Days 17 and 18 (Yikes!)
Thursday had been decent except that it was muddy from the rain we had for most of Wednesday, but both days in question for the purposes of this blog were frigidly cold! I am SO SICK OF THE COLD!!! BRRRRRRRR!!!!
On Friday morning Roulette came in from the pasture lame. The vet (the same one that ultrasounded Buttercup) came in to look at her, and gave us much the same diagnoses he had given Buttercup – something that she had done in the pasture had aggravated an old injury, this time in the fetlock, and she would have to be on stall rest. I got to put the Furazone on her for the sweat wrap, which Ashleigh got a video of, though I haven’t looked at the video yet so I don’t know how it turned out.
Speaking of Buttercup, I discovered that the time when I was able to pick her stall while she was in it was actually a fluke – she was abnormally nice that day. Friday I cleaned it in the morning and was a bit uneasy about it, and upon trying again in the evening she was actively hostile toward me. DareDevil, on the other hand, was as sweet as a clueless blind horse can be. He’s awfully cute.
During the PM big feed, Hayley asked me to tend to Athena. They apparently try to keep tabs on her feathers (for non-horse people, those are the long hairs that grow around the lower legs of some horses, most notably Friesians and draft breeds) during muddy spells so that she doesn’t develop mud rot. Hayley gave me the task because I’d expressed an interest in working with Athena in order to increase my confidence and experience around heavy breeds. However, I don’t think I want to experience them while they’re having anxiety spells in tiny stalls. Athena is accustomed to being outside, and is only in a stall for perhaps an hour each day. The stall is too small for her, but she has to be separated from the other horses when she eats because she’s the alpha mare of the heard and we don’t want things getting dicey.
When she saw me enter her stall, I imagine she assumed I was there to turn her out. She let me run a curry over her, but when I started cleaning her feathers she started pacing. She went around in circles, turned herself around, and moved around so she could see out the window. It got to the point where she was pawing (and those are some MASSIVE hooves to be pawing with), shoving her nose at the door and not staying still for more than 5 seconds or so at a time. I decided then that perhaps it wasn’t a good time for me to be playing with her, so I reported to Hayley that she was a little to antsy for comfort and wouldn’t let me touch her feet at that time.
Speaking of Hayley, she didn’t end up teaching me how to drive the tractor, but volunteer Don did! It seemed to be simpler than the one we used in Bud’s class two years ago to help Sam drag the arenas, but I can’t be sure. I drove it into the gelding field, and he let me drive it around a few times by myself (he even took some actions shots for me), and I felt like a serious farmer girl for a little while, even though I wasn’t really doing anything except driving around in circles and loopty-loos while the horses stared at me. He also showed me how to move the bucket, but I didn’t get to use the lever other than for raising and lowering it when I needed to go around corners.
The other thing I did Saturday that was sort of different was computer-y stuff for Brittney. Well, I was one of three people that were doing computer-y stuff for Brittney. She showed Elise, Ashleigh and me the program the farm uses to keep track of every horse that comes in (and believe me, there is a LOT of info that gets recorded, right down to each horse’s care on a day-by-day basis). She needed us to make 3 copies each of the files of every horse we took in from a certain case recently so that she could present them to (I can’t remember who she said, but I’m probably not supposed to anyway, so maybe that’s not a bad thing).
Persian, for those of you who are wondering, is much better. He’s getting ¾ pound of feed now and a flake of hay several times a day, and is being turned out with Maura for a couple hours a day. He’s also back to what I imagine is his old attitude, which almost makes a person wish he was still sick. He’s an aggravating and frustratingly crotchety old man horse, and I can’t imagine how Hayley and Kaitlyn came to love him as much as they do. I had to give him his electrolytes orally on Saturday, and by the time I finally got them into him I was way over my frustration quota for a single horse. We didn’t even have to take his vitals Saturday night – Sabrina just ran out into the cold to give him some hay when we got back from eating at the Greene Turtle with Hayley and Kris and Will and Leslie, at which I had a lovely chat with Will about science fiction and fantasy in film, TV, and books.
And that made me extremely excited to get back home. Not for any particular boy-related reason, but just, you know, because.

♥
SM