Another lovely boy

Well, this summer may turn out to be "let's bathe the ponies and take pictures instead of ride" until September or so.  I don't mind too much, though - collecting my horse from the back end of the 30 acre farm in 80-90 degree weather with 50-80% humidity is... it's not pleasant when no part of the walk is shaded.  It's just not.  I pretty much drive past that end of the farm and make sure my horse is alive and call it good. LOL

Anyway... on to some pictures!  This young stallion is the son of my BOs' best broodmare and full brother to her daughter.

...He also knows where the camera is and what it's about. This is literally the closest I've got to an outtake (other than a few blurry ones where my focus went wonky):

Can we be done now? Please?

And we had a friend!

Handsome boy

I think I mentioned elsewhere that my BOs have offered me a baby to replace Justice; this is so incredibly generous of them, and I can't even put into words how much I appreciate it.  They're even letting me pick who mom and dad will be!

After some deeply considered thought and a lot of indecision, mom is going to be either the best broodmare on property or her daughter; they ended up deciding to breed both and let me pick rather than make me pick between the two mares.  (The other baby will be for sale, I believe.)

Dad was the easy part.  Farm's got some really nice studs, most of which I've known since birth, but I've kind of had my eye on this guy.  Just... the pictures I've had of him until this weekend looked an awful lot like this:

Which, I mean... he was a cute baby, but "cute baby" and "actually worthy of breeding to" are... not necessarily the same.

Especially when he's grown up a little!

Or a lot.  :)  He's 4 this year, and this will be his first crop of foals.  He got lightly started over the winter, and he'll be going back for training in a few weeks so he can start showing.  We already know he'll clear a 5 foot fence handily.  (No, that wasn't planned.  It also wasn't to get to mares.  Guess he was bored!)

Regardless of which mare... Although color is not a factor here unless all other things are identical, both babies should come out black or bay/brown, with ~ 50% chance of spots.  Both will also be high draft percentage - somewhere in the 75-90% range, as I recall.

The stallion isn't perfect; neither are the mares. But I wouldn't cry to get an exact reproduction of any of the three of them, either, and the worst parts are things like "a little long in the back" or "a little short in the neck" or "your foot is a dinner plate and looks a bit disproportionate" or "that... is a lot of feathering."

I am very quietly excited about this baby.  Cessa is 15 this year, and part of what I was looking forward to with Justice was doing some showing and other events that I'd be hesitant to push an aging broodmare with allergies to do.  The other part was having a horse that my husband could ride, if need be... which this baby totally should be, given the personalities of the equines involved.  (I would be hesitant with Cessa - she could surprise me, but I'd rather not bet my distinctly non-horsey SO's safety and happiness on it.)

All's Quiet

So hi!  It's been a while!

Turns out, when it's raining every freaking weekend but two for the last three months, not much horse stuff gets done. lol I mean, I've seen Cessa?  She's fat and happy?

Not that you'd know it by photos. Silly mare.

The two weekends it didn't dump inches upon inches of rain on us... we couldn't really ride because it's breeding season, and between three stallions and a boarder whose horses can't be out in the big pasture with the rest of the herd, there's no room (and none of us are comfortable enough yet for trail riding!).

So it's been quiet.

And wet.  I mentioned wet, right?  Like, I don't want to complain too much because it's better than the decade of drought we had, but... um.  Could the rain maybe happen on Monday instead of Friday or Saturday?

At least my roses are happy.

Finally!

Hey Cessa!

What'd we do this weekend?

Yep!  We went riding.

Related: ohgod.  Don't stop riding for like three years and then start again.  Your thighs will not thank you.  Nor will your ass. 

Also... Apparently I will get told on every time I tip forward or fail to use my relatively undereducated seatbones.  lol Not that this is a bad thing, but boy is it a brand new sensation after two decades of lesson horses.

Also, this is what happens when your fat mare is a yak, you're not precisely svelte yourself, it's 70 degrees, and you ride at a walk for half an hour or so.  Fitness: it's what's on the year's plans...

