Bachelor #3

When I wrote my post about Dragon's ancestry, I mentioned the third stallion at the barn (at the time - there's four now!) and how I didn't have any good pictures of him.  Well, turns out he's the boy that got Cessa knocked up, and we ended up taking pictures of him this weekend.  

So now I have pictures!

As for my girls... Oh my god, Cessa is huge.  Poor baby.  She's decided that the stall where they stuck her for her shots when it was raining last week is just... where she lives now.  ("They bring me food, they bring me water, they turn on a fan... why would I leave?" lol)  She's so big, she can't roll over.  And she's uncomfortable enough that she's actually turning down food sometimes - which, y'all.  The only animal I've ever met that was as food-motivated as this mare is my dog, who was half-starved and 15lbs underweight when our friends found him in their back yard.  Poor mare is miserable.  

And Dragon is currently huge too, but in that whole, "Oh my god, will you stop growing vertically, please?" way.  We haven't sticked her, but she's gotta be pushing 15 hands at this point.  Not quite there, but close.

Well

That sound you hear is me laughing so hard there are tears streaming down my face.

The one year we were not gonna check Cessa for pregnancy.  The one year.

But either Cessa's pregnant and due in June, or she has some sort of really weird parasite that kicked the vet during the pregnancy check...

 

Birthday pony and every mare owner's "favorite" game

 So Dragon is now (as of about a month ago) a full-on yearling.  We celebrated this with a tiara, because why would you not?

Local baby very patient with her human's weirdness. lol

And then she went butt-high again, whee.  Like, hilariously, terribly butt-high.  She's been such a pretty baby, up until this winter, but the awkward teenage years appear to have arrived.  lol

Annnd then there's Cessa.

We play this game every spring.  "Is she fat or is she pregnant?"  And every year... it's unquestionably been fat.  But remember how last July she staged the Great Escape?  And at the time, we thought it wasn't a concern that we'd found her with a stallion, because she didn't seem to be cycling?

Yeah, um.  About that "is she fat or is she pregnant?" question.

This was Cessa last year, around this time - right before she went into fat camp:

Round.  Very round. At least she's shiny?

And this... was Cessa yesterday:

Slightly different pose... very different shape.

She's also mushy and sweet to everybody - which... that is not normal.  And her nipples normally point straight down, but right now they're pointing kind of at each other, which is also weird.  And she doesn't have the massively well-defined buttcrack she had last year.

So if anyone hears raucous laughter later this week, that'll be the sound of me and the BOs laughing our asses off if the vet palpates and finds a head, because this was the ONE year we were going to just shrug and go, "Yeah, she's just really fat; let's figure out how to get her off the grass."

(And yes, we've already discussed contingency plans regarding what will happen to baby - ironically, back in July when she hung out with the stud - and contingency plans for if there's no baby and that's all just... fat.  Someone has a new muzzle coming, and I'm GPS tagging this one, damn it.)

Pedigree fun

So... Dom posted about her mare's pedigree (and the fascinating and terrifying adventures in inbreeding it contains), and it got me thinking about Dragon's.

I knew going in what I was doing, choosing the breeding I did.  I had a choice of three stallions and maybe fifteen mares, including my own; theoretically I could have gone for an outside stallion, but that felt like coloring too far outside the lines of the agreement that was on the table.  I wanted a full Sendera Draft, which meant I needed at least 60% draft - which knocked a few potential crosses off the list.  

I particularly liked two of the stallions, who are related (same stallion is the sire of one and grandsire of the other); part of it was conformation and personality.  Nothing wrong with the unrelated guy; he's black with a big fat blaze, and he has a very similar conformation to the other two boys (like - startlingly similar, looks like he's related even though he's not).  I just didn't like the idea of him as a baby daddy as much as I liked the other two for some reason.  One of the related boys has less draft % than the other and a roman nose, which my strongest feeling there was "as long as it doesn't get more roman, it's fine."  (No banana nose, omg.)  The other is a bit smaller in size and not as flashy.  Both related boys have spots, which... I mean, I can take or leave the spots; give me two identically-built horses with the same personality, and I might choose the spotted one, if I like the pattern?

