of camera-shy dogs and helpful horses

Okay seriously, can someone please slow time down a little bit? I need more hours, more days, more weeks....

Eeek!

There is a particular photograph I'm trying to take of Angus, because I want to use it (well, "them" I guess, I want several photos) as a reference for a drawing. When the front door is open in the morning, he'll lay on the tiles and look out at the world through the screen door, watching the neighbors, waiting for the dog biscuit fairy, etc. The lighting is lovely, and he's so cute with his ears just slightly perked, his eyebrows all curious....

But if you point a camera at his face and he catches you doing it, he kinda shuts down. He'll turn away, walk away, look dejected, look guilty, look miserable, etc. None of which is what I want, so I'm going to have to enlist a little help (perhaps bearing dog biscuits) for this photo shoot. See, these photos just don't show the expression I'm aiming for! Ha ha ha...



Speaking of camera-shy, that doesn't apply to the horses at all. (Whoa, was that like the worst transition ever?) My horses have very different personalities. One way to notice this difference is to prepare for some sort of activity around the barn. This is the sort of response you'll get from Gwen:

Right, she doesn't give a rat's butt what I'm doing, she's busy.

Shylah, on the other hand, is always ready for adventure:

Even if the adventure is something really mundane like... picking up poo! Oh yeah, she's REALLY "helpful" with everything, has to inspect everything, and is pretty much in my way the entire time.


A friend of mine takes home buckets of horse manure for his compost pile... that bucket is empty! Shylah likes to give everything a "pre-fill inspection."



And then Mom brought out some overly ripe zucchinis and put them in Shylah's feeder....

Angus says "Hey Shylah, whatcha got there, smells good!"

And he proceeded to clean up everything she dropped, and she proceeded to drop large chunks of half-chewed zucchinis onto him. Gross!

And then she cleaned him up a bit! Ooooh I was laughing so hard!

What a bunch of dorks!

all like busy and stuff

Life is revolving around Blade Show right now, as I figured it would be. Come see me if you're in Atlanta June 10-12. Send your friends and family. I'll be at table 17A, you know, the one with the really awesome scrimshaw. ;-) Half my stuff is already on its way across the country (a strange feeling, I'm used to traveling with it!) and the rest will fly with me next week. I have one more piece to finish and then I'm good to go! I don't have pics of the dragon knife yet, but trust me I'm as eager to see them as you are!

The weather is pretty much insane. I kinda like it though, so I'm really not complaining. It's been very mild, and today we have thunderstorms, rain, and tornado warnings in the north part of the county. Tornado? California? Interesting. As much as I positively loathe hot weather though, I really am fine with this. Speaking of hot weather, it's going to be about a billion degrees and humid in the south when I am there, I'm not happy about that. It'll give me something to whine about though. It seems strange that a year ago I was on the cross-country road trip already, had been for several days. Man that was fun!

All's well with the chickens. I have one more batch of eggs hatching this weekend and that's it. I'd have to tally up how many I hatched, certainly more than I planned on, only because nothing went as planned this year with the colors that I wanted to hatch. C'est la vie, right?

My friend Kelly came over on Saturday morning and photographed my horses. She paints horses. I'll show you two of the photos, she got some great shots!

Gwen:

Shylah:

Yesterday I got a call from a friend who was cutting hay and mowed over the nest of some mystery birds. So I ended up with 4 mystery babies and 4 mystery eggs. Turns out they are Common Moorhens, and they are hilarious little things! I'm not raising them, I don't know anything about them and besides I leave soon, so this morning they went to a super nice lady who works with a local wildlife rehab organization, and happens to live a few miles away. Three eggs are still working on hatching, and those will go too. But I had a lot of fun interacting with these highly entertaining babies overnight!


And that's about it. Lots to do, so I'd better get back to it!

pictures today

Just a few things I've taken lately that I haven't posted...

It was horsey bath time today. A friend of mine who loves to paint horses is coming over to take some reference photos tomorrow, so the girls have to be looking their best!


Zen kitty Olin sends telepathic messages telling me to drop some of my BBQ'd chicken into his mouth.


Peafowl at a friend's place. I house-sat for them recently and spent a lot of time admiring the multitude of peafowl. Anyone want peafowl? They want to get rid of a few...



I'm hatching some Ringneck Pheasant chicks for a friend. Here's two of them hanging out with my 1-week-old Rosecombs before they go to their new home.


And this, I'd have to say, might now be my absolute favorite photograph of all time. Those Pheasants are curious little buggers! This cracks me up!!! :-)

eh, no particular subject

So supposedly the blog was "up" for 94% of the day. Well color me skeptical, because I'm still getting emails from people who frantically can't find it and think I moved it. I can see it again on my phone, so that seems to be some progress. I don't know what to say. Asking if y'all can read this is kind of futile, because if you can't then obviously you can't answer. Sigh. Technology. The blog is fine. The domain is fine. But there's this itty bitty part that's supposed to redirect the domain to blogger and that's on the fritz. There's nothing *I* can actually do, short of moving the whole thing, which just opens another can of worms because then people really won't find it!

I have to say that the weather lately is fantastic. I love fall!!!!

The grass is growing in the pastures. The horses think anyone who comes out to see them must have treats, so it's always worth checking:

To Shylah's dismay, I actually penned her up in the corrals today. She doesn't need to be consuming that much grass, she's already much too round. Gwen, on the other hand, who is getting rather elderly despite not being all that old (24ish?) could use all the groceries she can eat, so I let her into the far pasture today. She says this is a good thing:

fun with animals!

I cut up this watermelon for dinner the other night, only to find it totally blah tasting. Hmmm, what to do with it....

I think I found some volunteers!




