF? Of course, he "somehow escaped through the mountains". Three months after that, President Bush is relaxing with one elbow on his podium as he smiles and says "I just no longer think about bin Laden. He's just not that important to me". Well he was, and is, still important to me dammit.

That's when we suddenly were at war with "terror". We had a list we were told were an "Axis of Evil". Saddam Hussein was at the top of the list. He had weapons of mass destruction. He was ready to pounce. At the same time we're hearing this from the President, we're SEEING that Hussein is giving the U.N. inspectors "Unprecedented Access" to Iraq to search for these weapons. Even all of his private palaces were being searched. The French inspectors kept coming up empty. There were old rusted out buried missiles from decades before, but nothing that would pose a threat. But Bush kept shrieking "WMDs! WMDs!!" There were only 20% of us (myself, my boys, my husband and his family included in that percentage) yelling "WAIT WAIT please dear god let the inspectors do their jobs!!" But no. We forced the inspectors out of Iraq for their own safety and we went into "Shock and Awe" mode. Well. It was shocking.

90% of our news was and is, no better than what we were hearing from ol' Baghdad Bob who kept telling the Iraqi people "There are no American troops at the airport! There are no American tanks in Baghdad!" Just like the Mississippi newspapers in the 60s trying to tell the rest of the nation that black folks liked segregation, the majority of our news outlets tell us what our government wants us to believe just as the Iraqi state run media told it's citizens what it wanted them to believe. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, etc. are just little U.S. Bagdad Bobs, telling us what the corporate run republican powers want us to believe so that they can stay in power.

Muslims still hated us for our freedoms, therefore it was wholesale hate of Muslims. All Muslims. Wonderful peaceful Muslims, and wonderful peaceful people that idiots decided were Muslims, were being attacked all over the country. It was just like watching the attacks on blacks in the south in the 60s.

We briefly forgot to hate Muslims for a couple of years here recently because the people that were busily giving our jobs to workers in China, India, Indonesia and the Phillipines were telling us that Mexicans were taking them, so people got the excuse they'd been searching for to hate Mexicans and paid no attention to the magicians actually making the jobs disappear.

For the past 3 years Honeywell has been dumping employees all across the country. In Phoenix alone, about 6,000 families that relied on this corporation for their incomes have seen those incomes sent to India, Indonesia, Mexico, Germany and anywhere Honeywell can find tax breaks and cheap labor. Last year my husband became one of those casualties. Honeywell gets tax breaks, cheap labor and isn't forced to pay insurance for those employees. Therefore, it looks as if the company has made a profit, even though all it's done is cut costs. Profit made the stockholders happy. Nobody bailed us out. Nobody bailed out all the other families that Honeywell left with no income. What my husband got for his 27 years with the company was a heart attack two weeks after he was let go without severence pay, heart surgery, our 30K in savings wiped out by medical costs the COBRA didn't cover, and a huge monthly COBRA bill.

That is just one corporation, in one city. All of the major corporations that used to provide jobs for U.S. citizens are "offshoring" our jobs and getting paid by our government to do so. John McCain had Carly Fiorina stumping with him for a time. Said she would be one of his main economic advisors if he were elected. Do you know who she is? She's the woman who was fired from her CEO position for running Hewlett-Packard into the ground. She's the woman that said no American has a god given right to a job. She was not talking about lazy people who lay about on the job and expect pay for nothing. She was talking about everyone. If you currently have a job where you do not have to deal with customers face to face, your job can be sent to another country now and more than likely will be within the next 5 to 10 years if someone doesn't give corporations more reasons to keep our jobs in the U.S. than abroad. McCain and his economic advisor think we should just suck that up.

So, for all the Hannahs and Golies, for the children who had nightmares about "The Bomb", for those whose lives were torn apart or disrupted by segregation and busing, for the friends who died of AIDS, for the single mothers who were treated like pariahs, for those fighting the cleaned up "White Rights" face of the same old vicious bigotry, for those that died on 9/11, for those that have been crippled and killed in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, for those who have worked all their lives only to have their jobs sent to other countries, for those without insurance, for those that can't afford college and for those paying astronomical insurance costs for insurance that doesn't cover decent care, I cast my vote, with tears of hope, mourning and gratitude streaming down my cheeks. I cast my vote and then stared at my ballot while remembering all the people and events that have touched my life in the past 50 years. I cast my vote with immeasurable pride for "That one".

Not through rose colored glasses

2008-10-28T11:10:00.000-07:00

but rather between the fingers over my eyes, will I be watching both the bull riding news and election coverage.

Life has suddenly gotten just too darned suspense filled for me. I feel like I'm living in an Alfred Hitchcock movie. A neighbor of mine has two glasses of wine at night after work so that she can get to sleep. She told me "I drink too much." I answered, "I don't drink nearly enough." This fact may well change over the next 13 days.

My favorite candidate for the PBR World Championship will have to overcome bovine dirty tricks and not get injured or killed in his quest. My favorite political candidate must do exactly the same.

I read an article that said reporters from around the globe will be descending on the U.S. to watch for and cover potential election fraud and/or vote suppression in key states. I hope that helps this time around. I wish judges from Mexico, Brazil, Canada and Australia, would be here to cover the points fairy issues likely to crop up at the PBR World Finals.

There are a lot of prejudices to overcome in both the race for the Presidency and the race for the PBR World Championship. We had two southern rednecks recently arrested for plotting to murder black school children and then go out in a blaze of "glory" by assassinating Barack Obama. We have slope browed individuals wanting to send the Brazilian bull riders "back to Mexico". We have a nukular rocket scientist McCain campaign worker who doesn't even understand "mirror images" so she looks in a mirror, cuts a "B" into her own cheek, and swears to police that a big mean ol' black man (she probably used a different term to her friends) assaulted her because of her McCain bumper sticker. I'm sure the backwards "B" on her face was the police departments first clue she might not be playing with a full deck of cards.

But still I hear that there's no need for "affirmative action" anymore because prejudice is no longer a problem. Sha right, where are those people living that prejudice is no longer a problem? I'd like to live there.

So. Will our ballots be counted correctly this time? Will Marchi be scored fairly this time? Will the human bovines win the election by hook and crook? Will the points faerie visit Kody Lohstroh enough that he somehow snatches the World Championship away from Marchi? Will there be more assassination attempts amongst the throngs of rage filled voters Sarah Palin and Sean Hannity have convinced that Obama is a terrorist? Will Marchi be injured? Where are my giant 3 fingered Mickey Mouse hands to cover my eyes for the next two weeks?

Doctor Mom

2008-10-23T01:32:00.000-07:00

I foolishly thought that when my boys were grown, there would be no more sleepless nights watching over a "patient". Well the heck and gone beyond the first time and no where near the last time I am up at 1:34am nursing a sick horse.

Usually, it's a horse pregnancy that has had me up at all hours, snatching rest when and where I could manage. The last time I was up all night with an actually sick horse was when Desi had the flu two winters ago. I don't really (not really) count the night I spent watching newborn baby Poppy when her mother wouldn't let her nurse, even though I had to haul her to the vet at the crack of dawn the next morning.

Tonight it's Blondie. All the hooved kids had their flu/rhino vaccinations yesterday. Some of them were mildly droopy today. Nothing big, a couple of them were just resting a little more than usual. As soon as I cranked up the treat wagon (aka Minerva the quad) they were all more than willing to race joyously along the fence lines, following me for their Nicker Maker horse treats. When I brought Blondie in this afternoon she was fine. She ate like a horse. Tonight when I went out to feed their nighttime meal, she was sick sick sick.

Poor baby could hardly walk. One leg was locked and she's never had a locked stifle. She was none too steady on the other three. She'd had diarrhea and was totally uninterested in her hay. She hobbled slowly over to her water tub and drank, letting a lot of water just dribble out of her mouth. I pulled her out of the paddock and put her in the temporary stall we have set up between the barns. I soaked her a little bit of hay, a little bit of beet pulp and a few spoonfuls of her SafeChoice, but she didn't want any of that. She just kind of hung her head over the bucket and looked very doleful. This is not healthy horse behavior.

Her respiration rate, gum color, gut sounds and capillary refill time are normal but her temp. was up at 102.5 and it's a darned chilly night. I rinsed out her tail, gave her a dose of Banamine and here I sit. Waiting to see if she gets better or gets worse or stays the same. If it were just the aches and the fever, I wouldn't be overly worried, but diarrhea is a bad thing in a horse.

When we first got Blondie she came with Blaze. Blondie was extremely bonded with Blaze. We had them stalled side by side and if we took Blaze out of her stall, Blondie would get so frantic that she would have spontaneous, stress induced diarrhea. 4 or 5 cowplop like poops in the brief 20 minutes we'd be bathing or trimming Blaze were not uncommon. Knowing that, makes me slightly hopeful that the stress of being sick may have given her the diarrhea tonight, but I can't count on that.

Other causes for diarrhea in horses could be parasites or sand ingestion. Gosh knows we have sand and she always has her nose in it, but that wouldn't cause the fever or the obvious aches. Neither would parasites. Plus, they get psyllium every month to clear the sand and are wormed every 2-3 months.

That leaves the really bad stuff like Potomac Horse Fever and Salmonella. Although Salmonella is a concern, I've not read where pain is a symptom and there is no foul smell to her diarrhea (you needed to know that didn't you). I'm doubtful that this would be PHF because we do not have a pond, it's the desert, and water buckets are dumped and filled frequently. She's been vaccinated for every lethal disease there is a vaccination for. Thus, I am stumped, and, therefore, awake at 2:14 am.

Off to freeze and stare at the patient for a while to see if she feels any better after her Banamine.

Happy HalloWeena

2008-10-19T16:45:00.000-07:00

Evil Demon Found on Local Farm

The Evil Rowena Demon

Does this devil tail make her butt look big?

Joe The Manure Plumber

2008-10-16T18:48:00.000-07:00

Oh, and just a note before you send me something about a poor plumber who's against that evile Obama.

"Joe the Plumber" isn't a licensed plumber and is actually plumbing illegally. He has lied (oh imagine that... I bet you don't remember Jeff Gannon, former White House Press Corps and frequent after hours visitor to the White House, who said he was a reporter but was really a gay prostitute). Not only that, but turns out old "Sam/Joe" hasn't paid his state taxes. He is also not "planning" to buy the plumbing business that he is illegally working for. "Planning" requires a plan, otherwise it's called "wishin'". (I know about wishin'. I wish an owl would bring me a letter asking me to live at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.) Don't you always ask for licensed contractors when you have something important done?? "Joe the Plumber", as my husband points out, is actually Joe Blow.

The real Joe Plumbers are the licensed plumbers, you know, the ones who are backing Obama because they don't make $250,000.00 a year.

Don't be telling ME to "Wake Up!"

2008-10-16T16:33:00.000-07:00

Okay. I really need to get this off my chest because I find things like this really rude.

I have constantly said that I live in a great neighborhood. I do. I like my neighbors. Several of them I like a whole heckuvalot. I don't care that they are Republicans. I'm assuming they don't care that I'm a Democrat because they still call me up to chat. Mostly, we don't talk about politics at all. I've always found that most people are more alike than they are different. We all care about the same stuff, mostly. I don't feel that Fox News and the various republican run websites are legitimate sources for factual information, so I personally feel their beliefs are misguided. I can wish all day long that some of them would look the information up on legitimate non-partisan websites, but that doesn't mean I won't like them if they don't. Unless, they shriek at me in my email box. At that point, they are treading on very thin ice, but even then I put up with it and try my damnedest to ignore them. I have filtered all forwards out of my inbox. I have actually blocked a good friend because her husband was sending me about 10-20 forwards a day. Now I have to go into my Trash folder once a week to see if she has written me an actual letter. When I'm there, I have to look at the insulting garbage mail one person constantly feels compelled to send me. The last one was choice.

I went to my trash folder to check and see if any letters from my buddy Joann were in there. What did I find? I found something to "Obama's 'FANS'" which was just another stupid, rude, insulting, ill informed forward, but what got my goat is that before the huge lists of other people's emails, (why do people feel compelled to forward and reforward and continue to forward thus giving me 3 feet of other people's private email addresses. I'd like to reiterate that this is a very rude practice. Not to mention stupid. If someone's email gets hacked, gee thank you very much for giving the hacker all these extra spam recipients!) anyway, before the forwards, in capital letters, italicized were the words "WAKE UP!!!" I could practically hear the keys being pounded in anger. Welp. That woke me up better than 4 cups of coffee.

It woke me up to the point that I decided it's getting harder and harder to keep you as a friend and one more thing like that and there is about to be yet another person you don't get along with on this road. Don't be shrieking at me to "wake up". My last vote didn't get us into the messes we're currently in and you are the one fixin' to do that all over again. I've been using the internet for legitimate research for 13 years. I've been online for 14 years. In 1993 it was well known that if you address someone in capital letters, you are shouting at them. I'll not be shouted at in my own email box. I've sent you nothing that would warrant such behavior and never would.

I never forward anything other than our online Satellite bill and that only goes to my husband. That's it. If anyone gets something from me, it's from me. It's not me giving their private email addresses to every person in my contact list (which is like the rudest thing ever, are you going to call all your buddies up and give them my unlisted phone number while you're at it?). It's not me making no greater effort to keep in touch than to hit the forward button. No, if you get something from me, it's just from me. I might cut and paste a joke that I think you in particular might find funny, but I don't just clog the internet sending 100 people a joke. I also include a note.