All quiet on the stupid weather front

First week of January:

Second week of January:

Third week of January:

Fourth week of January:

Aaaaanybody want to guess how much barn time I've had this month, when it's an hour drive to the barn so I usually only go on weekends?  And when the ground is so saturated that it's taken four days for our normally dry back yard to dry out?  And when neither my BOs nor I particularly want to be outside in 30-45 degree weather, especially at the barn where there's not much to block the wind?  (Although we all have freakish husbands that like the cold and/or think that our idea of cold is far too warm because they're from points well north of Texas.)

Anybody?

Yeah.  I'm not thinking about it either.

I know we're not suffering from the godawful cold of the Midwest or the feet of snow, but this is so gross for our winters.  We're having 20 to 40 degree temperature swings in 24 hour periods - literally, 70 one day, 39 as the high the next, and 25 that night - and we usually only see that in the spring.  We haven't really had any snow or ice (and I know I'm gonna regret whining about that next month, which is usually our winter weather month), but the one day we did have snow, it was just... depressing.  It snowed during the night, and by the time we woke up... there was snow on the cars and that was about it.  Everybody is getting sick.

Just... ugh.  Ugh.

It's all adding up to quiet time for the blog.  Literally the extent of my excitement this month has been the discovery that one of the squirrels that's nested in our trees stole a dog coat from some poor Chihuahua or something somewhere, shredded it, and is discovering how terrible a nesting material it is every time the wind blows.  Although I have to say, whatever dog that was, it had to have been round when it wore the coat; I found the base of the coat first, which is how I know the size of it, and since then, I swear to god I've picked up enough fluff for a big dog coat.  I know for sure I've filled 2 plastic grocery bags, and there's more out there.  It just keeps coming.
 

Yeah, ok. I'm a little whiny and grouchy at this point. I have a cold clearing out and a spouse down with food poisoning. Doesn't help that today's the anniversary of putting Justice down - something that doesn't bother me too much day-to-day at this point, but is definitely not the happiest of memories.

Anybody else super ready for spring? lol

Happy New Year

I'm not much for setting resolutions for the new year.  And I'm not much for retrospectives of the past year.  Just a me thing - I just start feeling inundated by the ones I don't care about, especially on New Year's Eve and Day, and I just bleagh out on the whole thing.

But I gotta admit, as I sit here watching the lovely ice storm that's decided to show up, I'm hoping for more of this in the new year:

You know, maybe without the walker assistance!

Fall? Winter? Who knows!

'Tis the season of "is it worth it to drive to the barn?"

And it's been worth it a few times.  I mean, I got blackmail pictures:

Very cute

The side-eye on this one cracks me up.

She puts up with me... lol

I also made it out to chat with the vet about Cessa's loud breathing issue, since she's done it a couple of times at slower than trot/canter (which she was doing at the trainer's).  We'd put it off then because she had a cold shortly after she came home, so we were thinking maybe she was brewing something. Not so much this time, so... vet.

Turns out, fat mare has allergies. Like her human. (I thought it was "look like your pet" not "share medical conditions with your pet..." lol)

We knew she had some allergies; she gets some thin/balding patches when she sheds.  Because of that, we're falling down on the side of "more allergy issues" rather than "heaves" - per the vet, who said they're related, but since we knew about the balding... allergies was more likely.

Step one is putting Vicks on her nose to see if that helps her breathe better.  (It will definitely help me breathe better, as I discovered this weekend when I tried it out and discovered that she does not give a shit as long as there are cookies involved.)  And if that doesn't work, we move up to something stronger until we find where she needs to be to be comfortable.

lol Just... maybe stop short of the full on "let's flush her sinuses and lungs."  As I told the vet, we're talking about a 13 year old broodmare whose job is to have a few more babies and cart me around once a week or so.  We might go as far as to do a Training-level dressage test.  We might jump as high as two whole feet.  She might have to work an entire day someday - terrible, I know.  Comfortable is where we're aiming.  Dumping thousands into her so we can continue a high-performance career?  Nnnnot so much.