Wildairo gets a new friend.

Saturday was Wildairo's special day. It was the day he started his training on how to be a good ranch horse. The cattle will need to moved into his pasture soon and he has to get used to cattle because I don't want him chasing them. Who better for the job than Dandylyons, the old cow widow.

As we made our way through the cattle, a cow wanted me to meet the calf she gave birth to the day before in the pouring rain.



So we had the naming ceremony; "In the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I name you Rain, daughter of Selma Pointy Horns. Live Long and Prosper"!


Well that made someones day!


And so Dandylyons was turned out to teach a 4 year old mustang the ropes. It was a job that was supposed to be her dear late husband's.


Wildairo seems polite.


They both eat out of Brad's hand.


Levin, daughter of Daisy, granddaughter of #11 our herd founder, wanted to go out too.


Dandylyons takes Wildairo out into the sagebrush.


Wildairo tries to chase her but it's not as much fun as he hoped. She turns 19 on Tuesday and her stampeding days are over.


Soon he discovers they have some thing in common and they decide to hang out.


At dinner time I noticed he wouldn't share his food with her. He put his ears back and for the first time ever I saw her back down. I felt very sorry for her. In the dark I picked up a clump of dirt to chuck at Wildairo in case he needed sorting out..but I don't think it was dirt. lol....

Blondie is in the dog house..again.

Today I took little Blondie, a city dog from Oklahoma, out for a walk along our creek with Bobby to see how she liked walkies in the country. She loved sniffing around and tried her paw at tree climbing.


Bobby went across the creek to go exploring.


She got completely wet.


At first Blondie seemed to be behaving herself because she ran back to me when I called her.


Thinking back, I should have noticed the roguish gleam in her eyes.


And also the way she seemed to be getting more in tune with all things wild.


Right here, this is where she made her break for it!


She dived into the dry irrigation ditch and disappeared. I had no idea which way she went because the tall grasses each side of the ditch turn it into a tunnel. I kept walking back the jeep calling her and hoping she had sense enough to keep me in sight when she could.

Suddenly everything seemed ominous. All around there were danger signs for little dogs. This is coyote poop and it's nothing but fur and bones!


Here's a coyote trail going into the same ditch silly little Blondie is in.


With coyote fur caught on the barbed wire!


This fellow stopped running.


I think it's a deer skull with the nose part chewed off. At first I thought it was a monkey skull then I remembered we don't have monkeys in these here parts. (Step away from the crack pipe).

Anyway..no Blondie. Bobby and I thought we could hear her sometimes in the dried grass below. I called her till I was hoarse. We sat by the jeep and waited. (Bobby said she always thought Blondie was a bitch). After what seemed like a long time I saw her come up for a look around far off in the distance. I yelled my head off and she started to run back across the field to us. She went back into the ditch a few times..there's something about that ditch she loves. In her own sweet time she returned and finally jumped in the jeep. I told her I was never taking her near that ditch again....unless it has water in it. She hates to get her paws even a bit damp, lol.

When I got back to the corrals I gave Echo a really good working over with no dogs allowed. All my singing and dancing around him has paid off, there is nothing I can do to make him jump...unless I touch his hip. So far I've only got as far as his hips with my hands then he squirms away. I'm going to put him in the little tiny pen for his long awaited desensitizing. Not behind the squeeze gate, those days are over, he's a big boy now. There's too much room in the other corrals and he can get away from me if he wants to. Wildairo only stuck around till I ran out of apples, then he shouted out to Echo, "See ya, I wouldn't want to be ya" and disappeared back into the sagebrush.

First calf of the year.

I spotted a new calf in the pasture, the first one born this year. I had to leave Blondie in Tommy's good care for awhile.


The new calf thought he was well hidden behind this sagebrush :)


In my eagerness to take a picture I did a bad thing, it's not a good idea to approach a calf next to a fence because this happens.....


He almost went through and guess who was coming to see him...


I didn't want to find out what Wildairo would do to a new born calf so I beat a hasty retreat and the calf settled back down.

Here's the new mum...notice she doesn't give a hoot.


Before I left the animals in peace I just had to give Echo a bear hug. He tolerates it and doesn't move because he doesn't want to squish my toes. I duck under his head.......


and lock my arms around his neck and give him a cuddle.

Tommy Two Tone's excellent adventure

I sat there looking at Tommy Two Tone and then at Blondie then back to Tommy and I couldn't resist any longer.
Tommy became.......
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Tommy Two Tone the famous cross dressing cat!



"Yes", Tommy says, "the stupid dog came here and I conquered it and now proudly I wear it's skin".

He did some tree climbing....


laughed at old Max having a cat nap in the sun..(probably dreaming he has a tail)...


inspected the chickens.....



and returned home to a hero's welcome

Signs of Spring.

The Golden Current and Honeysuckle are leafing out!



Echo now comes up to the gate to greet visitors! A friend of Brad's was feeding him carrots through the gate. Echo has no fear of strangers!! Brad joked Echo was too scared to turn his back on him. Echo gave me some kisses through the gate and didn't mind when the metal part of his halter hit it and made a noise. He's come a long way.

I have been working with his leading. He does great till we get to the gateway. I've tried approaching it with him as fast I can walk and slowly. The part that makes me mad is I've led him through the gate before and so has Brad. He's rather stubborn and needs a firm hand. This is what I had to deal with today.



