The barn is located near a firing range. Ro could care less about random gun shots at this point.
That barn camp that was going on? Ro is now unfazed by soccer nets, swimming pools, slip-n-slides, horseshoe pits, and newly-painted barrels.
She will walk over a wooden bride (of sorts) and practically fall asleep in the scary wash rack.
She stands quietly to have her legs wrapped and can work calmly in the arena alone, with horses she knows, or with horses she doesn’t know.
A dirt bike was running up and down the road yesterday, and after one spook she went right back to work on the lunge like it was nothing at all to worry about. In the dark—I’m not sure I’ve ever worked her in the dark before.
She’s learning to back up under saddle, lengthen or shorten her stride at the walk, and do turns on the forehand.
And she still thinks the port-a-potty will kill her, unless I walk between her and it.
I’m starting to wonder if she knows something about the port-a-potty that I don’t know.
Get up at an ungodly hour, run out to the barn, wrap Ro, work from home for a couple hours, go back to the barn to meet the vet for some routine stuff (Coggins, vaccs, hand-holding about the stocked-up leg), finish work.
No big deal, right?
Everything went well, up until the “wrap Ro” bit. I wrapped the left, stocked-up leg, and then thought about the right leg. It’s 100+ degrees here during the day. Her right leg is not stocking up. She’s not favoring either leg. I’d be back in a couple hours to unwrap for the vet anyway. Despite having been drilled that you always wrap the opposite leg if you’re going to wrap at all, I figured she’d be fine with just the left leg wrapped. I wrapped and left.
I had barely settled in to work when the vet called to say he was running early. I called another owner who was sharing the farm call to let her know the vet was on his way and headed out to the barn.
The other owner met me as I was walking in, looking worried. “I don’t know what Ro did… she was fine a minute ago…”
My brain shut off a little, because “I don’t know what she did” probably meant “there’s blood involved.” I can handle blood, as long as I don’t think too hard about it. And, you know, it’s not mine.
Somehow Ro managed to scrape a big chunk of hide off her right hind cannon. I stared at it, nicely insulated from the blood (not very much, actually) by my shut-down brain. Then my brain woke up just enough to remind me that if I had wrapped the right leg like I should have, this wouldn’t have happened at all. Thanks, Brain. Where were you at Ungodly Hour of the Morning when I was making bad decisions?
I still don’t know what she did—kicked herself, scraped it on the pipes in her run, spontaneously shed skin to remind me that horses are expensive and vet bills inevitable?
I hosed her off, verified it was pretty superficial, slapped some gauze and vet wrap on it, and waited for the vet.
On the one hand: I’ve owned her for a week and she’s spent most of that tormenting me with minor injuries. Horses shouldn’t do that to owners inclined to be paranoid. It gets expensive. The vet, I’m sure, has already figured out that Ro + me = a new car for him in the near future.
On the other hand: if she has to be a goofball and scrape herself up like this, isn’t it nice of her to do so when the vet is already on the way? I mean, her timing is pretty awesome. To be honest, I probably wouldn’t have called the vet if he hadn’t already been on the way. But since he was there…
Added to the routine vaccinations she was getting: tetanus booster.
Ro got tucked away again (both legs wrapped this time) and I went off to work.
However, Ro’s ability to apparently hurt herself on thin air inspired me to do what horse owners are always threatening to do: put their horse in a padded stall.
After work, I stopped by Big Box Store and picked up supplies. In case you weren’t getting enough funny looks buying routine horse health care stuff at the grocery store, try walking around in breeches and chaps while carrying a pool noodle and black duct tape.
I’ve padded the parts of the stall that she is most likely to hurt herself on. I’ll have to pick up another noodle to pad the less likely spots. Really. Seriously. I am for-real making a padded stall for her.
In all fairness, I knew Texas was hot before I moved here. And I knew that it was dangerous: Texas has killer bees and fire ants and other demonic creepy-crawly things. I bought stock in sunscreen and Raid and moved anyway.
But I am sure the tourist brochure did not mention that it was so hot that you could hurt yourself opening your mail. To be specific, when my sparkly engraved stirrups were delivered, I pulled them out of the box without thinking—and promptly dropped them because they were so hot that I thought I’d burned myself.
And it’s not like they were sitting in direct sun, either. They got that hot in their box, sitting in the delivery truck.
Unfortunately, they are virtually unused as yet—the heat is playing a number on Ro, and she’s been stocking up excessively. We’ve been hosing, hand-walking, and bonding instead. And torturing—there was a summer camp going on at the barn, which meant slip-n-slides, soccer nets, painted barrels… all sorts of fun things to
spook at
investigate.
(Also not in the brochure: the mind-boggling number of showers and changes of clothes you can go through when you are running out to the barn multiple times a day. I should have bought stock in laundry detergent.)
Her legs are looking better, though—good enough to start working again. I should be back in the saddle soon, and then I can find out if my sparkly stirrups have magic powers.
I hope so. I’d hate to think I risked burning myself for nothing.
First, Ro has a show name now. Her owner and I took in all the suggestions, bounced a few others off each other, and nothing was quite hitting home.
Then one night while I was randomly crawling the web, I came across this video:
And I went hmmm.
Actually, I thought Corny! and then I went hmmm.
I emailed Ro’s owner and suggested The Twelfth of Never. She went hmmm, and we let the name sit for a while.
I can say definitively now that Ro’s show name will be The Twelfth of Never.
I can say this definitively because I bought her today.
That’s the second news flash—or not. I’m sure you’ve been reading between the lines and knew I was considering this.
Of course, if you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know I am always considering buying, but it was starting to look like I wasn’t going to actually buy until, well, the twelfth of never.
Well, the Twelfth of Never is here. What happens next is anyone’s guess, but I am sure it’s going to be an adventure!
Everything is settling down at the new barn and we are developing something like a routine.
It goes like this: show up, clean stalls and refill water buckets, work Ro, torture Ro, work Dezi, feed, turn out.
We don’t torture Dezi because he’d just roll his eyes at us and do whatever was asked. Ro, on the other hand, gets offended. I’ve figured out, for example, that she will walk past the port-a-potty all day long—as long as I walk between her and the port-a-potty. If I walk on the outside? The thing could kill her. She’s sure of it, and she does not understand why I can’t comprehend that.
But she seems to be coming to terms with the horse-eating port-a-potty, so when I saw a temporary bridge (some planks across a little muddy ditch) had been set up, I asked her to walk over it.
It took a few false starts, but she went—and then gave me a There, I did it. Now hose me off and let me eat dinner. look.
I’m mean. I made her walk over it again.
And then, after hosing her off at the non-scary hose, I took her over to the scary wash rack. It’s set against the tree line and is really dark. She hasn’t been thrilled about it since we got there, and I hadn’t pushed the issue yet since there was another hose we could use to rinse her off.
The wash rack took a little more convincing than the bridge, but the same technique that works to get her on the trailer got her in the wash rack. Once she made up her mind to enter the wash rack, she was really calm about the entire thing. We hung out for a minute and then left.
At which point she gave me an omg wtf was the point of that? look. Anticlimactic, much?
Tomorrow: the wash rack again, and then… the swimming pool. It’s even bigger and blue-er than the port-a-potty.
