The Bug

As much as I love to travel...There is no place like home!! And I have spent the last five years turning our place into our own personal little haven. Well, MY haven anyway. When MH is home, he still spends the majority of his time over at 'his' place with his cars and bikes. People think that MH and I have an exceptionally strange relationship, in the fact that we are both okay with spending a lot of time away from each other. Despite the fact that we love each other very much...For us...SPACE is not just a luxury...It's a necessity. Neither one of us can stand to feel smothered. Eventually though, the plan is to build a new shop for MH's collection at this place...Which is the primary reason I have left the big open area at the front of our property empty. That space would be perfect for putting up a barn or even just making a big dry lot area...but I'm leaving it alone so that I won't feel it's lose when MH's shop goes up.

Not that I don't have plenty of space to do what I want/need to do around here. I have 3 dry lot areas sectioned off and each will adjoin it's own 4-5 acre pasture. Right now, all of these dry lot areas are simply set up in hot rope. Let me tell you...Solar chargers are the way to go!! I cannot believe I have waited this long to use them. But, a person still needs more permanent fixtures and this fall, my pipe fencing will get built. Yayyy!!! I will need to run new water lines and put in 3 new hydrants to make watering at the new pens easy...and I will probably run electric line as well so I have outlets where I can plug water heaters in to the individual tanks in the winter. The whole goal is to make things around here as efficient as possible. It just gets to be too time consuming and wearing to keep up with all of this AND get horses rode. Every year about this time, I start to get worn down and have to start making choices about how to spend my energy. Usually the riding time suffers because pens have to be cleaned...I mean, THAT part will never go completely away...BUT, it's a whole lot less taxing to take the 4-wheeler and drag to a dry lot than it is to have to manually scoop poop. LOL. Dragging the mare's dry lot once or twice a week kept the fly problem to a minimum and no one has needed to wear fly masks and/or sheets until just recently. Considering it's getting to the end of July and I'm just now starting to have a fly problem...That is pretty good. Especially considering the amount of moisture we have had around here this year. Everyone else is really struggling with flies and VS (vesticular stometitis) is everywhere.

I have been babysitting a couple of horses for some rodeo friends of mine this last week, while they went to Canada. Way easier to just leave their extra horses on the U.S. side of the border. Of course, since these were their high-dollar rodeo horses, I kept up with the care they are used to receiving. Everything except their daily riding. I did pony them every other day and gave them 1/2 a day turn-out, but I warned my friends I wouldn't have time to actually ride them. They were okay with that. Man...I had almost forgotten how much time a person spends with a competition horse. It's just a whole 'nother level than where I have dropped too. But you know what? Taking care of their horses seems to have given me the bug to get back to the way I used to do things. I know that my horses have been missing all of the extra attention they used to get. Oh, don't get me wrong, I still brush them, hose them off, clean feet, etc., etc....but with so many to ride, I've had to turn it more into an assembly line vs. one on one time with each horse. The horses can definitely tell the difference.

I haven't quite figured out how to change my routine and still get everyone ridden AND give them that extra attention...I mean...even an extra 30 minutes per horse ends up adding an additional 3 hours to my day...But  it's important, so I guess if that means I have to start alternating riding and time well spent with each horse...That is just what I will have to do.