Therefore I must ask, what in the last 3 years has ever made you think I want right wing propaganda in my email box? I seem to remember asking you several times to take me off the list of people you forward that garbage to. I told you then that I'd love to get letters from you to tell me how you are doing, but that I did not want any more forwards. I seem to remember gently pointing out the decided lack of facts in these forwards... a dozen or so times. So why on god's green earth do you send me junk you should know by now is both unwelcome and nonfactual? You must not care about me as much as I cared about you since you continue to send me this crap. You must have no respect for me at all to send me stuff when I've politely asked you to stop. I don't think this is a very nice way to treat someone that has always been kind to you. If you cannot take the brief time it takes to remove my email address from the forwards you send out when you know I find them insulting and that I don't want my email address spread among your friends, their friends, their friends friends, etc., then why would I take the much greater time it takes to be a friend?

Public Enemy Numbers One and Two

2008-10-01T07:57:00.000-07:00

Mickey da Rat: Public Enemy Number One

Rocky da Squirrel: Public Enemy Number Two

I went out through the garage on my way to feed the horses one night several weeks ago and something large and furry raced out from under the shelves in the corner and ran under my truck. I got down on my sore knees to see what it was but it had disappeared out into the desert darkness. I thought.

I caught glimpses of the critter hopping at blinding speed across the patio and several more times in the garage over the next couple of weeks. It never slowed down enough to get a really good look at it, which is probably a good thing. I might have developed an emotional attachment if I'd been able to see it well. I knew it was a largish rodent. I knew it had big, round, Mickey Mouse-like ears. I Googled Arizona rodent images and discovered our new critter was a Pack Rat. "Aww how CUTE!" I thought and then spent a few minutes giggling about model parts, shiny bolts and such disappearing from the garage, only to turn up in a cozy little nest somewhere.

Just about the time I saw the pack rat for the first time, the engine light came on yet again in my truck. I'd just taken the darned thing in two weeks before and two weeks before that and two weeks before that. This particular week I just didn't have time to sit in town an entire day while the dealership figured out what was wrong this time, so I ignored the light.

The following week, the truck started dying at traffic lights. I called and made an appointment to have the dealership check out this latest problem. "Thank heaven for warranties!" Over the weekend the "Check Fuel Cap" warning came on. I checked the fuel cap. It was there. It was on. "Fab. Just fab." I added this latest nuisance to the growing list I would present to the service department.

In the meantime, the pack rat continued to play in the garage. I did begin to worry when I found a small pile of pack rat poop under my truck one morning. We did begin to wonder what was going on when we began to find small shreds of chewed rubber in the garage and on the driveway. Nothing, however, prepared me for Roger at the service department handing me a totally chewed up vacuum hose and the oxygen sensor with mangled wiring and telling me "You have a friend." Apparently pack rats (which we now have) AND ground squirrels which we have had an over abundance of since last April, love the taste of greasy rubber truck parts.

Rat chewed truck parts are not covered by warranty. $512.00 and 7 hours later, the truck runs fine. Truck ran great, as a matter of fact, straight to Safeway for a box of rat treats. $5.00 later there's a cache of lovely green hors d' oeuvres in each corner of the garage and a small offering under the truck at night. A friend suggested that we just park in the garage at night. Since the ground squirrels chewed big access holes in the rubber strip at the bottom of the door, it hardly seems worthwhile to empty the garage so that the vehicles will fit. The rodents would probably just think we'd done them a service by delivering dinner to their doors.

The Evidence

Twilight: Enter another dumb heroine.

2008-09-15T20:08:00.000-07:00

I read youth fiction because I find it much more intelligent than the general "women's mystery". I'm always on the lookout for a good story in this genre. On one of my trips to Barnes and Noble I picked up a copy of the first book in the Twilight series. I was told the author was a "local" so I was excited to support a local author and I'd heard many people say how much they loved the series. That is all I knew about the book when I picked it up.

I read. I waited for something to happen. I read more. Praying for something to happen. I read further telling myself that someone or something was going to hit "Bella" in the head and knock some sense into her. No such luck. I got to the end of the book and something finally did happen. Some other vampire tracked our heroine to a dance studio and, to my ever lasting chagrin, did not manage to rip her into so many pieces that the story could no longer continue.

As I've mentioned before I'm a huge fan of the Harry Potter novels. I thought for sure that the character of Hermione Granger had forever put an end to tepid, goody-goody, nonsense driven, female characters, at least in youth fiction (nothing, of course, will put an end to them in adult women's fiction). Hermione has every wondrous feminine emotion, yet she does not allow herself to be a slave to those emotions. She has spunk. She has common sense. She is intelligent. She does not spend 7 books swooning over Ron Weasley. We saw how stupid that looked when Lavender Brown spent most of her lines crooning sappily to "Won Won" and giggling like someone who might well be 3 or 4 bricks shy of a full load. Well, on second thought, let me rephrase that. The relationship between Lavender and Ron clearly showed how silly that kind of empty headed adoration looks. With the popularity of "Twilight" it's obvious that a lot of Potter fans didn't learn from that lesson.

Hermione, often quite literally, pulled both Harry and Ron out of more tight binds than I can count. She did not sit still waiting for "Won Won" or handsome and famous Harry to rescue her. Hermione is a heroine who stands on her own small feet and often saves the day. She doesn't wait for someone to tell her when to act or how to act or what to believe. Hermione LOOKS STUFF UP and researches the answers to all the problems and mysteries that plague them. Hermione was a giant leap forward in the world of fictional female heroines.

Back to "Bella", the heroine of the Twilight series, or should I say back up 50 years to the world of the feckless, wimpy, damsel-in-distress, who likens a sparkling dead guy to a "god" and spends an entire book sighing wistfully. Okay, she doesn't sigh through the entire book. She bounces back and forth between sighing and wondering if "Edward" likes her or doesn't like her and why he doesn't like her and then sighing and shivering and getting all goose pimply. I swear to you that by the end of the book, if I could have crawled into the pages I'd have killed the little dimwit off myself.

Years ago, back in the dark ages of the Reagan years, a talking Barbie caused a big stir because one of her pre-recorded lines was "Math is SOOO hard". 20 some odd years later we have "Bella", the village idiot, inspiring our young women to do nothing more than dream about, sigh over, and rely upon young men who look like gods. Back in the Reagan years we stood up to the brainless role models like Barbie. We, and Murphy Brown, battled Mr. Dan "Potatoe"-head Quayle as he waged his war against single, working mothers. Why are we, and our girls, now swooning over this "Twilight" tripe??

When faced with the dilemma of "Twilight" and "Half-Blood Prince" competing against each other this winter, Warner Bros. decided to move one of the movies clear out to next summer. In spite of all the hype, the trailers, the toys and games all set to be released in conjunction, it was "Half-blood Prince" that got knocked out of the line up. The bimbo movie for young teens won out over the story and characters of substance. What does that say about the U.S. entertainment industry? Well... it IS the industry that made Paris Hilton a star afterall.

In Memory of Poopie kitty and Oberon

2008-09-09T07:50:00.000-07:00

On my old AOHell website, I had a section for pet stories because our pets are a large portion of our lives. I found these pet stories were still online for some reason, even though I no longer have that account.

We lost our eldest kitty just a few months after we moved into our new house. I think Oberon was simply waiting until she knew we were settled before she moved on. She was about 18 years old.

Yesterday evening we lost our Poopie kitty who was about 17. Thus, this morning I decided to move some of our old pet stories here to the blog.

Party at Poopie's Pad!

All the critters here get treats from Pupperoni to Tender Vittles, but as wild as Elmo gets for his junk food, the cats make him look positively sedate when we offer them Catnip. The best is the fresh herb you can buy at almost any local nursery. We have tried twice to keep these catnip plants alive. The first time we tried keeping one in a pot in various window sills but it failed to survive after numerous "accidents", when it was knocked onto the floor. Perhaps in a closet under a grow light would have worked better. The second time we decided to hide it in our herb garden amid other odiferous herbs such as spearmint, garlic chives and rosemary.

As we were puttering in the front flower/herb bed, the cats came by to offer advice but took no real note of what we were planting, we thought. We already had a good crop of spearmint going and we planted several bunches of garlic chives, a couple of basil plants and a few marigolds for color. Centered in the mint and new herbs we planted one small Catnip plant, watered the area down well and went inside to congratulate ourselves on being able to hide the nip. We kept watch on the garden all that day, but no cats bothered to investigate further and we fell asleep that night secure that at last we'd found a safe place to cultivate kitty treats.

The next morning I woke up, made a pot of coffee, opened the blinds and sat down with a cup to enjoy the morning. As I gazed out at the garden, my sleep fogged mind began to register something terribly amiss. I thought we'd planted more than that yesterday... I went outside for closer inspection. There, where our lovely herb garden had been the evening before was a large patch of damp earth, packed so smooth I could have laid down a cement patio addition. Our lovely herbs and marigolds were stamped into the earth and the entire area was covered with a thick layer of various colors and lengths of cat hair, some of which matched our cats, but much of which did not. In some areas there were puddles of, well there's no truly polite way to say this, DROOL.

Obviously at some point in the dark of night our cats had sniffed out the nip and then proceeded to invite all their friends from the neighborhood over for aparty at Poopie's pad. Since the drool was still apparent, I'm guessing the party didn't end until dawn when the last of the neighborhood felines staggered home and our little "angels" came inside, curled up and passed out in dark corners. Not a cat was to be seen in our neighborhood for the remainder of the day. Must have been SOME party!

Meet Minerva

2008-09-06T09:40:00.000-07:00

Due to an apparent catastrophic illness on the part of my little electric quad, aka the "Shrieking Eel", I decided I needed to move up a couple of rungs on the ladder of farm-mobiles. Meet my new, gently used 2006 Honda Recon 250. I have dubbed her Minerva, as she wears a green cloak and is somewhat shorter than Albus the white F-150.

Minerva has already proven to be a MUCH more comfortable ride than the Shrieking Eel, she doesn't have difficulty maneuvering the sand, gravel and eroded terrain in the dry wash, and she doesn't make any more noise than the supposedly "quiet" electric quad. Minerva's gentle contralto rumble is much more pleasing than the Eels uber-soprano shriek.

As you can see in the photos, my crutches are already bungeed to the handy dandy crutch carrying rack. I had to sit on my crutches when riding the Eel. Not very comfy.

News from the thriving metropolis of Wittmann, AZ

2008-08-21T19:51:00.000-07:00

I sputtered to a start this morning and coasted slowly to the coffee pot, let the little dogs out, let the little dogs in, and headed to my computer to read the news while enjoying the first cuppa caffeine of the day. This is my morning routine. It's the only time when my needs come before those of the perpetually hungry critters. If I don't have my relaxed time with the cup of coffee and get my brain cranked up by reading Google News I stand a good chance of totally hosing up the horse feeding.

Today I hosed up the horse feeding. Blaze got what baby Godric gets, Blondie only got hay, Desi darned near didn't get anything and finally got breffast as a hurried after thought. Why? Because I got to my desk, double-clicked my Internet icon and got the dreaded "Internet Explorer cannot display the web page" message.

I rebooted computer. I unplugged everything and let it all sit for 20 minutes then plugged everything back in. After 30 minutes of trying to figure out what was wrong on my end, which entails a great deal of crawling around in the cat hair under office furniture, William called. What the heck is William calling me about? He hardly ever calls me. He emails me.

"Are you awake?" He asked.

"Oh god yes, I'm awake. I'm just unplugging everything in the office trying to figure out why I don't have Google News to go with my coffee."

"Umm well, that's what I was calling about." He paused.

I waited for the other shoe to drop. Many things were running through my brain at that moment, ie. unpaid bill, cat sabotage, dog sabotage, size 14 shoe thrown at cat that somehow destroyed the DSL box, cat murder by electrocution that took out our Internet service, and, at best, some fool with a tractor plowed up the phone lines. I at least knew that the horses weren't involved in whatever disaster had befallen our connectivity. Their barn is an acre away from the phone lines. The most they can do is sabotage their own water and fencing.

"Okay. What happened?" I asked, with my eyes squinched shut as if not seeing would make hearing easier.

"Someone must have taken the corner too fast onto Lone Mountain, spun out and literally crashed and burned into the telephone pole. I mean the whole pole is blackened and the wires have been melted into a ball of black spaghetti. Must have been a big fire, all the brush on the corner is burned and the car is burned down to a nickle."

"WHOA dang!!! Well alrighty then I'll cease the search for chewed wires here."

"Yeah, I think this time we can safely assume the problem is on their end. You really should jump in the truck and go see. It is a most impressive wreck."

My morning was momentarily saved. This was much better than Google News for getting the brain in gear. I fed the horses, hurriedly and ineptly, grabbed the digital camera, and headed up the road. Not much excitement happens in Wittmann, AZ. When it does, it attracts spectators. Some savvy entrepreneur, with more guts than ethics, could make serious money charging admission to highway stops, fender benders and brush fires out here.

By golly the wreckage was indeed as bad as William described on the phone. In the words of a friend who watched his first bull riding event last weekend "I hope he's okay. I hope he's okay. I hope he's okay." Even as I was sending positive thoughts to the driver, I was staring at the 4 closed doors, caved in roof, obliterated front end, evaporated interior and a 20 foot, black ring of charred brush surrounding the car, the telephone pole and our wiring. I thought "If someone walked away from this wreck he needs to stand like Ho Ti and let people line up to rub his belly for good luck, because no mere mortal could have survived."