Dragon's daddy

Dragon's uncle

(I don't have a good photo of Bachelor #3 - the pictures I have are gawky three year old, which... he looks like a gawky teenager, lol.)

Picking either one of the spotted boys completely removed several mares from consideration because they were far too closely related.  A few mares I discarded because they drive me nuts - too clingy, in one case, and the others just plain rub me the wrong way, personality-wise.  Eventually, what it came down to for me was it would be silly to not choose the best broodmare on site (or, as it turned out, her daughter) as the mother when she was on offer as an option.  I get along with her just fine, I like how she's built, and I know exactly what she produces because I've seen 3 of her foals and one grandkid grow up.  And that left one of the spotted stallions completely off because he's the best broodmare's son and the daughter's full brother.

Best broodmare

The decision was made to breed both mother and daughter to the same stallion, and I'd get to pick which one I wanted.  Best broodmare twinned twice and then turned up with an infection, so... it was gonna be daughter's baby or wait for the next year for momma's baby.

Dragon's momma

And daughter's baby was awesome.  :)  We ended up here:

Colored-in boxes are duplicate horses.  The stuff I drew boxes around - the red boxes are Percherons, the blue Hackney.  There's more Percheron off the 5-generation pedigree on the other lines, along with a bunch of Appaloosa (no shock - spots gotta come from somewhere) and Quarter Horse, and also some Thoroughbred.  (And I'm just enough of a nerd to be delighted that Man O' War is in there, even if I have to go back 10 generations to find him.)  The mixed breeding was something I expected - the breed is relatively young, as such things go, and outbreeding is a regular thing to keep the breeding population viable.

I... had kind of forgotten until I looked at this again that the sire's dam was the product of what was, at the time, the only remaining "viable" breeding pair in the breed... which at that point the breed had 12 members, and at least three of them were the children of this cross.  Or rather, it was less that I'd forgotten and more that I hadn't realized quite how those two were related.

At least it's not closer?

Side note: Cessa's sire is Dragon's great-grandsire on her dam's side.  I chose to exclude Cessa from consideration for breeding to the related boys because one of them was straight-up her nephew and it felt icky, and the other, the guy that ended up siring Dragon... I dunno, it would have been OK, but much as I like Cessa, getting a foal out of her wasn't a high priority.  It would be neat, for various reasons that are about half sentiment, but she stamps her foals with her head and her personality pretty hard, and I just wasn't convinced that he could tone down the personality.  (Love her to death, but hoo boy, her babies have Attitude.  Which I've been told she did too, when she was younger, and a lot of work went into making her the mostly model citizen she is now.)

I've been doing a lot of digging around past the generations shown here, just because I'm curious, and I have 100% fallen down a "history of the Thoroughbred breed" hole at this point.  I haven't even started in on the other lines - I just picked up with one of the Quarter Horses and all of a sudden I was in TB-land and discovering that there are so many other "Arabians" and "Barbs" and "Turks" around the same time as the Godolphin and Darley and Byerley that I had no idea existed.

Progress shots

Hey, so Dragon will be a yearling in... *checks calendar*  Uh, 11 days?  I had my camera with me this weekend when I went out to the barn, so I got some decent shots of her that aren't cell phone pictures.

Although this phone photo did crack me up.

She's butt-high.  Because of course she is.

Why does my yearling look so adult?!

Hello from the formerly-frozen hellscape, part 2

In retrospect?  That should have been a sign.

That is a 135-car pileup on Thursday, the 11th.  Before all the actual ice and snow started.  (There's a decent article about it here, but fair warning - video at the top auto-plays, so if you don't want to see cars stacking up...)

I mean, don't get me wrong... this was kind of a sign too:

I am roughly north of Dallas and Fort Worth, so deep, deep into the blue.

But honestly?  Snow and ice here isn't that unusual.  We get a couple of inches, everything shuts down because it happens like once a year and nobody knows how to drive on it - and it usually comes with ice and we have way too many overpasses and nothing but sanding trucks - and that's it.

Except... there was this:

And that thing on Monday is a five.  We don't get single-digit temperatures here often.  Like... sometimes we get a 9?  Mostly we get teens and twenties.  So that was gonna suck...

