Mikki

Getting Out of Barn Duties

December 21, 2006 Mikki Comments 0 Comment

In bed — *Photo by Vishal Shanto on Unsplash*

Poor Bill. Little did he know that buying a horse for me would mean so much work for him. In the 9 months we’ve had Valentine, he has had to take over barn duties for more than one day five times. I’ve had to do it on my own only three times, each time for one day when he traveled on business. So if you’re tired of barn duties and want a break, here are some good ways to do it:

Get sick. I had a really bad allergy attack in March that I thought was a cold. Then I really did have a cold at the beginning of this month, right after a week of what was probably bronchitis. That’s three times I was laid up right there.

Travel. Bill only goes for a day or two, but I was gone for 9 days. I really do feel bad about that. But he’ll be gone for over a week in January, so he’ll get some of that back.

Injure yourself. On Monday afternoon, I had an unfortunate accident with a kitchen knife. No stitches, thank goodness, but it will take a while to heal all the way and it was, of course, my right hand. I was able to muck out the stall last night (only two nights off), but I was really slow.

Actually, I don’t really advocate any of these methods. Except for the travel, they’re not that fun. And I missed my horses while I was gone, so going away isn’t all that great, either.

Bribery, on the other hand, isn’t too bad.

Christmas Gifts for Our Youngest Horse Fan

December 17, 2006 Mikki Comments 0 Comment

It still hasn’t really sunk in, but we are grandparents – even though the little guy is two years old now. His daddy was a car fanatic when he was a kid, but suddenly he has become horse crazy. They have neighbors who have horses, and he and Jordan spend a lot of time there. Apparently, Jordan loves horses even more than his daddy! I’m really happy about this, and can’t wait to have them all come visit and see our horses (they still live in Arizona). In the meantime, though, it sure made Christmas shopping for Jordan easy this year!

Jordan got cowboy boots for his birthday this year, so I thought, all he needs is a hat! Unfortunately, as I’ve probably mentioned, we live in the middle of nowhere. So I had to put my trust in Google. There are a lot of kids’ hats out there, but not so many for toddlers. After what seemed like hours of searching, I hit the baby cowboy motherlode. It’s a little site called Small in the Saddle. Not only did I find a hat, I found a NICE hat. It came in the mail today, and it is nicer than I could have hoped. Hopefully it will fit him for a while:

They have more than hats, though. They have clothes and toys and accessories and all kinds of stuff! I had to really control myself because after all, Jordan’s mom & dad might want a gift too. But I did find a nice tactile book:

And this adorable shirt:

Shhh…don’t tell Jordan!

Horse Sayings

December 12, 2006 Mikki Comments 37 comments

It didn’t occur to me until we owned a horse just how many times we use common horse sayings. I’m amazed how common these saying are, even though they seem to have origins many years ago before the automobile was common. I’m sure I’m forgetting some good ones but these are really funny to me now that we have horses:

“Hold your horses!”
“Get off your high horse.”
“Hey, your barn door is open.”
“That’s like putting the cart before the horse.”
“Aw, blow it out your nose” (applies to multiple animals, I know)
“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” (my non-gift horse would prefer I not look in her mouth either)
“He’s got horse sense” (Is this a compliment or an insult?)
“I got it straight from the horse’s mouth” (Ick!)
“…a horse of a different color” (you know “brown” isn’t really a horse color, right?)
“Hey!” (trust me, it’s funny up to 30 times a day when you work with hay all the time.)

and my favorite:

“Why the long face?”

Can you think of any more?

Horses, Fire and a Wood Barn

December 9, 2006 Mikki Comments 2 comments

As you all may know, we moved to the southeast from Arizona. In Arizona, fire is very, very scary. Setting a fire in your backyard and leaving it to burn is a major no-no. Here, it’s no big deal. We have an empty field across the street from our property, and the owner has spent many months clearing it. He chops down a bunch of trees, mows down weeds and sets whatever’s left on fire. Then he just leaves. No big deal. He did this shortly after we moved here, and believe me, Bill and I were fit to be tied. We let it go until it was a few yards from our other neighbor’s house, then put it out ourselves. I’m sure the natives are still giggling over that one.

Anyway, someone not too far from here is burning a big pile of something tonight. Either that or a house is on fire and no one has noticed yet. Our house smells like a casino (cigarette smoke, for those of you have never been to a casino), and there’s a haze of smoke all around. You can see a glow over one of the hills just east of here. The horses are pretty freaked out, and we’re concerned ourselves. Especially since we just locked our horses in a barn made entirely of wood.

Unfortunately, we can’t stay up all night to watch in case the fire makes it all the way over here. Normally, we might try it, but we have to take The Kid to school early in the morning, Bill is pretty sick with a cold and I’m still recovering from some other bug I caught last week. But as a precaution, rather than leave the horses’ halters and lead ropes in the tack room like we usually do, we brought them down here to the house with us. That way, just in case something were to happen, we have halters ready. We really should do that all the time, and if we had more storage here, we would. But there’s simply no space. We have a mudroom planned, though, and that would be a great place to keep a couple of emergency halters. As I’ve mentioned before, a lot of people keep a halter hanging outside the stall door for emergencies, but we’re too paranoid for that. It feels too much like leaving the keys in the car.