If Brad enters the corral behind him he flies through that gate mighty fast. I was working alone today and we worked on 'who's your boss'. We were pretty much fighting for the boss job. I think I won...barely. Since Echo is not so terrified of me anymore, I'm a little more forceful with him and he with me, lol. I was trying to reach for his bad side and he took my hand in his mouth, between his teeth. He didn't bite but I instantly smacked him across the nose with my other hand. He took it calmly because he knew he was naughty and in the wrong.

I think he's passive aggressive. He pretends he wants kisses but he's really holding me off with his nose. We are making progress and he's a really nice horse. He trusts me more now and has a different attitude about people. I really like him. We had an audience.


This is what they were looking at.


Wildairo comes in every now and again when I'm with Echo and he gets apples. It's rather odd, Brad will feed him and he'll take a nibble then go back out into the sagebrush. He would much rather forage out there, even this time of year. The hay is really good so that's not the problem. He does eat all his hay, but just a bit at a time. I think it's the wild horse in him.

Farmer/lumberjack.

Two of the most dangerous jobs are farming and logging. Brad likes to combine the two now and again for an extra bit of excitement..

There are some dead trees or limbs around the place that needed to be cleared up. One tree in particular, a very dead white willow, looked really ugly. I told Brad for Valentines Day I didn't want flowers and stuff, but wanted that tree chopped down. He moaned and groaned at first but soon started enjoying himself when it got dangerous and I was pleading with him not to do it.
That's him up on the old 400. He's standing on the hay fork.


See the kitchen chair he used to shimmy up the hydraulics? lol.


Notice there's a power line going through the middle of the tree. He had to nip away at the tree to avoid pulling the cable down or the bigger limbs hitting the building.

Timber.....a little limb falling away.


We had to stop for awhile because of the heavy rain and so when he pushed the rest of the tree over with his faithful old 400, it was too dark to take photos.

The scariest time he played farmer/logger was when he took down two dead 100+ year cottonwoods. His grandfather planted them in the 1800's and they were huge. He did it all alone and it was very scary for me to watch. He just did the same thing, climbing around, although much higher, sawing off the troublesome limbs then pulled the rest down with a much bigger tractor. I remember the cables kept breaking.

Nice smells.

I think woke up to Spring today because it was such a lovely morning. We have had such a mild winter for once. I think the East coast and England got our snow. So nice not to trudge through deep snow, I wish every Winter was like this.

Outside my Spring bulbs are about an inch above the ground but indoors things are really blooming.


They smell lovely. Speaking of lovely smells.

I took these pictures yesterday of Wildairo. He was out and about the pasture. I called him.


He has such a lovely stride.






His whole head smelling like sagebrush and it was lovely. He's been grazing out in the sagebrush eating the new grass. He looks pretty good. He managed to graze all Winter and I love to see horses living as natural as possible, but I know it's impossible for most horses. Of coarse he gets hay twice a day, grain (when it's very cold), apples and muffin treats. I'm looking forward to seeing the two Mustangs out together. I have to feel very confident they want to be with us and not see us as a threat before I turn them out together. Echo will have to be out on his own for awhile first so I can be sure he can be approached out in the open. They both need some heavy desensitizing first. I find the best way to get horse in on a big pasture is to call them in often and then give them treats or grain. They never know if they are going to get dinner or a job. I started to write about our dear old friend here, but I couldn't do it, it's still too hard to think about him not being here anymore. I miss him so much.

Echo is break dancing.

Shocked at Echo's muddy face, I tried to get a photo of the mess.


Well he didn't like the idea of a camera sneaking up besides him like that and he ran away. Lucky for me he has made a clear little path to his hiding place in the other corral.


Look at the state of him! Fat, fluffy and muddy.


How does he manage to get thick mud under his forelock? I concluded he must be break dancing.


He is easy to catch as long as you make kissing noises and pucker your lips.
Echo puckers his lips right up and plants a big muddy one right on your kisser.




He has a little patch of fur missing from his hip...no skin, just the fluff missing. I was wondering how he did it and thought he must have rolled on a rock. Later Brad was telling me how Echo had been racing around in excitement every morning and would race from one corral to the other and all Brad could see of him was hind feet and tail above the boards. Echo took the corner wrong and lost some fur on the gate post, lol. Brad has cut the richer alfalfa down and both horses seem a little calmer.

My tale of woe.

I haven't been getting out much because I've been out of sorts. Besides my regular incurable disease, I have developed a nasty allergy to something. My face..cheeks..eyes lids and lips have been swelling to gigantic proportions and looking like a hot air balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving parade. I was having a bit of a laugh with it till my throat started to swell shut. I was lazing around going from my death bed to my death lazy-boy and having a good old scratch..kind of like a flea bitten dog, when I realized I was covered in huge hives. Not so funny anymore. So I took a couple anti-histamine pills and they wouldn't go down my throat, they just stayed there. Really not funny now! I noticed fluids could get down so I swallowed some liquid benadryl. Then when I could swallow better, I took some steroids.

The next day I saw my GP who thought it was an allergic reaction to the new poison pills my auto-immune doc had given me. Good thing I'd already had the sense to stop taking them when it first happened... I thought. Problem is my face is still swelling without the anti-histamines and steroids. My over active immune system has declared war on something and I think it's me.


When at the docs, this woman spotted my giant red hives and started telling me about the three people she knew that died from allergic reactions. Scared the hell out of me. Then when we were in the parking lot, Brad told me about his friend's wife who died in the car while his friend was driving her to the hospital..bee sting allergy. I really need to find out what is giving me 'Big Face'. I took some photos of the mess that used to be my face, but they are to graphic to put on here. Don't want to scare children and horses. lol.