I don't know if the tape on the telephone pole is to hold the pole together, which would not surprise me, or if it's there to mark which pole needs to be replaced, which also would not surprise me. For one thing, QWorst is known for shoddy fixes and, for another, the people that perpetrate those shoddy fixes may well not be able to distinguish a giant stick of smoldering charcoal from any other telephone pole.

Just in case anyone has forgotten, or there's anyone alive I didn't whine to, it took the phone company FOUR MONTHS to run a phone line 5 acres down the road from the nearest house, to our house when we first moved in. I'm sitting here, gloomily checking for Internet every hour or so, knowing that phone company history has a tendency to repeat itself. It's any one's guess how long it will take them to replace the pole and the melted line.
------------------------------
OOOh update! As of 9:00 this morning there were no vehicles on the corner other than the burned out car. By 11:30am, when John and I went by to take pictures, there were about 15 other vehicles, mostly QWorst along with one Sheriff's Office car, and an APS truck. They'd managed to get a new pole up already. The stick of charcoal was still there, as was the charred car. Who knows? Maybe they'll get every one's phone and Internet restored today? We can hope.
-------------------------------
Update 2: Well, some of us lucky folks have phone and Internet tonight. My friends the next street over are still incommunicado. A ridiculous number of official vehicles are still camped out on the corner. It would not surprise me a bit to learn in the morning that several other wrecks have prolonged the repairs. Because of all the large camper-like QWorst trucks parked all over the intersection, it's impossible to see oncoming cars until you're t-boned.

Ayup. A busy day in Wittmann.

Why We Love To Watch Bull Riding

2008-08-09T05:36:00.000-07:00

Our fascination with bull riding has grown to the point that it's almost the only thing I'm willing to sit down and watch for 2 hours and is certainly the only thing on TV I'm willing to sit through a ton of commercials to see. We may well be the only couple in the U.S. that has never seen a single episode of "Survivor", "Dancing With The Stars", "American Idol" or more than 2 minutes of any given NASCAR event. We are not the only couple in the U.S., however, that can hear the names of 45 PBR cowboys and be able to say "Hey, that's a new guy." Not even I completely understand why we've come to love the bulls, the riders and the eight second clash between them, but there was a progression during which we moved from amazement that anyone could be so foolish, to admiration.

At first, we called them The Darwin Award Tryouts. It's not pretty, but there you have it. Fellas, if it's any consolation, I'm sorry about that initial impression. We can understand the roots of many of the rodeo sports. Calf roping, saddle and bareback bronc riding, team roping and penning, cutting, etc., would have all been typical cattle and horse ranch work. Bull riding, on the other hand, seems like a sport that got it's start with the phrase "Hold my beer and watch this!". Whether it was by drunken bet or some cowboy that got his bluff called after claiming he could ride anything on four legs, seems to be unknown. The only information I can come up with on Google is how rodeo itself got started during a friendly competition between neighboring ranches to see who performed ranch tasks best. This does not explain how bull riding came to be since there'd have been no ranch use in breaking a bull to ride.

One of our earliest impressions of bull riding was the iron muscled riding arm of Adriano Moraes. We started watching bull riding off and on in 2004. Adriano was one of the first cowboys we began to recognize. We'd see that arm and know what rider was attached to it. In close up shots of a cowboy getting set up on a bull, we'd see the hands, arms, or boots of the cowboys standing by the chute. "There's Adriano!" we'd cry out as a massive arm reached over the bars to grab a cowboy by his vest to keep him from being injured by an overly eager bull. Because of that ever ready arm we began to see bull riding as something more than just something you'd do on a dare.

At 38 years old, Adriano Moraes is one of the oldest riders in the PBR. The young Brazilian cowboys who are making big splashes in the world of the Professional Bull Riders, are likely where they are today because they were inspired by Adriano. On the Built Ford Tough Series PBR circuit, he has become the father figure to many. He's been riding professionally since he was 22 and he has both seen and experienced what can happen in a chute, on or under a bull. Adriano is retiring from bull riding this year. There are going to be a lot of young cowboys in the chutes who will miss that strong, quick and loyal arm.

The following photograph taken at this year's Glendale PBR event, captures what we have grown to admire about these men who choose to ride dynamite. Young Pim Rosa of Brazil has just been rescued from the chute in the arms of Adriano Moraes. Directly behind Adriano, his face partially obscured, stands Guilherme Marchi who is the number one bull rider in the country and is stepping into the boot prints of Moraes. The concern, caring and strength on the faces of these young men is why we have grown to admire them. The fatherly strength this photograph captures on the face of Adriano Moraes is why so many young bull riders will miss his presence next year.

Photograph used by generous permission of

The Arizona Republic Newspaper

and Photographer David Kadlubowski

I write because my soul would shrivel if I didn't. Putting bits of myself on a page may seem scary to me at times but I only risk emotional injury. I may never understand why these young men put their lives on the line for their professional sport but I no longer think of them as foolhardy guys with more machismo than brains. These are good men, iron men, forged to maturity through facing their own mortality each time they buckle on a pair of chaps.

Live from Baton Rouge

2008-07-25T20:57:00.000-07:00

I'm here at the home of my best friend Daph and my new friend Allison, aka Nice Lady. It is here that I have come to heal through laughter therapy at the end of each day since Wednesday this week.

It's been a tough week. Even tougher than I expected in some ways. I found things out this week. Things that the living never tell. Things that only the belongings of the dead can reveal. If you've ever had to clean out after a death, I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. There are things that lie concealed in everyone's past. Some of which are best left concealed.

There are also things found in the belongings of the dead which serve no other purpose than to give us something to do that takes our minds off the grief. Did my mother know that by saving every grocery, drug, and bill receipt from 1962-1983, every Christmas present tag, every letter from every kid off at college, and every shot record and report card from each of us that by sifting through these useless records for at least 8 hours a day for a solid week I'd have a break from the grief of being completely without parents for the first time in 52 years?

What the hell are all these keys for? Are they my mother's keys as well as keys my mother inherited from her mother and was afraid to throw away for fear that whatever they unlocked will show up? I am now the keeper of the keys. I couldn't throw them away either Mom, so I'm going to make a wind chime out of them. Until whatever they unlock shows up, they'll tinkle in the breeze.

I have to say that at 25 years after my mother's death, I didn't expect to find so many of her things in Dad's house. Her entire vanity area was as if she'd only stepped out for a moment. Even her makeup case was still there. The vanity must have been a sort of memorial since my father had placed her final notes to him there, her final scribbled wishes in case anything happened because of the surgery, which it did, and the kind note from her surgeon who seemed genuinely stricken by her passing and wished to let us know that she was unconscious and unaware as she passed away so there was no fear or pain in her final hours.

Then, to stir up the emotions a little more, I found out that my father felt guilty because my mother was terrified of the coming surgery and had asked him to do something simple to comfort her. She'd asked him to crawl into the hospital bed with her and just hold her. My father was so uncomfortable about being seen in bed with his wife, in public, that he would not do that one simple thing. Yet, years later he prominently displayed on his night stand the photo he took of his girlfriend clad only in a flimzy teddy, attempting a pin-up style pose. Perhaps in heaven or wherever, there are large, cast iron frying pans and perhaps the only pain is when dead wives clout their dead husbands with them. We can hope.

Then there is my eldest brother who looks so grief stricken and sorrowful at times that I'd just like to hug him tightly until he cries. I'm sure he has some rather conflicted emotions as well, although probably different than mine. I'd give just about anything to save him the pain he's in.

Thus, with my brain clouded with grief for the father that wasn't, grief for the mother that was, anger at the injustices, guilt over the anger, and worry for my brother, I have stumbled gratefully through the door on Vicksburg St. and into the healing company of women who care and laugh and lighten my heart and spirit.

I am lucky to have three of the most wonderful women in the world as my friends and they are all right here in Baton Rouge. Becky, my absolutely crazed friend that is known for picking up sea shells, shark teeth and missiles on the beaches of Pensacola, Allison my new friend and truly Nice Lady, and Daph my soul friend who lifts my heart even if I simply hear her laughing on the other side of the house. These are the kinds of women that make having women friends such a special experience. I thank all three of them for helping me through this week.

Norman Caldwell Scaife

2008-07-15T12:07:00.000-07:00

Gone Fishin'

July 13, 2008

'Nuff Said

2008-07-07T00:34:00.000-07:00

One picture worth at least 500 words

2nd picture, a close up, worth the next 500.

Farmer's Note:

Okay. I guess pictures aren't enough and a bit of explanation is necessary for Zonkster pals and others.

We do know the importance of our prey animals. All the gods know how I wish I had more king snakes, more bull snakes, more coachwhips, more coyotes, more hawks and falcons. I have to draw the line at snakes that will kill my animals, my family, my friends and me. In a much much earlier post I go into some detail about the effects of having put 1/4 inch wire mesh around the entire horse facility in order to discourage the rattlesnakes. The coachwhips can zip over that stuff like it wasn't there and they're welcome in my barn and pastures. We keep our mouse population under control with traps. My barn dog keeps the squirrels and rabbits out of the barn and pastures quite handily. None of the snakes kill the adult rabbits and only prey on the very small young ones. The snakes can eat the squirrels and I wish more non-lethal snakes were here to do so. It's never with "glee" that we dispatch a rattler so we work more to discourage their presence. When we're forced to, however, we do without hesitation and that's just how it's gotta be.

A Day in the Life...

2008-06-29T10:30:00.000-07:00

Dad, this one's for you:

Here at the miniature horse farm we rise at around 5:30-6:00 each morning, creak our way slowly out of bed and stumble toward the coffee maker. We wake up via caffeine I.V. while checking email and reading news on line, then we head for the medicine cabinet and hit the dated, categorized, carefully compartmentalized pill boxes that we're told keep us living. Then we dress and sit dumbly on the edge of the bed, as if our boats fetched up in mud, while our engines try, re-try and try again to turn over. Mostly what we get is that "tick, tick, tick" sound of a bad battery. Eventually, however, we sputter to a start and mosey out to the barn to feed the horses around 7-ish.

Sometimes it's good to be short.

Then we feed horses. Horses who today are standing out there, tapping their toes, and not at all happy that breakfast is late. Rowena is determined to chase William down for her bowl because as you can see the poor baby is emaciated. Handsome is turning himself into a giraffe trying to inhale his feed straight out of the scoop before I can dump it in his feeder.

William and John handle the heavy chores around here, lifting those bales, toting that poop and such. (Imagine Green Acres theme playing in the background)

John also handles the WHW (Wittmann Horse Wrestling) duties whenever anyone gets out of line.

While the horses eat we check the garden for ripe veggies so the rabbits and squirrels don't make off with them first. The rabbits have finally gotten desperate enough to eat zucchini. Looks like we've been raided over night AGAIN.

Gol-durn rabbits! We'll show 'em!!

Then it's time to ride out to check the fence lines.

Good grooming practices are part of the daily routine. Well, at least for the 4 legged residents. People wouldn't recognize me without hay in my hair.

William tries to explain the concept of rabbit hunting to Elmo and Anniedawg. They just want their bisquits and bacon thanks.

On weekends we love to watch the televised PBR (Professional Bull Riders) events after the evening chores.

And that's pretty much our day, minus the tractor work, house work, nap, and writing!

DISCLAIMER: No herbivores were harmed during the making of this blog post.

Horses, Horse Racing, Horse Lovers and Taking Responsibility

2008-06-23T10:55:00.000-07:00

Marquet Gold aka Buster, safe at foster facility.

There's a lot of griping going on about the horse slaughter ban. Y'all know, or should by now, my feelings on that subject. A lot of the griping centers around people who can't afford to have their horses euthanized, can't sell them, can't afford to keep them, having to turn them loose in the countryside because of all of the above.

I've recently come across the Alex Brown Racing website which hosts discussion groups. There is a section in the discussion boards dedicated to the rescue of horses from auction houses that sell to kill buyers. I've learned a lot from that forum. These are not PETA people. These are not "uneducated" people who have somehow been brainwashed by PETA. These are HORSE people. These are horse owners, horse breeders, horse trainers who band together in a giant cyber army of responsible humans to rescue horses. It's one of many such groups.

How did I find out about this forum? I plugged the name of a horse I know into Google. The horse belonged to a friend of mine that breeds, trains and races thoroughbreds. I've known Buster (aka Marquet Gold) since he was a baby. Sandy kept us updated on his progress through training, his first race, all subsequent races, all his personality quirks, and I feel like I know "Buster the Butt" almost as well as I do my own minis. When Sandy let me know this weekend that Buster had narrowly escaped being sold for slaughter in Ohio when his trainer, Randy Joe Faulkner, dumped him at the Sugarcreek auction. I was horrified. Sandy had sold this horse on condition that she be contacted to buy him back if the horse ever left racing. She was NOT contacted.

Buster is one horse among thousands with responsible breeders ready and willing to buy them back rather than see them end up in a meat wagon. Yet, there they all go. Why??! In the words of one of the members of this discussion group "there are no UNWANTED horses, we just simply live in a quick disposal society."

