Nope - Not Spoiled At All

As I've said before, I don't know what standing on the Surefoot pads does for the horses, but they sure love them! Especially Phantom - she almost always has a moment where she goes into a Surefoot-coma.

Last night I put her on pads in front and back, thinking she'd only stand on them for a couple of minutes. Wrong! After 25 minutes I pulled her off - reluctantly on her part.

It was interesting to see make some very deliberate moves when she decided that she was done with a specific pad. She clearly was finished with the left hind first and gave it a kick to get it out of her way before placing her foot back down.

She stood in the exact same spot for the whole 25 minutes, with the shank on the ground, while I leaned against the wall sending texts.

The initial set-up - firm pads in front and hard slants behind.

7:23 pm - Where we started.

7:31 pm - done with the left hind.

7:40 pm - now done with the left front and has adjusted her position on the right front.

7:41 pm - stoner pony face.

7:47 pm - still in the same spot. Had to make her walk it off.

A Grey Chunk Up Close

I really like taking pictures of things close up. I love being able to see texture and details that the naked eye cannot make out. I'm not very good at it - I have a macro lens for my dslr camera, but to get really good pictures I would need a ring flash and a macro rail that would allow me to do bunch of pictures that would get merged together in a process called focus stacking. Since I'm not going to make any money off my pictures, I don't feel the need to invest a bunch of cash in equipment.

So imperfect pictures it is!

A couple of years ago I took some pictures of parts of a horses hoof that were trimmed off by the farrier (and apparently I didn't blog about it). And then I took some pictures of a tooth cap that I found one day in the arena footing.

Last week I finally got around to something I had been wanting to do for a while.

A horse chestnut!

I managed to peel a good sample off of Cisco two nights previous. This wasn't my first attempt at this - I've taken many pieces of chestnuts home in my coat pocket. However, I usually forgot about them and by the time I remembered it had dried and shriveled up.

The pictures left me a bit disappointed.

You know how they say that a horse's chestnut is like a fingerprint? Everyone is different?

I expected to see lines and formations that would be noticeably different from another one.

But no. It just looked like a grey chunk of something keratin-y.

The inside.

The outside.

Maybe I need to apply an ink pad to it.

Horses In the Mist

Fall is coming.

The leaves are already turning yellow, I've seen geese gathering, the horses are starting to fluff up, and I've turned the thermostat up for the mornings just in case the temperature drops overnight.

However, it's still raining. So when the temperature drops in the evening, we get fog.

On Friday evening, the fog starting coming in well before sunset. I had both horses in, so I decided to try to take advantage of it. I foisted my phone upon a friend and asked her to take some pics of me and my ponies in the fog.

It was a spur of the moment thing, so I wasn't dressed real fancy, my horses weren't groomed, we were using my cell phone instead of my dslr, and my friend is not a photographer. The photos weren't perfect - they are a bit too grainy to be able to enlarge them.

I just don't have many pictures of me with my horses. I have lots of pics that I've taken - but since I've taken them, I'm not in them. We have someone at the barn who does photoshoots, and I've thought about hiring her, but with two gray horses, getting ready for an evening shoot is an all-day job and I just don't have the desire.

I think this one is my favourite though it's a little eerie.

It kind of looks like we are all crossing over together. Should I ever get into a devastating car crash while hauling both of my horses, this is the picture to use.

I'm going to start throwing my good camera in the car for my evening trips out to the barn. Maybe I'll get lucky and get a second chance at these pictures. Maybe I'll throw some better boots and a jacket in too, just in case.

(Mostly) Wordless Wednesday

Last night I returned to the barn from a late evening hack on Phantom and looked up to a beautiful sky of pink and purple clouds. My cell phone camera did not do the clouds justice. 

It was the calm before the storm - today has been full of thunderstorms and rain. 

I wish I had shot these in RAW instead of JPEG so that I could play with them a bit. The colours were changing too fast to mess around with settings though!

Weird Horse Possessions

When you own horses for a long time, you sometimes accumulate things that, well, normal people probably don't have kicking around in their house.

I have one such thing that I keep forgetting about. I've had it for 30 years, sitting in a jar, sometimes in a drawer, sometimes on a bookcase. I was reminded of it while reading The Hunky Hanoverian's post about her horse Rio's surgery.

It's a splint bone.

Or rather, part of a splint bone. About a 2" part.

My first pony, Sunflower, had a bit of a bad year around 1989. We figured that she tried to kick another horse (being the cow that she was), missed the horse, and connected with a wood plank on a fence. Which resulted in a broken splint bone in her left hind leg. This was only the start of one of those "crappy things happen to horses" years.

The Sunflower pony.

So off to the local vet clinic she went. I was only 14 years old at the time, so I don't remember much of the true scenario. I imagine that she went under general anesthetic, but I don't know for sure. I know I was completely unaware of the risk that it would involve,  as I had only been riding for about 3 years. She stayed at the clinic for about a week and came home to be rewrapped daily by me (I remember using Cool Cast bandages). After a while, it became apparent that she was experiencing some pain where the bone had been, so the nerves were cryogenically frozen along that area, and she forever more had 4 hairless dots along the outside of that leg.

And the surgery cost $800.

I don't think I'd ever taken the bone out of the jar until I took these pictures.

At least, that is how I remember it all, from my child's perspective of 30 years ago.

My party favour when I picked Sunflower up at the vet was the chunk of bone in a jar of formaldehyde.

The writing on the masking tape on the jar says "Sunflower, Left lateral splint bone, April 11/89". I guess that was my birthday present that year - my birthday is April 8th (bad things tend to happen around my birthday, I tend to get really paranoid around that time).

Over time, the formaldehyde has either leaked out or dried up. I didn't realize the condition of the jar until I took these photos - not sure if all the cracks actually go all the way through the jar or not.

Whatever formaldehyde was left in the jar I dumped out when I took the bone out. Oops.

Do you think it would be weird if I were to take it to the vet with me on my next visit and see if they would top up the formaldehyde?

This bone cost $800. I'm not getting rid of it anytime soon.

What weird horse things do you have in your possession?

All Ears? Maybe Not

Phantom is generally pretty chill about most things in life. Which means taking pictures of her with a perky look on her face is rather difficult. Most of the time my pics of her show disinterest. Like this:

Enter the All Ears Selfie app (on iTunes or Google Play Store). It makes sounds using your phone that should make horses perk their ears towards you. The sound buttons are overlaid on your camera screen, so you can get your horse shot lined up, press the sound button, wait for their ears to whip forward, and snap a great picture.

Sounds include various horse whinnies, a donkey hee-hawing, candy wrappers, dog squeaky toys, dogs barking, a plastic bag crinkling,and grain being poured into a bucket. I counted 44 differents sounds.

Did it work? Did I get perky eared pics of Phantom?

Nope.

I tried almost every sound. I think her left ear twitched twice. And not forward.

While I was going through all the sounds, I could hear the horses outside snorting loudly and running back and forth on icy footing. It sounded like they were seeing something that was quite spooky (land sharks maybe?). All that commotion was still not enough to perk her ears forward. Or to the side where the noises were for that matter.

What did work?

I put my hands in my coat pocket.

'Cause maybe cookies might come out of that pocket.