September 15th, 2008

September 14th, 8:50am: Yawn…good morning friends. Another overcast dreary day. The rain yesterday cut short JoAnn’s riding lesson and she got to experience what Rain is like when she’s bored in the barn waiting for the rain to let up. She sure doesn’t live up to her name sometimes – fair weather horse! I’ve been up since 7am so got to sleep in this morning which was nice. Kat and Polly left then to go pick up a rescue horse, along with Dance (Kathi’s show horse) who has been spending some time down in Southern MN. We’ll tell you more about the rescue mare on Windchill’s blog site but we’re excited to bring her here.

Spent the last two weeks stockpiling round bales of hay. 200 bales – that was a lot of time on the tractor. I would never ever ever have guessed that a semi that large could make the turn into our drive, I swear he had maybe a centimeter (see it was so close I even had to switch to metric to describe in my excitement) clearance between the power pole and trailer. He could haul 34 at a time so do the math…lots of loads. Walker LOVES this time of year because haybales are lined up in lines across the pasture and he gets to jump from bale to bale to bale with this huge smile on this face (Australian Shepherds are one of those canine breeds that actually smile). Anyway, we bought enough for our herd, for some rescues that are coming in and a reserve supply in case we end up with more rescues than anticipated or surrounding farms need to buy some – area farms and hay suppliers had been gouging by charging WAY too much for hay bales so we bought out an entire farm’s production to help drive prices back to a reasonable level. May not be popular with the gougers, but we’ll hopefully help some small farms out of the financial bite that was being caused. Talk about adding to neglect problems, sheesh, how is it helping if you charge so much for hay people can’t afford to feed their livestock?