Certainly, there are times when hard times hit fast and out of the blue. Just like rescue groups such as this one grew out of need, I feel that other groups will form to help owners facing sudden financial crises. As people who enjoy or make a living off of horses, it is our responsibility to provide a decent life and humane care for these animals. Knowing that there may be people out there that suddenly find themselves in sudden dire financial straights it should be a shared responsibility to help them do the right thing by their horses in a crisis. Rather than saying "They can't afford it! The ban hurts them! They'll have to turn their horses loose!", it's time for responsible owners and caring veterinarians to stand up and say "Together we CAN help afford these animals either a humane passing or find them a new home." It can be done. It has been done. It is being done even as I type this blog post.

Here is a link to the discussion group. Please read as this exciting story grows with each individual post and shows what this group of responsible owners and trainers went through in order to save 8 thoroughbreds in the kill pen at the Sugarcreek Auction. Then ask yourself if it "can't" be done or if people just aren't willing to put forth the effort and time do what's right. (The "FOB" refered to in this forum is the group "Friends of Barbaro".)

http://forums.delphiforums.com/alexbrown/messages/?start=Start+Reading+%3E%3E

Here is Buster's story, written by my friend Sandy:

He had scratches and bite marks all over him, he was hungry and only had one shoe left but Buster was one lucky horse.

He was alive.

He had raced on Monday, and here it was, Thursday, and he was at the auction barn in the kill pen with a bunch of other Thoroughbreds who had just been dumped. Horses were already being sent through the auction ring and dedicated rescuers were frantically making calls and emailing people trying to raise enough money to save a few of them. Twenty dollars came in from a PayPal account here, a hundred there, fifteen or twenty dollars from somebody across the country. Friends of Barbaro and Canter and volunteers were scrambling for every penny. Some of the volunteers were in the pen, trying to look at lip tattoos to help identify some of them. Many of the horses would shy away from the humans, but Buster walked right up. Maybe one of these guys had a snack, he probably thought. He was chosen as one of the lucky ones to be saved that day. His identity came back; his name was Marquet Gold, known from birth as Buster. My partner and I were there when he was born.

Thursday night about 9:00pm I was checking Email when a message popped up from a nearby friend. She wanted to know if I had seen the post on Backyard Racehorse forum. Buster had been pulled out of a kill pen in Ohio. My partner and I started making frantic phone calls, googled rescue groups in Ohio, called the phone number listed on a website. An online friend in Florida alerted her parents in Ohio, and they were ready to go bail him out, or do whatever needed to be done. Another online friend in VA was ready to help get him transported to the barn where she boards her hunter until we could make arrangements. A friend in the Pacific Northwest contacted people she knew in rescue to help track him. We were frantic. This was one of our babies.

We had a couple of good mares, and might have one or two foals a year. One might sell as a yearling, or we’d send one for training. Not happy with the results, I was ready to semi-retire and decided to try my hand at training my own. I figured I could not win races cheaper than the other guys weren’t winning, and this way I got to keep my horses sound. It worked, I had some wins with my babies, and when they retired they were found new careers. People liked my retirees because they had been raced with no drugs except an occasional dose of Lasix, which seems to help in the South heat and humidity. Never did my horses get steroids or other "performance enhancers". Buster was no exception. He was started under saddle in a big pasture full of billy goats and whatever other livestock wandered onto our place. The rider did figure eights on Buster while I kept the world’s nastiest billy goat at bay with a squirt gun full of water. By the time Buster got to the track, not much spooked him.

Buster was a stone frontrunner. Try to rate him, and he’d get sulky and spit the bit. It was wire to wire or nothing for him. He was big and stout and tough, but when the Sam Houston meet ended in April ‘07, I didn’t think he’d be competitive where I was headed next, to Dallas and Lone Star Park, so the plan was to turn him out. Another trainer who had come down to Houston for the meet was going back East, and thought Buster would run well there. He wanted to buy him.

After waffling, I decided to sell him, the first active runner I had ever sold who could run as a racehorse for someone else. I pinned my card to the foal papers, with a note on the back stating there was a forever home, if needed. The trainer agreed to let me know if he ever decided to get rid of Buster so I could buy him back.

Of course I had followed him in the charts and with Stable Alert, and was pleased to see he was back running. Buster never had a sore spot in his life but injured a fetlock in the first race for that trainer, still while at Houston. Then, I noted that he had not finished in the money in his last race Monday, and wondered if he was sore. Then Thursday night I got that email.

Sleep didn’t happen Thursday night, and by Friday emails were starting to be answered. We finally got the one we wanted to see—"we rescued your horse!" Buster was on his way to a foster farm in Virginia. We phoned the farm there, and Sheila told us that he seemed to be sound. Relief. We had been afraid that he had injured himself in that race.

A flurry of activity followed, and today, Sunday, my friend in VA had commandeered a friend of hers who owns a trailer, and the trainer at her barn hopped in for the trip, and off they went to retrieve Buster. It turns out Buster had been delivered to a foster farm a mere 24 miles from her house.

Buster is alive only because of a bunch of unlikely and awe inspiring miracles. Miracles that interlocked and formed a safety net that caught Buster when he fell. The miracle of the group that calls themselves Friends Of Barbaro, in honor of the great racehorse who won the Kentucky Derby, then was injured in the Preakness and fought valiantly for months to recover. The rescue organization, Canter, whose people were there helping with the rescue. The miracle of friends and strangers across the country chipping in money and effort to save as many horses as they can from slaughter. The fact that someone who knew me through a forum scanned the pedigrees of the horses rescued, and saw me listed as breeder. This is the miracle of people like Gail and Sheila and Kathleen and Susan and Lyn and a hundred others holding out helping hands.

One miracle is wonderful. Buster receiving so many is almost unbelievable.

I wonder how many breeders or past owners would like to help these horses if they knew there was a crisis situation. The only answer is some sort of early identification so they could be located quickly. Can the formation of a national volunteer registry of breeders or caring owners help? Info on a microchip that auctions would be required to scan, and show proof of trying to contact the breeder or owner? Requiring a holding period of time before a registered horse could be sold to allow time to make the contacts? How about an additional fee for all horses, like a licensing fee, to help with the horse’s eventual retirement? Say, a thousand dollars in an interest bearing trust account for that horses as foal, for TBs deposited thru the Jockey Club, for others another applicable agency. When a horse is retired or no more useful, a licensed agency gets the horse and the money to care for it. I don’t know the answers, but if the racing industry is to survive, some hard decisions must be made. Drugs need to be banned except for therapeutic use. The crisis situation for horses is increasing and rescues are being overwhelmed. Of the thousands who weren’t so lucky, I thank my lucky stars that Buster is safe now. The scratches and bites will heal, the weight will be regained.

Buster is alive. I am forever indebted.

Aridzona Jean and the Garden of Doom

2008-06-19T09:23:00.000-07:00

I dreaded it. I put it off. I was saved by two phone calls. I trimmed Hellmo's eyebrows. Eventually, however, I had to (insert eerie music here) check The Garden. Keep in mind please that I checked The Garden two days ago and still have the 8 zucchini, 4 yellow squash, two romas, and about 20 cherry tomatoes from that day's haul taking up a large space on my kitchen counter.

THIS is what I found in The Garden this morning! HELP my god HELP!

There were about 6 small zucchini (about 6 inches long) that I didn't pick today. No doubt they will double in size by tomorrow and triple by Saturday. There will also be about 20 more cherry tomatoes ready to pick tomorrow. I'm thinking I should start bagging up mini-manure and sell it as miraculous designer fertilizer because you wouldn't think all of this food would come out of a 12 x 4, seriously overcrowded, unweeded, totally organic garden.

Here's a photo of the garden. It used to be about 12 x 10, but that big bare spot you see is where the 6 melon plants used to be until the squirrels mowed them down. (squirrels and rabbits STILL won't eat the zucchini) Everything else is crammed into the remaining 12 x 4 section of The Garden of Doom. On the far right, against the wall, are the cherry tomatoes. Those immense green umbrella leaves are the zucchinis. Obscured by those immense green umbrellas are 3 pepper plants and a spaghetti squash vine. Behind those gigantic abundant green umbrellas are the two yellow squash plants, the roma tomato and the grape vine that is still holding it's own.

And yes, you see correctly. Glutton for punishment that I am, that is a sprinkler going in the spot of bare dirt. We certainly don't want those plants to parch and die do we?!

Veggie Tales

2008-06-18T21:41:00.000-07:00

No, this isn't about the cartoon, it's worse than that. I'd like to know why we're importing tomatoes (I guess they are technically not a veggie, but I promise I'll get to the veggies later).

We started a garden this year for the first time. We threaten ourselves with growing a few veggies every year, but this is the first year we actually made the effort. It's even hard for me to call it an effort. We took about two weeks worth of mini-manure and spread it out in a 12 x 10 section of bare dirt inside the pool fence, wrapped some chicken wire around it to keep Hellmo from peeing on the plants, and called it garden.

We went to Home Despot and bought seed packs of lettuce, broccoli and zucchini. We bought 6 honeydew melon plants, 4 cherry tomato plants, a roma tomato, two yellow squash plants, a grape vine, a bean plant, and a spaghetti squash vine. We planted, watered and waited. I planted an 8 foot row of lettuce and a couple of feet of broccoli. I only planted 6 of the zucchini seeds because I figured a couple wouldn't sprout and a couple wouldn't thrive and two zucchini plants would produce plenty for the two zucchini eaters in the family.

Let it be known that today's seed packets have obviously seen some improvement in the last 3 decades. Seeds now sprout very well indeed. Perhaps there are magical properties in mini-manure, but all of those zucchini plants sprouted, as did all of the lettuce seeds and broccoli. They all thrived. All the plants we planted thrived. Our 12 x 10 garden was looking a bit cramped after about a month, but nature has a way of dealing with overcrowding.

The lettuce was almost ready to start picking a bit each day for side salads when the squirrels found them. I went out to water one morning and half the lettuce had been sheared off at ground level. The next morning there was only bare dirt where 8 feet of lettuce should have been. The zucchini, squash and tomatoes were untouched.

The melons had begun blooming and boy were we salivating. Nothing beats chilled honeydew melon. The vines were lush and lovely. Until the squirrels finished up the row of lettuce and discovered the melon vines. 3 entire melon plants gone in one night. 2 the next night, bare earth on the third day. The zucchini plants were untouched. I started contemplating rodenticide.

I forgot to mention the 6 strawberry plants I put in pots with potting soil. These strawberry plants grew, blossomed and started producing little berries. I'd placed them toward the front of the garage where they'd be protected from the lethal effects of the Aridzona sun. They got about 6 hours of morning sun but were protected from the worst. The berries started getting big and fat and pink. I was salivating again. The berries went from big and fat and pink to gone and mostly gone. Damned squirrels had found them IN THE GARAGE. The zucchinis were still untouched. I went to town and came back armed with 3 boxes of D-Con and a high powered pellet rifle. I was ticked off.

After 2 months, our garden contained 6 gigantic zucchini plants, 2 gigantic yellow squash plants, 5 gigantic tomato plants, a grape vine that is still fighting the good fight amid the choking tomatoes and zucchinis. The bean plant never did much. One bean per week is hardly a harvest. Then the rabbits discovered it and left nothing but the stalk. Rabbits don't eat zucchini either.

I'm getting about 12-15 zucchinis per week. We've only just now started getting decent yellow squash even though the plants are huge and lush. And our tomatoes are ripening. The tomato situation is about to become as frightening as the zucchini problem. We have hundreds of tiny green maters and probably 15 romas ripening. None of the tomato plants show any inclination to stop blooming so there are more coming after these. There's going to be a lot of fresh salsa, spaghetti sauce and salad fixins around here.

The zucchini wars are quite frightening really. I get on my hands and knees, pull back leaves, and search diligently for new zucchini every other day. Zucchini, however, is evil. There will always be 3 or 4 that manage to hide in the bermuda grass (when watered, mini-manure produces a better, more hearty, patch of bermuda grass than any landscape artist can install) until they weigh about 10 lbs and are bigger than Elmo. I have made two 10 lb zucchini casseroles, I've steamed it, I've baked it, I've cut it up raw on salads, I've grilled it and I have two 1 gallon freezer bags stuffed full of it in the freezer with 8 more fresh ones on the kitchen counter staring at me. I also haven't checked the plants since yesterday and I know there are more out there lurking. I can feel them watching the house, and growing. My neighbors avoid me. I'm considering mailing them to friends across the nation.

What I am forced to wonder here amid the salmonella epidemic from imported tomatoes, is why in heaven's name are we importing veggies? I have 5 tomato plants that are producing enough to handle the average tomato consumption of 3 families each week. I'm doing this with nothing more than water and magical mini-manure so it's certainly not a high cost crop. If I discover we're importing zucchini I'm going find out who is to blame and take one of these two foot long club shaped veggies and beat the fool over the head with it. I can feed 3 families DAILY with the zucchini I get out of 6 zucchini plants, more than that if one of those 10 lb casseroles is involved. I mean really. If I can supply this many veggies from a garden that is now only 3-4 feet wide and 12 feet long why are we paying for salmonella imported from Mexico?

How Minis Helped Shape the West

2008-06-14T16:03:00.000-07:00

Harry Potter and the Plagiarists of Slytherin House

2008-04-19T06:46:00.000-07:00

I'm sure that everyone has heard of the Harry Potter novels even if you have not read them. If you have not read them, please do not presume to tell me that you know better than I do on this subject. Watching the movies doesn't count. If all you read are sex-by-chapter-three novels or "Women's Fiction" in which the brainless heroine finds time to yearn, sigh and/or even THINK about having sex while running for her life from whatever villain the equally brainless author has belched onto the page, please do not presume to tell me diddly about my Harry Potter addiction.

