Two hundred!

Wow, this is my two hundredth post. I think this blog has been on line for about a year now (too lazy to check)... so two hundred postings in one year, I guess that's not unreasonable.

None of the other blogs I read (all two of them) have been updated in the last couple days so I guess I'll have to update my own, it'll give me something new to read. ;-)

It's really really really stinkin hot again. For a couple days it was sooo nice, it only got into the 70s during the day, and I even got sprinkled on the other night when I first rode Shylah. Woo, it's summer time now, yuck! Oh, and the swimming pool liner sprung a leak. Great...

I gave the horses (and me) the day off today, but I rode Shylah again last night. I encouraged some forward motion out of her. She tries hard but it's obvious she really doesn't understand what I want. But she didn't do anything bad whatsoever, and she certainly has no objections to me being in the saddle (of course this may change when she has to move quicker than a walk, we'll see). I need to get E.H. to come over and ride while I do groundwork, but our schedules haven't worked out just yet. Maybe next week...

The search continues for good fly sheets for the horses. For one thing it's hard to find ones that have a belly strap, and for my horses that's the most crucial part since they both get irritation on their bellies. The sheets that do have belly straps have buckles on the side of the sheet, and the horses rub on the fence and rip the buckles off (not good for the fence either but that's not my immediate concern). So... I thought I'd finally found a good one, but they ended up too large (it says right on there "these run large, order one size smaller" but did the company I bought them from say anything about sizing on their website? No, of course not! I reordered smaller sizes today so maybe that will work out. The belly strap on these hooks onto dee rings that are on the bottom edge of the blanket, and that's all fine and good because then there aren't straps and buckles to rip off, but it hangs like 8 inches below the belly! Grrrrr. I'm hoping the smaller sizes will fix this. Or perhaps I can sew on some dee rings a bit higher up. What a pain.

Patrick has really settled in a lot lately, he doesn't neigh much, he's MUCH calmer. He still cribs, but I think he'd need a 12-step program (or a shock collar) to get over that habit.

I think next week will be my last week of selling eggs on line. It's gone really well, and I think I could continue to sell them, but the problem is the birds are stopping egg production in a rather drastic way (lots of birds starting to molt already, hens very determined to go broody, etc). The Blacks are still laying a lot of eggs, maybe I can still keep a couple of those breeding pens together, but the ones that get the most bids are the colorful birds, and they lay the most eggs early in the season (the Blacks are very poor layers early on but then go into full force in May and June). I am taking about half of the oldest batch of chicks to auction bright and (way too) early Sunday morning. Another batch is due to hatch Monday. Where am I going to put all these things?? The auction people will get to know me quite well this summer! Oh geez, I am going to have an tremendous amount to take to the mid July sale...

I made a strawberry cheesecake today. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. :-)