I think I hate the goat
Today I had a Mexican standoff with the goat.
The goat is surprisingly intelligent.
Let’s digress for a moment. The barn has two stalls set up as feed stalls—one for the barn manager’s horses and horses on full board, and one for partial boarders. I have a stall at the end of the barn that I use to store hay (I like to feed more hay than the barn provides). I figured, logically, that I might as well store my feed in my stall as well so that I have everything in one place.
This worked fantastically. Before the goat.
And then, one day the goat saw me prepping Ro’s feed. The next day, I came in and found he had knocked over my container and eaten half my food. Like I said, he’s surprisingly intelligent. He only needs to see a thing once: There is food inside this thing? And you get to the food by removing that cover? So if I knock the container over…
My feed is now in the feed room, which is goat proof.
Problem solved, right?
Nope. Although I moved the grain to the feed stall, I left my supplements and the bucket I use to prep her feed in my hay stall. I don’t want to clutter up the feed stall, and all of these are theoretically goat proof.
But since Ro gets fed her evening grain when I am there, which is invariably not the same time as the full boarders get their grain, I have the goat’s full attention when I am prepping. He watches me put grain in my bucket. He watches me go back to the hay stall and put stuff from the small containers in my bucket. And then he watches me feed Ro.
His conclusion: the bucket and all the little containers must be edible. Or contain edible things. Or both.
Every day he knocks down my shelf, kicks around the supplement containers, and noses the empty bucket around my hay stall. I thought he’d give up after a day or two and realize the bucket is always empty and the supplement containers can’t be opened, but he knows there is edible stuff there, somewhere, and is determined to get to it. Intelligent and tenacious. Great.
But I have a bigger problem on my hands: Ro, who will chase off the horse in the next paddock if he so much as looks at her grain, is confused by the goat. He waltzes right into her paddock as if she isn’t there. She pins her ears at him, and he ignores her. She looks at me. She makes Nasty Mare Face. He ignores her. She pins her ears and snaps at him. He ignores her. She looks at me, at a complete loss: OMGWTFBBQ. Make him go away!
Right.
Riiiiight.
For a couple days, I was able to catch the goat and tie him up.
This taught Mr. Rocket Science an important lesson: now he runs away from me so that I can’t tie him up.
This is how we ended up in tonight’s Mexican standoff.
I dropped Ro’s feed for her. She chased off her neighbor, who was looking in her direction, and started eating with all the urgency of a Lady Who Lunches. This is not a horse who will ever be in danger of choking from bolting her food. Entire empires could rise and fall in the time it takes her to finish a meal.
The goat stood at the end of the row of paddocks and looked at me: Hmm? What? I don’t want your horse’s stupid grain. I’m just scratching my head on this fence. See? Itchy. Oh, look, is that a bird over there? Look at the pretty birdy. Don’t pay attention to the goat. The goat is not walking forward… whaaaat? I’m just eating this grass here. Yummy grass. Mmmmm. I could live my whole life and never eat anything but grass, but hey, see that bucket? I’m not interested in your stupid grain, I just want to make sure that other horse’s bucket is empty. Even though I could live my whole life on grass, sometimes that horse leaves feed, and feed can ferment in the heat, so I’ll just lick this bucket clean and save him from an agonizing death. And then, um, that rock. It could be edible. Swear to Bob, I am not trying to get closer to your horse’s feed. I just want to check out the rock…
I believed him as much as he believed that I wasn’t out to catch him, really, I just wanted to scratch his head, honest…
It worries me that the standoff ended in a tie. Like I said, the goat is smart. I expect him to Have A Plan tomorrow night. Which means I need to have a better plan. I need to find the book Goats for Dummies: 1001 to Outsmart Your New Nemesis. If it doesn’t exist, I have a feeling I’ll be able to write it by the end of the week.
Surviving the Inferno
For those of you keeping up with my inability to catch a break, the vet was out Thursday to remove Ro’s staples. We were happy with Ro’s progress all around. Happy, happy, joy, joy, cheer all around.
That weekend, temps soared into the nineties and Ro showed off one of her many talents. She is a one-trick thermometer: temps in or above the 90s? Her left hind stocks up. We discovered this last summer, and I was prepared to deal with it again this summer… in, you know, July or August.
Not in May.
But the temps are already in the 90s, so we are already in the management zone.
Her leg gets hosed and/or iced twice a day, she’s wrapped while she’s in her stall, and she’s unwrapped for turnout at night. And, poor girl, she’s getting worked pretty much daily to ensure she really moves and increases her circulation. This time around, I added electrolytes and MSM in a Hail Mary pass to see if they would help.