It is because of my Harry Potter addiction, my lengthy past as an avid fan of fable and fantasy, and the research this passion has inspired that I am quite qualified to offer an opinion regarding the JK Rowling vs Harry Potter Lexicon lawsuit. It frightens me that people who have not read the books, know nothing of the great mythologies of the world, and have not thoroughly used the Lexicon, will be deciding this case. The Judge, god help us all, has already made the statement that the stories are "gibberish". The Judge in this case obviously has paid no attention to the great writings of the past, ignored the mythologies that are still the soul of each and every story written today, and is completely ignorant of the mythologies which are inextricably enmeshed in the history of humankind. It is frightening to me that someone who admitted having great difficulty reading the first book in the series and who, therefore, must have lower level reading and comprehension skills than my dyslexic child, is allowed to preside over any court case, much less one regarding book copyright. It is frightening to me that people who do not have enough imagination, talent, accrued knowledge and work ethic to produce such a multi-layered story of their own may well be about to open the flood gates for other little Slytherins to profit by stealing the work of writers past, present and future.

I have read the Harry Potter novels. All seven. I've read them several times over. I also have all seven audio books on my iPod and listen to them. I've waited a LONG time for someone that writes as well and tells a good old fashioned multi-faceted story. Until I read the first Harry Potter book, after several years of nagging by my best friend, I'd thought all the best story tellers were dead and gone. Stephen King is fun sometimes, but his novels often waffle on endlessly and leave me skimming pages to the point that I skip about half of the books. His short stories, however, are brilliant. I'd actually given up trying to find a novelist that didn't bore me to tears for at least half their book and had taken to buying short story collections to satisfy my need for well written fiction, until I was introduced to the magical mind of JK Rowling.

My Grandmother was brilliant at creating fairy tales. They were fun, funny, introduced me to new vocabulary and always taught a life lesson. From her tales of Tykie Toom the brownie, to Kitty Crooktail (the kitten who broke his tail and couldn't get around like all the other kittens). The wee folk of her tales, brownies, elves and fairies, passed down by her mother and grandmother, came straight from the folklore of Scotland and England. These "Bedtime Tales" as we called them, are the brightest memory of my childhood and instilled in me a love of stories well told. After 40 years of searching, reading, and occasionally finding stories well told, JK Rowling produced a series that captivated my intellect, heart and imagination. I know a good Tale when I read one.

If you've read the books and they did not captivate your intellect, you need to reread them. You need to pay closer attention to the names of people, places, plants, creatures, and even those evil "spells". When I was little, again thanks to my Grandmother, I was absolutely enthralled with the idea of going to school. My older brothers were learning fascinating subjects like Greek Mythology, the history of Rome, and Latin. By the time I got to school, however, the Bored of education had done away with those subjects. In high school we had to choose a language, but Latin (THE ROOT OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE) was not among the choices. French or Spanish were the only two choices. I flipped a coin, took French, and have one useful phrase to show for it. I don't have a better grasp of our own language like my brothers. No. I can tell someone they're a pain in the butt in French.

JK Rowling's Harry Potter books inspired me to seek out the education that I missed in my youth. Through discussions, essays, statements by Ms. Rowling and articles on the various Harry Potter fan sites, I discovered many marvelous facets to the tales of Harry and his cohorts. I reread the books, paying closer attention. I noticed character names, creature names, places, items, and phrases. I haunted websites such as Encyclopedia of the Celts, Encyclopedia Mythica, The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, altreligion, a multitude of sites regarding Arthurian and Grail legend, and astronomy sites. I haunted the bargain books at Barnes and Nobles, walking out glad that they didn't charge by the pound for the immense encyclopedias of mythology I'd found. What have romance and women's fiction taught you lately?

Of the many websites I frequented was the Harry Potter Lexicon. I frequented the Lexicon a LOT. It was often the spring board I used in my research. I used the Lexicon, not because it was the be all, end all of mythological knowledge. No, their knowledge of myth is not impressive. I used it because it was an alphabetized list of names used in the Harry Potter series. The Lexicon definitions of the names were, much more often than not, simply definitions taken from the books which came from JK Rowling's own vivid imagination. The other reason that I used the Lexicon was in order to have easy access to character quotes. THIS was where the Lexicon was most useful because in it's pages was nearly everything of importance any character had ever said. Easier than trying to remember at what point in which book a certain character had mentioned something, I could zip over to the Lexicon where they had JK Rowling's words organized alphabetically, by character, by book, by chapter, etc.

None of the Harry Potter fan websites are for profit. They are free sites, built by fans for the enjoyment of fans for the purposes of entertainment and education. They are places where people gather to get to know other people who appreciate the Harry Potter series. They are allowed to exist because they give us a place to congregate, make friends, discuss our theories, write critical essays, and exercise our brains. Ms. Rowling recognized the educational and social benefits of such FREE websites and allowed them to exist even though some of them, such as the Lexicon, seriously violated her copyright. She recognized that the sites were not trying to make money from the fans by using her works. She allowed them to continue and even joined the fun by mentioning them on her own official website. But these are FREE websites. The owners make no profit for them.

There are four school "houses" at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Gryffindor, where the most courageous students are sorted, Ravenclaw, where the intellectuals gather, Hufflepuff, where the students are determined workers, and Slytherin where the cunning, Machiavellian students belong. As the story progresses, the students of each of the first three aforementioned houses work together to fight evil. Slytherin house students, however, use any means to achieve power, even by allying themselves with the ultimate villain. Slytherin students think nothing of manipulating others, stealing, lying, bullying, plotting murder, plotting the defeat of all that is good and kind, so that they may achieve great wealth and power.

It would be Slytherin students who would not trouble themselves with coming up with their own information in an essay. They would be the students that copy over shoulders or steal another student's homework, scratch out the name and apply their own. It would only be a Snape, the teacher that is head of Slytherin House, that would let them get away with such behavior. Only the Slytherin students would, if caught by another teacher, attempt to justify the theft of another's work by telling that teacher it was their right to steal the work of another student. Without blinking an eye, a Slytherin student would point at direct quotes and attempt to convince their judge that those words were entirely different. They would tell the judging instructor that their work was completely their own because their outline was alphabetized. Therefore, they should be able to turn in their stolen report for credit because their use of someone else's hard work was completely fair.

The Slytherin student would hate citing their sources and quotation marks for the extra work research involves and would want to keep the credit for the writing all to themselves. Their Slytherin friends would back them up and argue in their defense because they all share the same Machiavellian tendencies. Theft, lying about the theft, and profiting from that theft are what Slytherins do. Steve Vander Ark and his publishing company, RDR Books, are Slytherins. Vander Ark is attempting to publish FOR PROFIT, his alphabetized version of the Harry Potter series. He has taken Rowling's words, verbatim, organized the names of items, people, places, creatures, etc. alphabetically and is now trying to convince those that caught him in his burglarization of the novels that his theft and ability to profit from it are Fair. It would seem also that a group of Slytherins from Stanford are still harboring grudges for being caught at plagiarism and lack of source citations in their college essays, reports and term papers. The Slytherin student would not do the hard work to research a project. A Slytherin would simply steal it and call it their own.

Obviously, Vander Ark, self-professed superfan of the books and their author, missed the many non-subtle points of the Potter stories and should go back and reread. If someone would like to mail Vander Ark, RDR Books, Judge Patterson and the little Slytherins at Stanford a clue taken from the books here are several:

You do not violate the rights of others in order to achieve or enjoy power or to accrue wealth.

What is right is never easy.

Evil may prevail temporarily, but sooner or later the train leaves without your corrupt and twisted soul.

HAIR

2008-02-29T11:33:00.000-08:00

Give me a head with hair, long beautiful hair, shining, gleaming... WAIT STOP NO! NO MORE HEADS WITH HAIR!

Today was bridle path trimming day. Minis can grow more hair than any beauty parlor has ever swept out at the end of the day. I just cut hair 3 months ago and every horse in the barn was wearing a 4 inch tall mohawk. 3 months ago I trimmed all tails to an inch above the ground and today every adult horse in the barn had at least 3 inches of tail dragging the ground behind them.

Tired of them all looking like drunken ladies wearing bizarre plumed headdresses, I got out the shears and hauled the first victim out of a stall. The first victim was little Weena who sports a kinky, curly, nappy, mop rather than a mane. Her hair has gotten so that it takes 5 tries to get her halter on without trapping wads of frizz in the buckle. She's still not quite used to the fact that life is no longer going precisely the way the Weena wishes and did not want that buzzing beast anywhere near her Queena crown of nappy locks. Queenas don't like wash racks either, by the way.

Just shearing the Queena Crown and bustle took about 45 minutes out of the morning because Queena had to be convinced the wash rack was not a place to murder woolly pot bellied pigs, nor were the clippers instruments of torture and doom. Once we got those two issues out of the way, then we had to deal with Weena boredom. "Okay, none of this is going to kill me. I got that. Can I leave now? I want to go over there and see that. Can I eat that over there? I think it's lunch time. Mind if I nibble your jeans? I need to go over there. I'M BORED!!!!!!" She doesn't look great, but at least I can get her halter on and off easily and she doesn't have a bubble butt anymore... much.

Weena has hair that would make a sheep jealous. One of her great joys rubbing her back and butt on low hanging branches and tree trunks. This wears down the wool on her back and the sides of her rump but left a woolly mohawk down her butt that made it look as though her front legs were about 4 inches shorter than her back legs. She at least doesn't look like she's walking down hill all the time now... much.

Next victim was little Godric. Except for the normal "I'm the baby, gotta love me" attitude that seems to be born into all mini foals, Godric and Weena are as different as fish and birds. Queena is utterly carefree. Godric has to consider everything, even feed buckets, before he gets too close. As you can imagine, shearing the head of "Brave Godric" took another good chunk out of the morning. That's okay though. This was the "children's" first hair cut and if I hadn't taken the time to do it right it'd just take more time next time.

Every day when I'm working with Godric, I am struck by his elegance. His daddy sure did put a mark on him. He's the absolute best of both Mom and Pop. He is refined, small head, tiny fox-like ears, bright expression, wide chest, graceful neck, gorgeous legs and perfect bite. He's not the flashiest color in the world. We think he's a silver bay, but under all that baby hair it's difficult to tell. He's going to make someone an extraordinary horse. He's simply that breathtaking.

Once the babies were done things went smoothly. Well, okay mostly smoothly. Lucy had a momentary memory lapse. For a few minutes there she acted like she'd never had to endure such torture in her life. Then suddenly the cogs in her brain turned and she remembered, relaxed and got a beautiful trim that compliments her pretty face and neck. Honey, Blaze and Brave took about 3 minutes total. Walk them in the rack, zzzziiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip off that hair, walk them out to their paddocks.

Desi, I don't even want to discuss the Desi-tude today. Honestly. As many trims as that child has had! That's okay though. He and Martini are slated for a "trim" at the Vet clinic and I'm betting they'll be really happy if all they lose is hair after that.

Sounds of life

2008-02-25T19:08:00.000-08:00

The week and life amid the minis moved on. The weather is beginning to warm up and so are the short horses. Thus, all the hair they have been putting on since October is getting itchy. It's a bit soon to shear them so, for now, they are left to scrub themselves against the tree, the fencing, the ground or even another horse.

"Hey, I have an itch. I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine." (one says with an innocently genial expression)
"You have a deal!" (Says the other horse)
"Whadja stop for??"
"Mma mmouf (ptooey) imf mphhull (ffthackptooey) mof haair!"
"snicker"

The little birdies are all busy singing to beat the band and hauling several pounds of horse hair out of the stalls. Horse hair which will color the nests all across the neighborhood. Next big wind storm and my neighbors will have bits of my horses laying in lumps on their porches. If it rains with that wind storm it'll look like some giant bird hocked up a cat in their yards. I know where I hope some of those sodden masses of horse hair land, but I shan't go there.

There is another sign that spring approacheth. We have "weanlings" screaming all through the night and day. The first day, of course, was the worst. We couldn't hear ourselves think around here. William covered his ears with his headphones and listened to loud metal all day. We couldn't even talk to each other in the barn that morning for all the indignant, pissy screaming.

We put Weena and Godric in one paddock and Lucy, Blaze and Honey in another. Lucy went out first and rampaged up and down the fence trying to see her baby who was shrieking as loudly as my ATV just out of sight. We turned Blaze in with her to distract her. THAT worked. Lucy is The Boss. Blaze used to be the boss of her herd in Texas. Blaze thought this arrangement hadn't changed. Blaze was wrong.

Blaze came bursting out of her stall and headed straight for Lucy who said "Oh I don't THINK so." Blaze soon had a bruised butt and tried to leave but Lucy wanted to drill her point home. "Oh no uh uh, you brought it on, you aren't leaving until I make you leave" and proceeded to chase poor tubby Blaze around the paddock about 45 times. It was very unfair. Blaze is much smaller than Lucy and had to gallop those rounds of the paddock while Lucy simply trotted easily taking the inside loop.

Before Blaze had a heart attack, we turned Honey out to distract Lucy (read as: we threw Honey under the bus). Lucy came at Honey who already knows the drill. Honey trotted off to the far end of the paddock the second Lucy took a step in her direction. Honey's no dummy. She gets along with everyone simply because she doesn't care if she's the bottom horse on the totem pole. I think she actually prefers that status. It's less work.

