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.

Columbine

Columbine
Yesterday, I planted this yellow columbine. The three that I planted last year have not yet completely bloomed, but two of them look close to doing so. I love columbines.

Meadowlarks and Irises

My friend and I took Havoc and Lily out on a short trail ride today in the mid-afternoon. I had spent some time training Lily to get in my trainer’s trailer and we both needed a break. Although Lily loads fine into a slant load, she doesn’t like the looks of my trainer’s straight load two horse trailer. She also loads well into my stock trailer as long as there aren’t any horses in it. Nor does she permit any other horses to be loaded behind her. Since my stock trailer has no dividers, this means that a three horse trailer can only hold one horse.

Last year when I took Lily out on trail rides, she rarely wanted to stop and graze. She has relaxed a lot since then, or grown up a bit, because she now is quite eager to graze. Since I’ve done a lot of clicker training with her, I just click to her when I wish her to eat. She seems to really like trail rides now, and all the juicy grass, which is usually hard to come by in Colorado.

While we were out on the trail, we listened to the meadowlarks, and looked at the profusion of wildflowers. We ride on a ranch (slated for development, unfortunately) and most of it is open grasslands and rolling hills, overlooked by Pikes Peak. Our prize find among the wildflowers was a single, perfect wild iris. We didn’t see any pronghorns like we did on our last ride. It is still not unusual to see them west of I-25, despite the encroachment of suburbs.

Dudley

Dudley
The first time I found Dudley in the bathtub I had walked into the bathroom without any lights and there was this large black thing in the tub. It was a bad moment. Dudley does large black thing better than any other dog we have ever had.

Time to find his wading pool.