Ro thinks this routine is pretty cool, except, perhaps, the working bit. She likes the attention. She also likes getting her supplement mash in the mornings instead of the evenings. She likes her mash, but she likes turnout more; she’s never been entirely thrilled about being left in her stall, even with her mash, while her buddy gets turned out. And, like a kid with a plate of vegetables, she will nose her food around a bit and then stand hopefully by the door: All done! If that doesn’t convince me to turn her out, she’ll nose her mash around some more and try the door again.
No more. Now she gets it in the morning, while I’m wrapping her legs. Because, see, I am not a morning person. Wrapping legs at an ungodly hour of the morning is more than I can handle, mostly because my brain can’t process what I need to do when the velcro ends up over the tendon: I started the standing wrap on the inside of the canon… so if I move it to the front, the velcro will end up… over the tendon, apparently. Eventually I get it right, but if you think I can remember what I did the next morning, you’re sorely overestimating my brain’s early morning processing ability.
So we repeat this daily. Ro puts up with it, because she has mash to eat.
The stocking up is under control—which is to say, she’s not stocking up at all with this routine. I’m going to see how she does this weekend without the wraps during the day; I’m hoping the MSM and electrolytes might make enough of a difference that we can manage with icing.
And, of course, riding.
You know why the ocean’s salty? It’s the run-off from all the Texas horses being hosed after their rides.
And the people, frankly, because we’re hosing ourselves down as much as we are the horses.
I swear that when I walk back in the barn after a ride, the flies start dropping dead. There simply is no deodorant in the world that can combat riding in Texas in the summer.
The only bright spot is that this barn has a covered arena. Since I am not a native Texan and I survived most of last summer without a covered arena… um, which is to say, I survived while riding for most of the summer in open arenas, not that I survived most of the summer and then died… the point being, when we moved to the barn, I looked at the arena and thought: Awesome! Keeps rain off!
Now I know better, of course. No Texan in their right mind would want to keep rain off. We’d welcome it, ride in it, sacrifice small children to it.
Keeping the sun off, on the other hand… priceless. I don’t know how I survived last summer without a covered arena, but I love having one available again. The temps are at least ten degrees cooler under it, and yes, that means I’m referring to 80 degrees as “cool.”
For some perspective, the other morning I showed up at the barn and the temps were in the 70s (if that tells you how ungodly early I am out there) and the barn worker was wearing a jacket. An actual jacket. Seriously. We’re so toasted that people are wearing jackets at 70.
Nothing we can do but gut it out, though. At least we have a routine, and the routine seems to be working.
It’s not like we’d be better off elsewhere—everywhere seems to be having extreme weather. I’m tempted to start mapping the weather articles. I’ll put big red Xs over every location that breaks some sort of historic record in a negative way. A year from now, I’ll move to whatever location isn’t X’d out.
I’d probably end up in… oh god… what if I ended up in Ohio again? I’ve been there once. I don’t want to go back. They say the devil you know, right?
The devil is clearly making his vacation home in Texas; guess I will have to get used to it.
Welcome to the Inferno
More on the joys of horse keeping in hell later, but here’s something to make everyone grateful for the weather they have, whatever it is:
Eric Berger (Houston Chronicle blogger) recently posted about the drought situation in Texas, summarizing it up as: “Put another way, we have had half the rainfall in Houston since the beginning of February as we had during the driest such period ever in the city’s records. That, my friends, is horrendous.”
If you’re wondering, we’ve had two inches of rain in that period; the previous low record was four inches. I can’t remember our deficit from normal, but I think it’s at least 12” below normal, possibly more.
Meanwhile, our temps are already up in the 90s, and it’s barely June.
Hell. I am living in Hell.
This was not in the brochures.
It’s the end of the world as we know it…
I like that there are truly wacky people out there in the world. They reassure me that I still have some semblance of sanity, some connection to normal, some hope of… well, some hope, anyway.
So, while my money is on the Mayans, I am fascinated by Harold Camping. I’m fascinated by his logic, or by what passes for logic in his world. It reminds me of… me.
See, I once bet my statistics instructor that I could divide by zero, and I won the bet. I had to use a food bank metaphor, some M&Ms, and three pages of my final exam booklet, but my logic was flawless. In a fictional, creative writing kind of way that is calculated to amuse a statistics instructor and distract from my general inability to do math.
Harold Camping’s “proof” brings back fond memories. And makes me crave M&Ms.
At least I know when I’m being absurd. He seems to have no clue. But did you know he intends to spend tomorrow in front of the TV, watching? That surprised me. You’d think he’d be out there trying to convert people, or praying for people, or, you know, doing anything except watching TV all alone. Why won’t he be with his congregation?