This was pretty shitty too:

And y'know... by this point, we're all bracing for cold and that was really it.

I mean... by Friday afternoon, this had shown up and I was threatening to leave the state:

THREE?!

Aaand we ended up here:

The fuck. I did not know that "igloo" was an option for the day.

Because what the fuck, why not.  It's not like any of my friends actually had teleportation rituals or technology to get us the fuck out of this cold.

For the first day or so, the whole thing was kind of fun, ya know?

Fun fact: this dog in this coat?  Will pee.  But he will not poop.  Apparently butt flaps mean one cannot poop.

I annoyed the shit out of one of my BOs with questions about whether I should bring up Cessa's blanket. ("No."  "Are you sure?"  "Yes."  "Okay, but it's gonna get down to negative numbers and snow."  "She is a beach ball and they'll chase her away if she's wearing the evil striped blueberry costume."  "But... cold and snow."  "You can bring it up if you really want to, but even if we put it on her, it'll get taken off so she can share the round bale and the shelter."  "...Okay, fine.")

Dragon temporarily got a blanket - oh my god, my not-quite-a-yearling wears a 63" blanket - and promptly shed it.  We think because that blanket didn't have leg straps and that wasn't noticed in time to fix the problem, she or one of her pasturemates just kind of... peeled it off her.  It was still buckled and everything, which is impressive.

And then Monday hit.

Around 2 AM, my husband and I both woke up out of a sound sleep.  We keep a big fan running at night, both as white noise generation and because our bedroom is somehow the warmest room in the house, despite being right across from the AC unit.  And when the power shuts off... the fan shuts off.

And then, an hour later, when the power comes back on, the fan comes back on.

And then, an hour after that, when the power shuts off again, the fan shuts off.

We weren't smart enough that night to actually turn the damned thing off, so it kept us up the rest of the night.

All day Monday, the power cycled on and then off.  On and then off.  We had a period of about 3 hours in the middle of the afternoon, which let the house warm back up to normal temperatures, and then back to the hour on/hour off cycle yet again.  I spent half the afternoon working on a blanket I'm crocheting for one of my BOs; it's in that awkward stage of "need to sit down and sew bits together," so this seemed like an ideal time.

Granted, we also found out as the sun was setting that we had... two AA batteries, four AAA batteries, two 9-volts, and a 4-pack of Cs of questionable age.  And approximately half a dozen battery-powered things that needed... you guessed it, AA or AAA batteries.  Fortunately, all of those had fresh batteries.  We also had a dead box of small matches (matches die; who knew?), a box of long matches, and the worst long-necked lighter in existence... and two tea-light candles and a pair of emergency candles that I just realized I failed to point out to my husband - oops.  And our chimney hasn't been cleaned in the... erm... fourteen years we've been in this house, and god only knows if the church that owned the house before us ever did it.  So we weren't having a fire, that's for sure.

That evening was when my parents let me know that after rolling blackouts since midnight, they were entirely out of power starting around dinner.  Concerning, but not the end of the world.  Also spawned this piece of conversation, which is at least good for a laugh:

By Tuesday, this was becoming less fun.  We were smart enough to not turn on the fan before bed, so we sort of got a full night's sleep (It was too quiet. I could hear the dog digesting, I swear to god.).  Power continued to come up for an hour, drop for an hour.  Come up for an hour, drop for an hour.

Well, ok.  Let's be realistic here.  It was never an hour.  It was 50 minutes.  Or 70 minutes.  Or 48 minutes.  Or 55 minutes.  Always came up at roughly the same time - we started on the half hour, but by Tuesday morning were on the hour - but we'd lose power at slightly different intervals each time.  I thrive on order; it was driving me insane.

Parents continued to be out of power, and it was upper 40s in their house.  Because we were getting intermittent power, we stayed upper 50s into lower 60s in the house the whole time, but... they did not.  My parents are creeping up on their 70s, so that was concerning.  They were doing their best to stay warm, but only so much they could do.

It snowed overnight.  Midday, we got word that the city wanted us to conserve water; the water treatment plants had lost power, but it came back up.  That said... with everyone dripping faucets to keep pipes from freezing, they were concerned that if the water levels dropped too low, we might have to boil water.  Note to future self: next time they say this, start hoarding water...

