Author: Elaine

Hap goes home

From what I imagine is Hap’s point of view, I took him home to my trainer’s barn yesterday, after he spent five months with Rags and Smoke. The young woman who had a half lease on him last fall is leasing him again for the summer. In the ten years that I’ve owned him, he has spent less than a year at our place.

After we allowed him to work off some energy in the arena, we turned him out with his buddies in the gelding field. I’ve seen some horses quail under the curious attentions of a herd, but Hap seemed to enjoy the horses pressing up around him. There was remarkably little squealing and striking. It probably helped that Hap was the second most dominant horse when he left, and good friends with the dominant gelding, Havoc.

I always flinch a little when I turn a horse out with others for the first time after a break. I keep telling myself that it is good for their little psyches, but the rough and tumble can be very hard on their bodies.

Smokie

Smokie
My mother and her cat, Smokie, are staying with us while we wait for their furniture to be delivered from Southern California. Smokie came through the trip on the airplane like a trooper: the first cat that I ever knew who headed for the food bowl as soon as she got out of the crate after a trip. Most seem to want to hide under the bed.

All the airline staff were cooing over her, and then grunting when they had to pick up the crate.

Chicken coop

I am writing this from a converted chicken coop near beautiful downtown Encino. I am briefly in Southern California to help with my mother’s move to Colorado Springs. Yesterday, my sister, her son and daughter, and I packed the items that will be moving. Today I will run some errands, and tomorrow we will do some last minute packing before the movers come on Wednesday.

My sister has converted an old chicken coop behind her house to an office which is where I am sleeping. She graciously granted me the password to her computer and I promised not to change anything on it. She says that techies always want to change her computer. I only have to suppress the urge to download and install Mozilla about once every two or three minutes. I find Internet Explorer so limited. I did find some problems with my weblog design under IE, but will wait until I get back home to try and address them.

Happy Hour

Horses

Originally, the dog run extended all the way to the horse field. However, sharing a common fence line allowed the horses (primarily Smoke) and the dogs to spend far too much time entertaining themselves by fence fighting. In an effort to save our ear drums, and those of our neighbors, Jack put up the chain link panels creating what we call the “buffer zone.” Occasionally, we let the horses into the buffer zone to eat down the grass, and a good time is had by all.

BloGTK apparently works

I am using the Movable Type blogging system option in the Account and Settings section. In my first post, I had something that made the BloGTK parser choke, but it seems to be working now. BlogGTK is an offline editor written in Python which works under Linux.