How we weather the weather down here: Tuesday’s Adventures
Since I lived in the far north, I know how to deal with cold weather.
You move south, where there is no such thing as cold weather.
That was working out pretty well for me, until now.
But early this week, the Historic Storm began making headlines. Four letter words like snow began showing up in forecasts. Articles began to say things like hard freeze.
I made my preparations: I bought some Cheeze-Its and called it good.
I mean, really: how long could it possibly stay cold down here?
Tuesday morning, I was woken up at o-dark-thirty by wind attempting to break my windows. My young cat, realizing I was awake with that sixth sense cats have, jumped off the windowsill and into my arms. She was so cold I nearly got frostbite.
I drove to work in the wind, morosely watching the temperature according to my car. I’ve never figured out how accurate that thing is, but my car thought it was around freezing. Fine. Whatever. The sun would come out and temps would rise.
This is the South. They don’t do winter here. Not for more than a couple hours, anyway.
But as the day wore on the wind got louder, the temperature kept dropping, and little details from the news articles began to start nagging at my brain. Things like snow on Friday. Tuesday. Friday. There were a couple days missing in there. I looked more closely at the numbers. It was going to be freezing for days.
Around lunch time, another thought bubbled up and finally caught my attention.
I don’t own any blankets for Ro. I do have a cooler, but it’s much too big for her. Normally, this is not a problem—for the few brief cold snaps we’ve had, I’ve tossed her extra hay and let her winter coat do its thing. But for a prolonged cold snap, for a horse not acclimated to freezing weather…
I made a call to a friend who had said previously that she might have some blankets. She was also checking out options for her horses.
She called me back later—we needed to find blankets for all three.
Some people would plan ahead. Order online. Or at least be at the tack store the moment it opened. By now, it was early afternoon. We knew our odds were not good.
She headed to one tack store. I headed to another. At the store I went to, all the employees were huddled in the blanket area, checking stock. They told me they’d been on the phone non-stop with customers wanting to know what they had left.
“Really?” I said, inching closer to the handful of medium-weight blankets left. “You’d think people would plan ahead…”
The problem with calling in, instead of being there in person, is that the person in the store can snag available blankets while they pow-wow with friends in other stores. She who has her hand on the blanket gets first dibs. I called my friend to let her know that there was one blanket that might work for one of her horses.
With only five blankets left, it’s amazing even one was in a size we needed.
Then I started looking at sheets and coolers, to see if I couldn’t cobble together some sort of layered option for Ro. The sheet part was easy; I even had some selection there.
When I started looking for a cooler, my options were a really, really ugly green thing—think someone started with that awful military green and then made it muddier—or one of those Irish knit anti-sweat sheets. I chose warm but ugly and bought the cooler. Given how desperate people were, I’m sure even the anti-sweat sheet was sold by the end of the day.
That night at the barn, we got everyone tucked in. The sheet/cooler option seemed to be working ok for Ro, and I tossed extra hay to make up for the fact that it wasn’t really an ideal setup.
Given my total lack of advance preparation (I’m not sure buying Cheeze-Its really counts as preparation), things looked to be going well. Ro was tucked in, munching on hay to keep warm. I was tucked in on my couch, munching on Cheeze-Its and snuggled up with the cats to keep warm.
By the time I fell asleep, I was pretty sure we were set. Four days of cold weather? No problem. We survived Day 1, didn’t we?
It’s no good having a truck…
First I bought a horse.
Then I bought a truck.
Then I realized that it’s no good having a truck that can haul stuff if you don’t have stuff to haul.
So today I picked up my new trailer:
It’s a 4Star Runabout 2-horse slant with dressing room.
It makes me very happy.
And since it’s no good having a truck and trailer that can haul stuff if you don’t have stuff to haul, we went straight from the dealership to the feed store to pick up a load of hay.
I mean, I’ve never hauled anything before, ever, so why not jump in with both feet, right?
Now my truck and trailer and I have been on the freeway, on toll roads, on regular roads, in traffic, out of traffic, and even at the shopping center, since we decided to stop and get lunch before we unloaded the hay.
Everything went well. Except, as I’m sure you can guess, backing up.
The guys at the feed store laughed at my first attempt and then kindly took the keys away from me. I don’t blame them—they are busy and don’t have time to wait for me to figure it out.