One pile of hay is as good as another to Honey, so if someone wants her pile, she just wanders over to the next one, no big deal. Being The Boss is a lot of work. You have to fight all new horses and hope you walk away with fewer bruises than they do. You have to constantly remind the other horses that you're the boss. You also have to watch out for the other horses and warn them if strange dogs, horses, or coyotes come into the yard. Honey would just prefer to nibble, scratch and snooze her way through the day. This attitude saves Honey a lot of trouble. No one challenges her because she's already at the bottom and likes it. The other horses find that a bit disconcerting.

"Well, sheesh. That was easy. You're supposed to fight me."
"Nah. It's okay. You be the boss. I'm cool with that. Here... I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine..."

I see the Thestrals

2008-02-19T22:17:00.000-08:00

For the uninitiated, Thestrals are the great, black, skeletal flying horses, invisible to those who have not seen and understood death. The thestrals pull the school carriages at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the masterful Harry Potter series by JK Rowling. Sadly, death visited the farm Sunday night in a very close and personal way that could not help but bring instant understanding.

Honey went into the final stage of labor at about 8:30pm. William and I were there with her, watching the progress carefully. This was her first child and she was a bit jittery so we just stayed out of her way and observed, ready to help when necessary. She didn't want to stay laying down to deliver, but after getting up two or three times, finally went down and pushed the baby out well within the normal time parameter. I was kneeling behind her and as soon as the foal's knees were visible I opened the sac around it's nose.

I was excited to see the pure white nose that signified the birth of a double creme dilute. That excitement was quickly replaced by the sickening knowledge that something was terribly wrong. The foal was completely limp and inert when I attempted to roll it onto it's chest. I urgently asked William to look up the section in our manual about emergency resuscitation of the foal. I squeezed down the foal's muzzle to clear it of any liquid and held it upside down to encourage drainage from the lungs. William read the instructions and I straightened out the foal's neck, pulled it's tongue out the side of it's mouth, clamped my hand over it's mouth with my thumb over one nostril. I puffed baby breaths into the exposed nostril.

At this angle, I had a clear view down the foal's neck, across it's shoulder, to it's ribs. I could see it's tiny heart beating. I could see it's chest rising with my puffs of air. I could also see it's soft, trusting, bright blue eye gazing into mine. It is that sweet, calm, trusting eye that I cannot forget.

I paused a few seconds every 5th puff or so, hoping desperately that the foal would gasp and begin breathing on it's own. My husband called the vet to see if there was anything else we could do. Load them up and haul them the hour drive to the vet clinic was his only other suggestion and if we did that A. the foal would likely die on the way and B. the clinic would probably have no better an outcome. He verified that we were doing everything correctly and stayed on the phone with my husband while I continued to work, and hope, and breathe and watch that little heartbeat, and gaze into that calm, blue eye. Until that calm blue trust turned to black and the tiny heart ceased to flutter.

I wonder what I didn't notice that I should have noticed while Honey was giving birth. I wonder what I could have done faster or better. I close my eyes and I see that calm blue gaze and I wonder how I could have better served that trust. I see Honey staring blankly at the other foals and I am so horribly sorry.

I see the thestrals.

Wowza what a week!

2008-01-30T19:36:00.000-08:00

and it's only Wednesday, which makes me a tad fearful of what the rest of the week may bring.

We had the rainstorm to beat all desert rainstorms over the weekend. The predictions alone scared us into borrowing a neighbors big horse trailer, and lining up emergency horse digs all around the neighborhood in case we got flooded out. We dug the natural dips in the yard a little deeper hoping to contain any extra flood waters and lead them out to the main wash. We added to and bolstered the tarps surrounding both barns to keep the wind and rain out. I drove John to work Friday morning and he had to stay in town all weekend so A. I'd have a truck in case I needed to haul short horses to dry land and B. he would be able to get to work and not get stuck on the wrong side of all the flooded roads between here and town.

Thankfully, our auxillary wash handled the extra over land flood waters, the water in the main wash didn't top the bank, and although we got a huge amount of rain, the horses stayed dry and cozy. It was just a grucky (both gross and yucky) weekend. However, since it was obvious the horses were going to stay dry, I was actually able to finish a book I'd been trying to read for the past 4 months.

It was so wet and soupy outside that I didn't check my little mare Blondie for two days. I just watched her on the foal cam as I was reading. She'd been trying to bag up for about 3 weeks but hadn't gotten full yet. When Monday morning dawned bright and clear I fed everyone, lifted up tarps to let the sun in, and checked Blondie. Darned if her little udder wasn't filled up like a balloon! It wasn't exceedingly warm, it wasn't dripping, and I couldn't express any milk so I zipped to town and picked up John. My other mares have stayed a couple of days with a full bag before they deliver, so I figured I could leave her for a couple of hours.

When we got John home, he let the horses out into the 2 paddocks that were mostly dry, cleaned the stalls and then sort of half-assed kept an eye on Blondie while I napped. We fed them around 4 and John went to town to get himself a burger. Having been up watching the mare and the flood situation for most of the weekend, my plan was to have a nice long hot shower and go to bed by 7. I got my shower, but that's all I got.

John disappeared into his room to watch TV and half-assed keep an eye on the foal cam. After my shower I came out and sat for a while just observing Blondie behavior on the camera before I went to bed. She was rubbing her side and butt on the stall fencing. "Ahh.. okay.. she's probably just uncomfortable. I'll watch a few more minutes and then go to bed." She paced her stall and stopped long enough to bite at her side. "hmm.. uhh.. okay... she's probably just being a maiden mare drama queen. I'll watch for a few more minutes.." She laid down and rolled. "JOHN!!! Blondie's in labor! We gotta get to the barn!" John filled her stall floor with hay while I pulled the foaling supply cart into the barn. Then we went back to the house to observe. Well... okay... I observed while John disappeared into his room again. He only got about 5 minutes in front of his TV though because within minutes of settling myself into a chair to watch, Blondie cocked her tail laid down and went stiff. "JOHN! SHE'S DOWN!" Back to the barn we went. I went into the stall while John positioned himself in the aisle next to the foaling supplies.

"We have the white bubble! Excellent!"

"We have a foot! Excellent!"

But that's all we got. Blondie groaned with each contraction, but wasn't pushing very well. I waited another minute before requesting the gloves. The second foot appeared but there was no nose between them. "Damnit. Head turned back position." was all I could think. She was making no more progress. About that time Blondie got up, turned around, lay down again, and rolled a bit. Both feet were still apparent. I put the gloves on and attempted to search for that elusive snoot. There it was! Propped on top of one of the legs rather than tucked down neatly between them. At least I was pretty sure it was the nose. If not, the baby would have had a seriously malformed leg with the knee only an inch or two above it's fetlock!

Blondie groaned and pushed a little more but after 5 minutes all I had were two feet. "Gotta be another shoulder lock." Once again, I pushed the trailing leg back a bit and pulled with all my might on the leading leg. "There's that nose!!" "There's the head!!" And that's all we had for several minutes again as I pulled with each contraction. I had John call our neighbors, Danean and Lynn, then call the vet as I continued to work on the problem. Head was out, one leg was out, the trailing leg was still pretty far back. Must still be those darned shoulders. I opened the sac around the baby's nose in case it began to breath, then waited for the next contraction and pulled with everything I had. I was terrified I was going to damage that baby's legs, but we were running down the clock and the baby needed to be born. Just short of planting my feet on that little mare's rump I hauled the rest of her shoulder through. The vet called back right as the rest of the baby hit the ground. I had time to squeal "It's a PINTO!!", before Danean and Lynn drove up. I of course squealed it again as soon as they got to the barn.

Blondie lay still and rested. I rolled the baby up onto her chest, stripped back the rest of the sac, and dried her off while rubbing her all over with the towel to imprint a bit. Blondie was taking a little too long laying down so Lynn encouraged her to get up. She was suffering a bit of paralysis due to the shoulder locked baby, but she was up and moving, even if stumbling slightly in her back end. We'd called the house to alert William as soon as the baby was on the ground and he became the official reader of the foaling manual (The Complete Foaling Manual, by Theresa Jones). He flipped to the segment regarding paralysis of the mare and the book assured us that more than likely all would be well since we'd been able to get Blondie up with no trouble and that she was attempting to walk. Sure enough she was pretty much normal within about 10-15 minutes of rising.

Blondie nuzzled my cheek as I sat by her baby and I smooched her nose and complimented her on a baby well done. Unfortunately, once the baby was up and attempting to nurse we discovered that Blondie really wasn't well equipped for nursing. The after about 30 minutes of watching the baby struggle to find the undersized teets, William ran to his shop to cut the end off a syringe to make a suction device and then Lynn attempted to milk the mare. He managed to get about 15 cc colostrum total which the baby did guzzle appreciatively before laying down to rest after her ordeal. The baby finally learned how to find dinner on her own and we all left to let them bond in peace. Lynn and Danean went home to bed, William went in to bed, John and I sat watching the foal cam to monitor progress, periodically going outside to make sure the baby was nursing. John dozed, I watched.

I watched the baby chasing Blondie frantically trying to nurse, nursing for long periods, then dozing while standing up, chasing, nursing, standing to doze. This pattern continued for about 4 hours. I grew more anxious. Finally after nursing for about 10 minutes straight, the baby flopped to the ground and slept for nearly an hour, clearly exhausted. By 6 am she was beginning to wobble after her mother, whereas she'd previously been chasing mom pretty handily. Forward progress had stopped and she'd backslid a step. Time to call the vet.

We loaded a very upset Blondie in the trailer, and a very tired filly in the cab with us. She stood in John's lap, periodically nuzzling my shoulder for the hour long drive to Durango clinic. Somehow she'd managed to get some colostrum from her mom, but not quite enough. She was given a good extra helping at the clinic and stayed there overnight for monitoring and awaiting the result of bloodwork to determine antibody levels. Blondie's hormones finally got in gear and she started delivering enough milk for the filly to get a full tummy and get back on track. We picked them up this morning and the filly left a brand new fan club behind at the clinic.

For now, all is well!

Below are pictures of the filly with Dr. Osborne at Durango Clinic, and me with a very new, very short horse in the cab of the pickup.

Zoooooooooooooooooom!

2008-01-12T17:36:00.000-08:00

My wonderful hubby (you can see him over at his Dubious Maxims blog), has outdone himself this year. I've been finding it increasingly difficult lately to get around and work the minis. It would seem the warrantee on my shoulders and back has expired and nothing pleases them. Can't rest well because something always hurts no matter my sleeping position. Can't crutch around for long periods because some body part or another whines and squalls. You get the picture. In fact, you probably get that picture in 3-D if you're over 50.

I decided to do yet another search for an electric powered off road vehicle of some type to help me exercise and train the minis. Having had no luck a few years ago, I began searching for heavy duty off road capable mobility scooters. I found some of those that might work. I even found several that definitely would work if I wanted to spend 10K for them. On a whim, however, I decided to try once more to find an electric powered Quad. Neither my horses nor I appreciate noise toys. I found a couple of really heavy duty, state of the art, as complicated as a guy can possibly make them quads. One was still in the design stages and one I'd need to wait about 10 years for it to come down enough in price to afford.

The next and last chance link was for THIS little gem.

I thought about it for a whole 5 days before I ordered it. Nevermind that the local store that advertised the item was in stock, didn't mention that it was in stock in MINNESOTA (cough) until I called them asking if I could just come pick it up. I won't go there... yet. I'll save that for another blog post.

The day after I ordered the new Jeanie Mobile, my power wheelchair coughed, sputtered, tried to run me into several walls and then quit. Well, it quit when you consider that when I tried to go forward it would lurch violently to the right and then shut down. I guess technically it wasn't completely dead, only mostly dead. I cowgirled up for 5 days, but was worn down to only basic feeding and watering needs for the horses and was beginning to wonder if I just piled their stalls full of hay could they wait a week before I had to struggle through the barn again.

Wonder Hubby to the rescue! After more disappointment filled searching for a local company that provided power chairs without having to wait 3 to 4 weeks for delivery, were affordable, and were not outposts for insurance rip-offs (see upcoming blog post), I found ONE company in the metro Phoenix area that actually had this little savior in stock.

We now have my spiffy little Go Chair charging in the kitchen. It smells like a new car. Poor little thing will be hay and dust covered by the end of the week but I have my new Shop Vac to help there. The horses are not sure they care for it's next to noiseless operation and it's candy apple red body, but they'll get used to it. I'll wait a bit before I spring it's horn on them.

So far the Go Chair works great! There are only two minor modifications that I'll make. I'll need to remove the foot rest for barn use as it is a trip hazard when I'm hopping up and down to feed. I'll also need to adjust the length of the controller. Right now it's either too close or I am too buxom because when I lean forward to put hay in the feeders my bosom bumps the joystick (oooh baby!) and I run into the stall fence.

My Favorite Christmas Present

2007-12-29T10:13:00.001-08:00

Well, okay, to be honest, my favorite Christmas present this year was just to be able to spend it with my husband and children. We almost lost my husband this year and, thus, almost could never have watched "A Christmas Story" together again, or sit together and gaze at the tree lights on Christmas Eve, when the tree is always it's most beautiful. So, truly "The Man Who Lived" was my favorite gift this season.

