Over the river and through the woods
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.