We woke up Wednesday to more of the same.  Fortunately, my parents woke up to power; their driveway is quite steep, so they couldn't just back out and I really, really didn't want either of them out there trying to clean it off... but they were 20 miles and an overpass over a lake away, so I wasn't getting over there in my little blue car.  I woke up that morning ready to start calling around to see what volunteer organizations were running rides to the warming station.  Well, ready to call when we had power, anyway.

It was, theoretically, starting to warm up at this point.  Lowest temperature was -3 on Tuesday morning; Wednesday morning was a comparatively balmy positive 3.

That was the good news.  The bad news... y'all, we have a fire hydrant very close to the house; our water pressure is insane.  But midday Wednesday, we had half an hour or so where we didn't have enough water to fill a toilet tank after flushing.

And then the boil water notice showed up, about the time the water pressure came back.

Do you know how much of a pain in the ass it is to boil water when you're on rolling blackouts?  Like... we had pots staged on the stove and the minute the power kicked on, someone was in the kitchen to stand over them until they boiled.  Bad experience, 0/10, would prefer not to do again. Only was not completely intolerable because I have tried home brewing in the past and had 11 gallons worth of water storage just... right there on hand.

Thankfully, some time around midnight Wednesday night/Thursday morning, the power cycled back on and stayed on.  I was able to get on and work for a little while Thursday morning, until just after lunch, when a circuit breaker switch in our breaker box failed and took out the damn internet with it - only time the entire adventure where the power was on, but we didn't have internet.

And then... Sunday, it was 75, because Texas.  The snow and ice are gone without a trace; you can barely even tell that we had precipitation at this point.

As of Saturday morning, the boil water notice has been lifted; we have drained all the things and refilled them with fresh, clean water, including the ice maker (and that was a bit annoying). Things are surprisingly back to normal in my area.

My household was very lucky.  We were careful, but we were lucky.  Barn folks were also lucky; the farmhouse at the barn lost water for 12 hours or so, because someone forgot to winterize the pipes in the crawlspace (oops), and they now know where all the holes in the siding are, but that was about it.  All the horses are fine, and for the most part still unclothed.

I have... so many thoughts and opinions and feelings about the Texas power grid and this whole situation.  It comes down to: Texas is stupidly gerrymandered - like, the district I live in only didn't make it into the court case a few years ago because there were three districts in Texas that were worse.  The state is governed as it is because everything is shifted around to keep the GOP in power.  We are reaping the "rewards" of politicians who gave their corporate donors all the deregulation they wanted, enabling them to not spend any more money than they absolutely have to and avoiding federal regulation.  Winterization costs money, so nobody wanted to pay for it... so fully 40% of our our generation got knocked out by winter.  Mostly coal and gas and oil plants went down, along with one of the nuclear plants and some of the wind farms.  People are dead.  If you want to show up here and blame the average Texan for this shit, go away or be blocked, because I am in no mood to fuck around.

WT-Actual-F, Mother Nature

 Y'all.  Y'all Northerners?  Please keep this shit in the future.  Actually cold winters are terrible, and so is ice and snow.

I don't recall if I've specifically stated it, but I'm in Texas.

Yes.  That Texas.  The one that is a giant-ass trash fire right now because it's not so much a "great state" as it is "a bunch of Republicans and oil barons stapling the rest of us into one big straightjacket and saying everything is fine."

...I'm a little angry right now...

Anyway.  Not in the worst-hit areas; those are farther south than me.  We didn't get skipped, but we are far and away not the worst off in this disaster of a state.  We had rolling blackouts from late Monday - thankfully one hour on, one hour off for the most part - until midnight last night and are under a boil water notice.  But my household is fine, the BOs are fine, the trainer is fine, the horses and the dog are all fine.  It's not great for my anxiety that none of my animals will wear clothes when it's fucking freezing, but that's a minor thing.  Even my elderly parents are fine, although they didn't have power for 48 hours and will not listen when I tell them not to try and clean their very steep driveway by themselves.

More later; right now I'm just glad to be back online and functional.