Why am I trying to rationalize the decisions of a man who multiplied atonement by completeness by heaven, squared it, and announced it equaled May 21, 2011? You can’t argue with that. I mean it. No real logic will ever get through to someone who uses that kind of logic, and this is coming from someone who used a food bank metaphor to pass her final statistics exam, so you know I know what I’m talking about.
The point of all of this is to let you know that even if the rapture occurs, I’ll still be around.
Also, I refrained from picking Animal Kingdom for the Preakness in my fantasy game, so go ahead and place your bets on him. I’m just doing my part to keep the Triple Crown dream alive. If you do win any major money, a 5% tip would be appreciated.
April: Goodbye and Good Riddance
This post comes with its own drinking game: take a shot every time a new injury or illness is mentioned. Put your local poison control on speed dial; you might want them later.
So, when last we talked about anything serious, it was early April. I was supposed to be moving Ro to a new barn and Ro was up to her eyeballs in snot. I resisted putting a paper bag over her head, but I did sneak her in under cover of darkness.
Fortunately, the move went well. I received a hairy eyeball or two the first couple days, but a few well-chosen words to a few well-chosen people did the trick. News seemed to spread through the rumor mill that my horse was not contagious, and the hairy eyeballs stopped. Learn from me, grasshopper: the trick to controlling barn gossip is to start your own rumors before others can start them about you.
The antibiotics ran their course, and the sinus infection cleared up. We started getting back to work. I broke my foot.
I admit, it isn’t a bad break. It took me a week to decide to go to the ER, and the ER tossed me a funky shoe, some narcotics, and sent me on my way. Don’t ride, they said. I considered their advice. If they really wanted me to stay off a horse, I reasoned, they’d have put an actual cast on me. That went up to my hip. I am having a hard time taking their funky shoe seriously. I decided I would ride without stirrups and be careful about dismounting, which seems like a reasonable compromise to me.
Life continued. Ro seemed to be staying healthy. I realized a local barn is putting on a schooling show in early May, and it would be a perfect first show for Ro and I. Of course, there’s the whole no stirrups thing… I emailed the organizers to find out if I could ride HC.
Ro, who is better connected than I realized, caught wind of my plans. Just when the organizers got back to me to tell me riding HC was not a problem, Ro came up snotty. Figures. I suppose I should be grateful she did this before I sent in the entry fees and not after.
This was last Friday. I called my vet and caught him at a busy moment, but we’d already talked about our next step if the infection came back. We quickly agreed it was time to drill a hole in her head (yeah, ok, that’s not quite how he put it, but “flush out her sinuses” is not nearly as dramatic, so go with me here), tentatively agreed on Tuesday, and that was that.
Well, except for the fact that “that” left me alone with Google for the weekend, which was probably not a good idea. There are porn filters and kid-friendly filters out there… why hasn’t anyone invented a filter for hypochondriacs yet? It could redirect any medical-type sites to a page with fluffy kittens and “Don’t Worry” spelled out in big, friendly letters.
But no. By Sunday, I was so convinced my horse was on the verge of dropping dead, I couldn’t even go out to see her.
And then on Monday I went out and found her looking perfectly healthy. No snot. No dried crust of snot. No snot rubbed off on her legs. I gave her the hairy eyeball and lunged her, thinking that would bring something out. No snot.
Conclusion: Ro just doesn’t want to go to schooling shows. Since I had already sent my regrets to the organizers, she was in the clear. In all senses.
I was sure that if I canceled Tuesday’s appointment she would be dripping snot Tuesday evening. But if I kept it, she’d probably be perfectly healthy again. So I compromised and emailed the vet, explained the situation, and asked him to come anyway.
Ro compromised by having some traces of snot again.
We decided to do xrays and go from there. The xrays were… not clear. There’s no massive pocket of pus, but there’s an iffy area in one sinus and a possible tooth infection. The vet wants to take a closer look at the xrays and will probably get a second opinion on the tooth, so we didn’t do anything else today. The good news is that the xrays don’t show any compelling reason to flush out her sinuses, so we’ll probably explore some more targeted but still conservative treatments, depending on how the xray readings go.
Meanwhile, for those of you still in the drinking game, my older cat is declining and my younger cat is on a hunger strike to protest the new brand of food I bought. Apparently they felt left out of all the drama.
But hey - all of this is stuff that can be dealt with. The fact that it’s all hitting at the same time is pretty exhausting, but none of this is unmanageable. That’s something, at least.