But back at the barn, I had to back it down the alleyway, which was… probably no worse than anyone’s first time backing a trailer, I’d guess. It took me a while to figure it out, but I didn’t hit anything and I got it there eventually. Part of the problem is that it’s very responsive, so the slightest turn on the wheel turned the trailer… and the whole turn-the-opposite-direction thing just wasn’t quite computing. The horses found it fascinating to watch: It’s going away… hey, it’s coming back towards us! Going away… Whoops, here she comes again. Nope… going aw—- oh, hey! She’s back up here!
It’ll get better. I just need practice. Lots and lots of practice.
Then, since the trailer she has been traveling in is more open than this one, I decided to load Ro up a couple times. Here’s what she thought of that:
She was good—she stopped and looked, and it took her a couple times before she stepped on, but she loaded up without any real problems.
Of course, now that I have a horse and a truck and trailer to take her places, I’m too broke to go places—but it’s the thought that counts, right? I could go places, if I wanted to.
(And if you’re wondering, I absolutely got the trailer decoration in navy to match my truck. These details matter!)
The Things You See on Highways
Yesterday, I found $4.86 in the washer after doing a load of clothes. Since I never carry cash, this is something of a miracle. Where did this $4.86 come from, and what does it signify?
In case it signifies better things to come, I spent the day window shopping for trucks, trailers, and multi-million dollar facilities. In the event that random change keeps showing up in my washing machine, I want to be prepared. It’s important to figure out what I will buy with my new-found wealth.
There are, of course, many ways to window shop. Visiting dealerships. Browsing the web. Driving on the highways and ogling everyone else’s trucks. And trailers.
Or trailer.
Specifically, a one-horse trailer that looked like something I would put together.
For people who have not been following the blog for any length of time, that was not a compliment. My mechanical abilities are… lacking. Entirely. Spectacularly. Electric drills confuse me, and it goes downhill from there.
I’m not sure how to describe this.
Imagine someone led a horse onto a piece of plywood and cobbled together some solid metal walls that went up about as far as the horse’s chest. Now imagine they realized they would need a roof, so they added some posts at the corners and added stock trailer-ish slats on the two long sides. Then they added a gate behind and tarped the top. With canvas. Who needs a waterproof roof, anyway?
If you’ve been paying attention, you realize the horse’s head and neck are currently having over a chest-high wall with nothing containing it. That’s ok—the trailer owner caught that, too. And built a box around the head and neck. And added a second tarp over the head and neck box.
I can only assume they didn’t want to waste the metal that would be required to make the trailer longer overall or something, so they just built it around the horse, in the shape of the horse. But don’t worry—the horse had at least 6” on any side of him to move around, and that’s plenty, right?
Then the trailer builder put the whole contraption on a single axle, hitched it up, and headed down the road.
The horse was a whole lot calmer than I would have been riding in that thing. Or else it was afraid to move and risk knocking off one of the walls.
I don’t have photos of the actual trailer, but it generally looked something like this.
Only it wasn’t quite so classy or solid looking.
Actually, I should have flagged down the driver. It was probably worth about $4.86.
Revisiting the Padded Stall
For some reference, the barn we are in has stalls with attached runs. The stalls have wood walls, but the stall doors and the runs are pipe. I padded (duct tape over pool noodles) a couple parts of Ro’s run.
First, the top rail of her stall door. The pipe is rough and she was rubbing her chest raw against it. Easy fix:
It looks good, right?
Here’s the problem. I firmly believe home improvement type things should be Somebody Else’s Problem. I am awesome with words. Hammer and nails? Not so much. So when I padded the rail, I was standing on the outside of the stall and my non-engineering brain did not quite catch on to the inevitable issue caused by working on that side of the door:
That’s right. I padded the outside of the rail, not the inside. My pool noodle was not nearly as wide as I thought it was. Despite my error, it’s working just fine—the rubs on her chest have disappeared. I probably could have skipped the pool noodle and just taped over the rail.
I can’t take credit for the idea. You can see the colored tape in the distance where some other people have already done similar things to their stalls. Some of them have also taped up one of the vertical support rails, but Ro isn’t rubbing on that so I haven’t bothered.
The other part of the stall that needed padding are the ends of the pipes where the run meets the stall:
The pipe ends aren’t capped, which you can see from the bottom rail. You can see my temporary fix on the middle rail; I still need to get to the home improvement store and find some more durable caps. But first I need to remember to measure the diameter of the pipes.
This was not in the brochure
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.