However, that said, I did get something that's almost as useful as my husband, if not as much fun to be around. A Wet/Dry ShopVac. Not high on the list of most women's dreams, but it rated in the top 5 of my Christmas wishes and was certainly the most realistic of them. Diamonds or a Lexus were not even in the top 50, although one day... a new used F-250 would be cool...

Several weeks before Christmas, as we were gathering gift lists, I was asked what I wanted. "A ShopVac" was not what my husband expected me to say. Not that he expected me to say anything in particular, but "A ShopVac" was not an answer that wasn't even in the top 50 of his wildest expectations.

"uhh.. okay... umm...Why?"

"I want to vacuum the horses."

Then he understood. He giggled, but he understood. We live in a desert. I have extremely hairy miniature horses. It's very VERY dry. We have a ton of dirt and enough static electricity to power the metro Phoenix area. The combination of lots of hair, lots of dirt and lots of static cling, makes for horses that can't be touched without raising a cloud of dust thick enough to obscure the landscape in several directions. Brushing only moves the dirt around because the static just sucks the dust back into the hair. I've long since given up brushing as an exercise in futility.

In the summer I can bathe them. However, since they're so hairy, it takes about 4 hours for them to dry. If you turn them loose before they are dry they roll in the dirt, making a mud pack in the hair that I just spent 20 minutes scrubbing. The mud dries and the cycle of hair, dirt and static begins again.

One of our neighbors uses a leaf blower on one of his mules. I sold the only one of my horses that would put up with a leaf blower cycloning him clean. I needed a ShopVac. Bless Santa, he brought me one! I happydanced. I raced out to the barn to pick the first victim. Braveheart was so good about getting a shave, that we decided to try him first. He was a real trooper. The hose is pretty long and the Shop Vac is pretty quiet. While giving us an "I'm REALLY trying to trust you here" look, he stood his ground and soon realized that the weird suctioning snake actually felt pretty good in some spots. I patted his rump and there was NO dust cloud. I patted him all over and got NO dust!! WOOHOO!! On to the next victim!

We vacuumed 4 horses, if you consider little "Weena" a horse. I consider her more a woolley pot bellied pig with hooves myself. Her hair is the densest of the bunch. It's long, it's thick and that's just the top coat! She's got an undercoat that can rival any sheep. I thought we'd need to have at her with a rug beater before vacuuming to have any success, but lo and behold that Shop Vac sucked every bit of dust out of the Weena Wool. Now, if we could only use it for a bit of Weena Liposuction, she might start looking like a horse by spring.

See title choices

2007-12-27T20:33:00.000-08:00

This post has two title options, so just pick your favorite.

Magic and Those Who Just Don't Get It
or
The Ball Cap of Christian Kindness

Call me childish and I'll thank you because youth is what my heart strives for. Children believe in magic. In spite of the disappointments of their unanswered wishes they do not fail in this belief unless some fool of an adult preaches it out of them. Someone too "grown up" inside to bother with such things and thus decides that others shouldn't bother either.

There are people who twinkle. The twinkle comes from the magic of the heart and shines in the eyes. There are people who cannot twinkle because they are too grown up for magic. I endeavor to twinkle, although I cannot always. I tend to allow others to douse my spark and it is this tendency that should become my resolution to abolish each and every new year.

Some people lose their twinkle because of life experiences. They daily see vile things and soon grow to expect vile things everywhere and in the hearts of all others. They cannot live freely and always attempt to warn others away from living freely. Here are a couple of clues. Not everyone is out to rip you off. MOST people are honest. If you do not feel this way, then this is a dark spot on your own soul that is begging to be healed and needs your attention so that you can twinkle once again. Unless such people heal their souls, they grow more and more untrusting and more and more miserable. Unable to contain all that fear, sadness and paranoia, they want to spread it around and have everyone looking over their shoulder or looking suspiciously at their neighbors.

There are some people who cannot twinkle because they assume that their favorite deity will twinkle through them without assistance. They confuse what amounts to wearing a bright ball cap with a giant logo of the words Christian Kindness with a true twinkle. As long as everyone knows they believe in this logo they're good to go and just fine and dandy individuals. Magic? HAH Phooey. No time for that silliness! Just do the Christian Kindness thing and we can be to dinner in an hour. Our deity will take care of the sparkle in our souls so we don't have to! Wrong.

Becoming too grown up is easy, that's why so many people are. If retaining the twinkle of childhood magic were as easy as becoming too grown up, I'd be better at it and more people would attempt it. Being grown up or mature are what we've always been told we're supposed to strive for. We are not often told to strive for wisdom, which is a helluva lot more important than just being mature and only on the rarest of instances are we told to retain magic. Being mature is "In". Retaining a child-like nature is silly.

What is truly sad, however, is when non-twinklers work to ruin the enchanted moments that twinklers work very hard to gift to others. They feel like they'll just burst open if they don't run around waving that ball cap with the giant logo around showing how wonderful we all have been. "TADA! There was no magic, it was us, in all our Christian Kindness glory because you were so hard up and we were so fabulous and care so very deeply that you're in deep doo doo!! Aren't we just the greatest! Here, give us a hug because we care so much! Okay gotta jet, we're running late". Or they rain on the magic parade by instilling the fear that something will go horribly wrong and all will be lost because evil beings lurk in every shadow ready to pounce.

Non-twinklers can really pee on my spark, because deep down everyone needs magic. Even as our brains hand us a list of probabilities and facts surrounding an unexpected boon, a healthy heart will flutter with the excitement of magical possibilities. Why? BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT MAGIC IS! It's not evil, it's not vile, it's not from satan, nor is it foolish. Magic is from the heart. It is an invisible gift to share with others. If you are too mature, too saintly, too busy or too careful to nurture and share this magic then you and the world around you grow colder.

Tornado Alley West

2007-08-22T08:04:00.000-07:00

Who knew there were tornadoes in central Arizona?! Tornadoes which, in fact, appear in a bright blue, cloudless sky? We do. I'm a witness.

Yesterday, as I was heading to the barn to check water buckets before I allowed myself lunch and a nap, I saw an approaching dust devil. Seeing that I was in it's direct path I quickly covered my nose and mouth with the collar of my shirt and headed for the shelter of the barn. As I was wheeling down the sidewalk almost to the barn door, the dust devil hit the back side of the barn. I figured it would just break over the top as they usually do, but no.

This devil lifted my entire heavy duty, four stall, roofed barn (easily 4 thousand lbs, and likely more considering it's locked into all the fencing) like a cheap paper kite. It hit nearest the stall housing Lucy and her baby. Lucy fairly flew from the stall having to leap the quickly rising bar of her gate on the way out. The baby, for once listening immediately to her mother, was right on her heels leaping the bar as well. The other two mares flew out of their stalls as the devil tore the roof extension off of one stall and left it hanging by a thread. Not only was the barn lifted, it was pushed forward and twisted so that the back half is a full 8 inches from where it started and the east side of the barn is pushed a good 4 inches north toward the house.

The dust devil lifted all but the poles in the very front of the barn, those it merely bent forward. The back half where it hit was lifted 3 feet off the ground. I sat watching the slow motion events terrified that the barn would fall on the horses as they tried frantically to escape. Watching it rise into the air I also was terrified that it would flip completely over on me.

The plumbing pipe was pulled to the breaking point and was adding a major geiser to the unfolding horror. Ten seconds later my roof was hanging, my water was gushing, and there was not a single straight vertical pole in a barn that was now situated facing northwest, as opposed to north.

Thus, on yet another record breaking day of heat, my husband and I were out repairing the damage as best we could. The dangling bit of roof gave way and was laying in the paddock. The splintered timber posts that once held it were now horse killing spikes in the stall. We removed the spikes and put the horses in their stalls so they wouldn't cut themselves on the tin roof in the paddock. In order to put them in the stalls, we had to tie the wire fence back to the panels and had to tie the panels together. When the barn was lifted and twisted the brackets holding the panels together were pulled apart and the no-climb buckled.

Then the water pipe had to be fixed, the roof removed from the paddock (thank heavens for Jackie, Mark and their work crew!!!) and a hose replaced because when the barn was dropped it, of course, landed on the brand new hose severing it. Thus, the horses can live in it, and eat in it, in relative safety, but it now leans at odd angles. One side of the barn is now on top of the stall mats that used to run down the center aisle, the intact main roof is askew in spots where it was buckled up by the wind, and the snake fencing in the front of the barn has been pulled away from it's dirt edge so that even rabbits can now enter the barn there. The barn never leaked before, but it will be a veritable rain sieve now.

Here's hoping home owner's insurance covers outbuildings struck by dust devils. I'm sure there's a freaking clause somewhere that pointedly lists this as a non-covered event.

I used to complain because the dust devils make a daily bee line for my swimming pool and dump half the contents of the paddock and hay pile there for me to skim out with the dip net. I'll just be grateful now if that is ALL they do!

Proper Barn Attire Required

2007-08-17T19:50:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I happened across an advertisement for a boarding stable which went so far as to give dress code requirements. I snorted and moved on to other web surfing.

You see, I own and care for a barn. No, wait, make that two barns. Two barns filled with miniature horses who easily create as much manure as their larger cousins. People ask me "But what do you do with MINIATURE horses." The correct answer is "I drive them, teach them tricks, train them, play with them. I can do anything with minis that others can do with big horses, except ride them." The realistic answer is "I feed the front, clean up behind, and keep their hallway cleaner than my own."

Do I wear "proper barn attire"? Oh, you betcha. In the morning I go out to feed in my pajamas and cowboy boots. Used to go barefoot or in sneakers until we found a snake in the barn. Now it's boots. An hour or so later, I'm dressed up... in shorts, a tank top and nasty sneakers with my usually unbrushed hair tied back in a pony tail. That's when I begin cleaning the percheron sized collection of poop out of the stalls.

After two stalls on a lovely Aridzona morning, I have to jump in the pool to soak my clothes (I do take the nasty sneakers off first), in order to have the strength and courage to clean another two stalls, after which it's time for another dousing in the pool. At that point it's too hot to consider cleaning the other 4 stalls, so I haul out the leaf blower and blow the accumulated dirt and hay out of the barn aisle.

After that, it's time to ditch the tank top and shorts and go for the swim suit and sunscreen and another dip in the pool. I then refill the water buckets, set up the misting fan for the comfort of the current mother and child (the child whose birth I assisted while wearing my wet swimsuit and flip flops) and put away my tools. Resisting the urge to point that misting fan at myself for the remainder of the day, I take another dunk in the pool. Thus ends the morning routine. The evening routine utilizes the same wardrobe choices only in reverse order, beginning with the wet swim suit and ending with pajamas and boots for snake patrol.

Several times a week, I have to spread all that poop around the paddocks. Those days I'm a real dish. Barn attire then includes the wet swimsuit, wet tank top, cowboy boots, cowboy hat and sunscreen as I drive the lawn tractor with scraper around the paddocks. Just call me princess.

I, only half jokingly, told a non-horsey friend that I was considering just painting my fingernails black since I could never keep dirt out from under them anyway. She said "That's just a little gross Jean." I started to explain to her that she didn't truly understand the definition of gross, but knew I'd only get a glazed stare. For the true definition of gross, see equine placental membrane and products of deworming.

What's Worse Than Seeing A Rattlesnake?

2007-08-14T07:26:00.000-07:00

Not seeing the rattlesnake.

I have had 3 hours of sleep because I've been keeping snake vigil.

Last night while I was feeding I noticed a strange looking stone. I didn't know for sure it was a stone as it was in shadow. It at first looked like one of the large toxic toads native to our area. Something just wasn't quite right about it. I moved closer. About the time I realized "no, it's just a rock", a small diamond shaped head and neck appeared across one end.

The snake was small, but size doesn't matter in rattlesnakes. A ten inch rattler is just as toxic as a 3 foot rattler. This was about 2 feet from a stall holding two inquisitive noses that are quite dear to me. I hurried for the shovel.

I was back in less than 30 seconds, just in time to see the tail of the snake move over the rock. I'd planted some bermuda grass in that area to give the horses fresh grass for treats and in times of illness. The snake had crawled down into the thatch. I began chopping the heck out of the grass patch.

My son got home from work about that time and saw me hacking away with the shovel. The only reason to hack away with a shovel in the barn, at night, in the summer is the presence of a rattler. He came running and, upon hearing what happened, got another shovel and we both hacked like crazy at the grass patch.

Then we got a pitchfork and began combing the grass to look for remains or a small very ticked off snake. The horses were all munching their hay and staring at us as if we were the lone television in the lobby of an asylum.

Finding no remains and no live snake we sat. And watched. And sat. My son walked through all the paddocks with the flashlight and all the stalls to see if it had escaped. We were on guard until a late (oh man was it late) night lightening storm drove us inside at around 3 am.

I've just been out to feed. I went over the grass patch in daylight and still see no sign of the snake. He either got away or we pureed him. The problem is that we don't know which it is. I'll have to mow today, not like I didn't have 50 other things to do. And, because I think he got away, I'll be on snake vigil again tonight.

If he was a smart snake he crawled like hell back to whatever hole allowed him entrance through the snake fencing and into the barn. But I have no more confidence in that, than I do that there is puree of rattlesnake in my bermuda thatch.

We have a baby!

2007-08-13T07:29:00.000-07:00

Well, the summer from hell wrought one good thing. We have a beautiful buckskin filly! NOT, mind you, from either of the two mares we knew to be pregnant, but rather from Lucy the miracle mare who we thought was not pregnant this year. We didn't notice her little secret until about 6 weeks before the baby was born.