By morning, it was but a mere shell of its former self (yeah, they have skills!). I washed off the ducky dirt... Now what to do with this lovely bowl, hmmmm...

I think I found a volunteer!


Looks like she has some competition though. ;-)


These ducks just crack me up this year, they have so much more personality than any other batch I've raised. :-)

I'm trying to decide whether to attend the State Fair art show reception Thursday August 20th. Anyone want to be my "date"? I use that term very loosely.

Fence project update:
Top rail fixing: 568 feet done, 1696 feet to go (SIGH)
Hot wire: budget approved, need to go shopping! Still working on the logistics.
I can't wait to get it all wired now. I knew the fence was bad, but didn't realize how extremely bad until I started working on it. What a pain. Sigh, where is my Farm Boy? (Bonus points if you just said "As you wish.")

hot wire, part two

Okay, I've had a few questions/suggestions, thank you. Let me try to clarify things a little more as to which areas most need help.

Here's what I posted yesterday, an out-of-scale drawing of where the horses live:

The red pipe fence is fine, I don't think they could damage that if they tried.

Here's a new drawing.

The areas bordered in pink are high priority, that's where they usually live. They always have access to the corrals, and if any of the two far pastures are open, then they also have access to the front pasture. The area bordered in green is middle priority, they don't live there as often as the pink area. The yellow pasture is low priority, they don't live there more than a few months during the year, and that is my riding arena so I think I'd just as soon not have that one be "hot," at least not unless needed.

fence woes

Today I am going to talk about fencing. Not the kind that involves swords. The kind that (at least theoretically) contains livestock. It gives me something to rant about, plus I'm soliciting input from those in the know.

Whoever built the pasture fence here didn't do a very good job. It was in "fair" condition when we moved here, although the original owners had used this awful plastic mesh on the fence. Not only was it a complete eyesore, but it wasn't really all that strong, and when a big horse like Gwen decides to lean on it, she might just pop through on the other side (this happened!). So my brother J, bless his heart, got the horrible job of taking down the plastic stuff and putting up non-climb wire instead. Major improvement, but the fence still has some serious structural problems.

Here's the fence (and a lovely view of the blackberries out by the creek). It's about 5 feet high, it has posts and a top rail, and the rest is the non-climb wire. Sometimes I think it would have made more sense just to do the whole property with hot tape, but the wire does have the advantage of keeping dogs on the proper side of the fence.


Just for comparison, this is the corral fence. It's welded pipe. I love it. I could keep an elephant in this here (not that I have any plans to). I wish they would have fenced the whole place with this welded pipe, but I'm sure it wasn't cheap.

There are several issues that are all coming together to create a situation called "the fence is falling down." One is that the dorks who built the fence did a really stupid job of it. Instead of angling the top of the posts (so that rain would run off) and nailing the top rail to the outside of the post, they actually cut sections out of the top of each post (OMG wouldn't that be a serious pain in the asterisk? Worse than angling the top of each post?) and set the top rail in there, like it's on a little shelf. See that? Bad no no.

Great, so now there's this area on the top of each post where rain water can flow down and puddle and.... you guessed it, rot the posts. They're all rotten, at least the tops. Most are still firmly in the ground, but a few wiggle. So what happens when the post rots? The top rail falls off! And you get a fence line that looks like this:

I'm NOT proud of this, I hate this, this is embarrassing, and I've been working on fixing it (that's obviously a section I have not gotten to) and it's probably going to at least many weeks to do. Sometimes it's basically just the wire that's holding up the fence. Aaack! I can't nail the boards back up, they won't stay put in rotten wood, so I have to drill holes, loop wire around each post, and wire the stupid top rails back up. It's rednecky to say the least, and feels like putting a band-aid on a gushing wound. But, it'll at least buy a few more years. The entire thing seems to be all falling down now. For a while it was just one board here and there, but omg in the last month I swear it's just all gone to heck.

Of course, a major contributing factor is that the darling mares are VERY fond of scratching themselves on the fence. ARG!!! They are both fond of scratching their butts on it (yes, they are wormed consistently, and yes I do take care to clean the gunk out of the udder-area to prevent itchiness, but they do it anyway). Gwen will also lean into the fence at about a 45 degree angle and scratch her entire body along the fence. I about have a heart attack when I see her do that, I can hear the wire stretching and the posts groaning and popping.

So, this brings up the thought of hot wire. It may be all that can save the fence, the horses really need to be kept from leaning on it. Without going out and measuring, I don't know many feet of fence there are. Thousands I'm sure. At different times of year they have access to different pastures. They always have access to the corrals, and sometimes are off pasture entirely. This is a VERY not-to-scale drawing, but this is pretty much the lay of the land. I'm having a hard time figuring out exactly how this could be hot wired, or if it's even doable ($$$). Thoughts about hot wire/hot tape? I want to hear them. Only the wire fence would need it, the red pipe fence is fine.


Sigh.

my beautiful horses

I started a new scrim project today. I just have the image transferred and a little bit done, it's not much to look at right now. So I didn't scan it.

My horses looked soooo bored today. Nice sunny day and they've been cooped up in the corral for months (I want the pasture to go to seed so I'm keeping the horses off it). Anyway, I felt sorry for them so I let them out for a gallop and a little grazing. They were so eager to graze it was hard to get them to MOVE for photos, which is why they have grass hanging out of their mouths in these pics! Classy, I know. Gwen is a 22 year old Morgan X Shire. She's the black one with white socks. Shylah is an almost 6 year old Canadian Horse (yes, that's a real breed). She came down here from Canada from the PMU industry when she was just a little stringbean of a weanling.

I took way over 100 photos. I narrowed them down to these. There are more of Shylah because she moves around more! :-)











Olin, meanwhile, maintained his usual level of enthusiasm.