Thus far this summer we've been screwed by the corporation where my husband slaved for 27 years (I must wonder if the parents of the individuals involved told them it was okay to lie, cheat and steal to get ahead or if they came by those traits on their own). Due to all the stress from that lovely event, my husband suffered a heart attack the morning of the 4th of July and underwent open heart surgery the morning of the 5th. Thus, once the COBRA pays out and we pay our share AND continue to pay COBRA the 1200.00 PER MONTH, Honeywell will have flattened our saved resources. The corporate way of thanking someone for saving their bacon for 27 years. There just aren't enough curse words to describe that company and those people. Suffice to say, I am not wishing them health and happiness, and they'd best hope that if they break down in the desert with no water, that someone besides me happens along.

Back to the happy news of the baby before I get homicidal. The newest cherub was born at about 7pm , July 21st. Back in May I'd told a friend and fellow Harry Potter fan, that we'd probably have a baby the night of the big release of the final book. I was, however, talking about a different mare! We hadn't been paying attention to the state of Lucy's belly as we were too busy staring at the barn cam videos of the other two mares. I could have caught flies with my open jaw when I saw Lucy's belly bouncing one evening. The shock was so great in fact that I tried to convince myself the movements were just fly flinching. That thought was dashed several minutes later when the baby not only bounced REALLY hard but changed the entire shape of her belly. This mare, by the way, wasn't in a stall with a camera.

The night of the big release parties, I'd gone swimming. My son was going to go to a release party in town where he'd pick up our books. I really wanted to go, but Lucy had been bagged up for a couple of days and I didn't want to leave her. However, since she was showing no restless behavior, no signs of labor, I'd decided that I'd wait until about 9 and run down to the closer bookstore just for an hour or two, just to participate in the celebration. I got out of the pool and, still in my swimsuit, I went to check water buckets. All the horses were still eating dinner. I filled Lucy's bucket while she munched quietly, I went on down the row of stalls filling all the buckets in the barn. I was coming back to put the hose up when Lucy suddenly laid down and began pushing.

I raced as fast as my wheelchair could take me up to the house to holler for my husband (who, recall, is only a couple of weeks post op from his heart surgery) to start calling neighbors for help. All I needed was someone to hand me things since my husband couldn't bend and lift. The only neighbor he could reach, is the only neighbor with no experience birthing animals. In my husband's hurry, he didn't explain to her that all I needed was someone to hand me things. Thus, poor Jan, ran out of her house to another of our neighbors and told them we needed help. Karen raced down thinking that I had an abnormal birth on my hands. When she got here, baby was already on the ground and trying to get up. You know you have a wonderful neighbor when they'll grab hold of a gooey horse umbilical cord and amnion and tie them up so your mare doesn't step on them.

The little squirt is racing around the pasture, already completely unconcerned about where her Mom is, unless she's hungry. She's been that independent since she was two days old. It drove Lucy crazy for about a week, and then she gave up chasing the child.

Still nothing from the mares we know are pregnant, however, Blaze's baby is currently dribbling basketballs, so maybe it won't be too much longer. Maybe??

Of Mice and Farm Owners

2007-05-22T18:06:00.000-07:00

I love furry and feathered creatures. Thus, when we had to move our flooded out haystack and found 12 tiny baby cottontails, I was more than willing to drive halfway across Phoenix (quite literally) to meet a lady who rehabilitates cottontails, jackrabbits and squirrels. As I kneeled in the still damp earth, smelling the misfortune of those babies that had not survived the flood, I thought of all the times I'd cursed their parents for eating whatever I plant. With my shirt hem folded up like a kangaroo pouch I transported the squealing bunnies to a bird cage, loaded them in the car and spent what was going to be a pleasant Sunday evening on the farm, driving through city traffic.

I love people who love creatures, which is one of the many reasons I hold my neighbors in such high esteem. Most of the people on our street have horses. My nearest neighbors raise adorable dogs and everyone here owns an assortment of dogs, cats and horses.

One of our neighbors today informed me that he'd been having to buy hay, because he couldn't use what he had left just yet. Seems a quail had decided to build a nest on the top bail and until her babies were old enough to leave, he didn't want to disturb that section of the stack.

I love creatures. They rule my roost. I draw the line at creatures with more than four legs and creatures that can harm my family or the animals in our care. I draw that line with a heavy heart, but it's drawn in stone. Rattlers present a terrible threat so we dispatched 12 or more in the barn last year and around the haystack and dog kennels. I felt badly. This year we put up a snake fence to attempt to deter the reptiles. It must be working fairly well. We have not found any in the barn yet and I have other evidence.

I've lived with a mouse in my tack and feed shed for about seven months. One mouse was cute. He'd peer out at me from behind buckets, blinking his bright little eyes, waiting for me to leave his home. One mouse was cute. It was when he began to invite his friends that I started to have a problem.

At first it was still a small problem. I had two or three mice in the tack shed who ate the spilled feed. Then they decided they should stock up for the winter. They gnawed a hole in one of the bags and began carrying cheekfuls of Omolene to their larder in the corner. I didn't notice this until their stockpile had grown large enough (about a foot high and about a foot and a half long) to be seen behind all the stacked bags. After cleaning that mess up and buying large cans for the feed, I actually spent some time wondering if I should take action against them at this point. It wasn't until I raised a scoop full of feed at o'dark thirty one morning and felt tiny bare feet scrambling, panic stricken, over my arm that I decided to actually do something about the issue. I bought several large cans to put the feed bags in. Yes, friends. THAT was the sum total of my answer to the problem. I hoped that by depriving them of food, they'd just leave. I hoped in vain.

Depriving the mice of food in the shed only sent them foraging in the barn. The barn is a big place. They thrived. I'd go out at night and see one scurry under a tarp. As the nights passed, I'd see one scurry under the tarp, one hopping like mad across a stall looking for cover and even sat and watched as a couple of mice children (yes, part of my problem is that I think like that), making their first timid forays into the larger world from the safety of their hole under a stall mat. Still, at this point, I merely wondered if there were some larger action I should take. There was, but I didn't want to think about it.

It wasn't until I was researching Salmonella and it's dangers to horses that I found out that mice and birds are the culprits in most outbreaks. It was while I was weighing the options (live traps vs miserable death vs quick death) that I developed an inkling of the depth of my mouse problem.

I went to the barn and there was a mouse in the middle of the floor, scavenging through some fallen hay. He didn't seem bothered by my presence and I worked around him. Then I noticed several hopping through the stalls, sifting the dirt for fallen bits of grain. Then I noticed a LOT of rustling coming from the tarp. As I was feeding I was shocked to see several mice racing along the fence panels in the stalls. This could not continue. There must have been fifteen to twenty mice out there. I could almost see the trails of Salmonella bacteria being left behind them. For the health of the horses in my care, I had to act.

When John called from work that night I told him the problem, he stopped on the way home and picked up the old fashioned, kill them quickly, mouse traps. He bought twenty of them. He began laying them out when he got home. Before he'd gotten ten laid out he'd already murdered several mice. We were both amazed and depressed at the success of the traps. He literally could not bait them and set them out fast enough. Within two hours there were 15 corpses and we began to realize that the problem was worse than I'd suspected.

Within 48 hours the corpse count has risen to 53 and there are still faint rustlings coming from the tarp. It's been sad. They all thought they'd found paradise and here we are sending them there. The traps are here to stay. I have to get busy and disinfect the entire barn. All because of one cute mouse.

Last year we didn't have a mouse problem. We had a lethal snake problem. I suppose the upside to this depressing tale is that the hardware cloth we wrapped around the entire perimeter fence must be working. It's an age old story. Remove the predators and the prey over populates. If anyone ever had any doubts about the truth of that, they're invited to see the phenomenon in action right here.

And then there is Suede...

2007-05-20T10:23:00.000-07:00

We have eight minis. Of these eight, four are mares, three are stallions, and then there is Suede, a gelding. All my life I've been told how great geldings are. They're gentle, calm, don't have the hormone issues of mares nor the testosterone issues of stallions. All my life I have found this to be true. Until now.

Our mares are dolls. All four of them. They're different from one another in personality, but the one thing they all have in common is their gentle willing nature. Lucy is the boss. Honey is a little joker. Blaze is a little stand offish, but very gentle, and has a mischievous streak not quite as wide as Honey's. Blondie is a pocket pet and loves to play and be loved on.

Our stallions do have testosterone issues. The two yearlings are boisterous boys and play too roughly with one another to be able to turn them out together. They like each other a LOT though and are big pals. Handsome, aka Evil, was given his nickname when he went through a people biting stage. We've almost worked past that now and he's becoming a really good boy. Desi, well, the sun rises and sets on Desi's head and he knows it. He was born here and we had our hands on him before he was fully out of his mother. He loves people. All people. If he isn't sure if they're friend or foe he turns around and backs up to see if they'll scratch his butt. If he's unsure about any situation, he turns around, backs up and expects a butt scratch. It's his security blankie.

Our mature stallion, Martini, is a hunkahunka burnin' love. He's the King. He's the smallest of all the minis at 29 inches, but he's more than willing to take on an 18 hand percheron. We've recently moved all the boys into one barn and all the girls to the other. Martini has dropped fat and added muscle just from trotting back and forth in his 36' run looking tough and official. Martini only likes girls. Handsome ignores Martini mostly, except at dinner time. Desi thinks Martini is great fun to play with when there is a fence between them. He runs merrily along the fence line side by side with Mr. Hot Stuff, while Martini charges after him with ears pinned and teeth bared. Put any of these boys in a halter and lead rope and they are changed animals. Martini trots elegantly at my side, making studly noises, but never daring to tug at the lead rope.

And then, there is Suede. The gelding. At least he doesn't bite me anymore. He reserves that treat for everyone else. He's stubborn, disrespectful, and much bigger than any of the others. At the same time, he's more laid back than any of the others. Not a thing in this world upsets him. When he's laying down in his stall you can go in with him, clean around him, sit in the dirt with him, lift his legs, push on him, lay on top of him, brush him. He doesn't care. He doesn't move. He's scared us all with this behavior, making us think he'd met a sudden tragic end. He lays sprawled on his side with his neck stretched, and lips parted in a death grimace. But he's just being Suede. His registered name is Monastery Almost Persuaded. We wondered how he got that name. Now we know. Almost persuaded to do something you ask, but not quite.

Suede can turn me into the live equivalent of Yosemite Sam in 5 minutes time, just by being a big stubborn ox. He's a very smart horse, smart enough to know when it is beneficial or entertaining to pretend to be stupid. I was out in the paddock trying to get him into his stall at feeding time, huffing and puffing in the Aridzona heat, hobbling on my crutches for 30 minutes trying to get him to go into his open stall. I was also cussing like a sailor and ended up flinging my crutches to the ground behind him. The only other time I had to fling a crutch was when Martini opened the gate to a paddock that adjoined Suede's stall and they were fighting through the fence. This act so impressed Martini that he positively flew back to the paddock he belonged in and stood there bug eyed, trembling and horrified that I could remove a leg and throw it. Suede was unimpressed.

Suede is unimpressed because Suede has respect issues. If Suede does not wish to move, Suede does not move. Something needed to teach Suede a lesson. I have been unable to do this, so I decided to let Boss Mare Lucy have at him. I turned them out together this morning. Lucy instantly made a swaggering, pinned ear, beeline toward him and said "MOVE". Suede blinked dumbly at her. The Boss spun around and kicked him square in the chest and said "I SAID MOVE." Suede was incredulous for a moment and then said "MAKE ME", spinning around and kicking at her. At this, Lucy backed into him landing about 3, full force, blows to his butt in an eye blink. Suede landed one blow which was instantly answered by a pummeling you would not see in even the nastiest street fighting contest. Suede moved. I cheered. Lucy gets treats tonight.

Suede moves now if The Boss even wanders in his direction. I'll leave her with him to continue the lessons and see if he is a bit easier to impress in a week or two.

The Sibyls Incarnate

2007-05-18T04:47:00.000-07:00

It is about this time during a mare's pregnancy that I begin to suspect their psychic abilities. They can feel me watching so they put on a real show as if this is genuinely THE moment I've prepared for. They wait until they sense I am fully awake and my adrenalin is flowing freely, then they lie down. Not to give birth mind you, but rather to relax and have a long lovely nap complete with snoring.

They also know where the barn camera is aimed. We adjusted the cam so that it would view the area where both of them had habitually lain for the past three weeks. The instant the camera was bolted in place they stopped laying in that spot. One has chosen her new bed in the one small area of her stall that the camera cannot see. The other now snoozes in the shadows as close to the edge of camera range as possible. She, thankfully, has a very light mane and tail so I can see each end when watching the camera at night, I just can't tell which is which.

If I am wide awake and staring at them, they will relax and nap. If I decide that they're resting comfortably and that I myself could rest comfortably for a few minutes, they will get up and begin raking their sides along the stall walls. If they wish an earlier than normal breakfast, all they have to do is lie down and have a good roll, look at their sides, then stretch out on the ground with their legs stiff. I race out the door, quietly approach their stalls and when they are certain that all the other horses know I'm there, they get up and waddle to their feeders looking very smug.

My books on raising horses all say that mares at this stage of pregnancy should have their whims catered to. I do. They know I will. They enjoy that knowledge.

I'm Jean. I raise, train, dote upon, worry over, stay up all night with, and provide support for eight miniature horses. This where I blog about it all.