So that’s our emergency plan, such that it is. It’s kind of a short-term plan, but we really need to have an emergency plan in place, and so should you. In our case, we need to worry about fire, tornado or nuclear fallout. Think about what might happen (even a remote possibility) and plan accordingly.

As usual, more on that later. For now, we have the teeny-tiny chance that the fire that may or may not still be burning a half-mile away could possibly spread to our barn covered. Whew.

When Bonding Goes Bad

November 15, 2006 Mikki Comments 1 comment

We were letting the horses in for the night. Bill manned the big outside gate, and I held the stall door in the middle of the barn. As Valentine went by, I lovingly rested my head on his side. Sigh. He ambled by and I inhaled the warm, horsey scent and felt the velvety softness of his new winter coat swish softly over my cheek as he drifted past until WHACK! His hip bone clocked me in the head.

Bonding over.

Reminiscing About Horses and Hot Wire

November 14, 2006 Mikki Comments 3 comments

Painted ponies Just a funny little story that I like to tell about my childhood.

I grew up in the boonies of western Arizona. A lot of my friends had horses, and frankly, I was friends with a couple of them only because they had horses. One of them, Dean, was actually a bully who liked to pick on my younger brother. I was conflicted when I hung out with him, because I loved my brother, but Dean was always nice to me, and heck, he had a horse!

So one day when I was about 10 or 11, we were taking turns riding Dean’s horse in a round pen. It was Dean’s turn, and I was standing against the fence inside the ring. Just as he rode by, I reached out and patted the horse’s rump. By a curious (and completely accidental) coincidence, I also reached behind me at the same time to lean on the fence. As luck would have it, the round pen was ringed with electric fence, what we called hot wire. That’s what I grabbed. The jolt went through me, through the horse, right to Dean. Horse bucked, Dean fell off (he was riding bareback). He was mad, I was sorry…

But man, that was darn funny. My brother thought so too.

Love Bites, Horse Style

November 13, 2006 Mikki Comments 2 comments

Someone recently commented on Bill’s post about our horses trying to eat our fingers, and it occurred to me that I really ought to address the issue of horse bites.

Yes, horses do bite; some more than others. Usually, it’s a natural part of horse behavior. Horses have various ways of communicating, and biting each other is a big part of that – from friendly “nips” to show love, to more insistent bites to get another horse to move, to actual biting in an aggressive way. Horses can hurt each other pretty badly this way (always be careful when introducing horses to each other – yet another future post topic), but usually the bites are light enough that they don’t do any serious damage.

It’s a different story, however, when a horse bites a human. Our skin isn’t nearly as tough as horsehide, and I can tell you from personal experience that horse bites hurt. Now, horses bite humans for pretty much the same reasons that they bite each other. We are, after all, part of their herd, and they need to communicate with us too. They will nip you in a friendly way to say “hi.” They will nip you if you’re standing somewhere they don’t want you to stand to politely ask you to move. They will nip in anger or to show you they’re the boss. As you can guess, this natural behavior is another way that they can unwittingly hurt us simply because they are so much bigger and more powerful. So naturally, you need to discourage that behavior.

As we have been reminded in comments to our post referenced above, horses will also bite you if you habitually feed them treats by hand. We do indeed feed apples, carrots and other treats to our horses by hand, but this is strongly discouraged by most people. There are a couple of reasons for this: one, their aim isn’t all that good and they will accidentally suck in fingers or even a whole hand with their treat. Two, once the threat is gone, they may not realize it because your hand still smells like the treat or they just expect it to be there. Three, even if your hand didn’t recently hold a treat, if you usually offer one when you greet them and didn’t bring one this time, they may just take a bite anyway. So the best advice is to feed all treats out of a bucket. That’s an easy way to prevent injury and bad habits.

So, if your horse already has the bad habit of nipping you, what do you do? Valentine was quite the nipper when we got him. I don’t think he ever meant it in a mean way; all his bites were gentle, “friendly” bites – that unfortunately left me with not-so-friendly bruises. Old-timers we talked to advocate smacking the horse when he bites you, but I personally cannot hit my horses. I yelled “No!” in a loud, firm voice and spread my arms out wide – the idea is to make yourself seem bigger. Valentine startled each time and backed up. I think that was just the reaction he needed to have. It showed that he recognized me as the boss and that he shouldn’t do whatever he just did. It worked – he hasn’t nipped me in months.

The key though, as with any bad behavior, is to not let it go on. Nip it in the bud, so to speak.

Maybe He Won One of Those Fancy Rose Garlands Once?

November 11, 2006 Mikki Comments 0 Comment

Rose We walked away from the barn the other day and looked back to see my horse with his head all the way over a low part of the pasture fence…eating a rose bush. There are no blooms on this particular bush, so he was just eating the leaves and thorny stems. Why? I don’t know. I did a quick search on the Internet to make sure rosebushes are not poisonous to horses, and it appears that they are not. I’m sure they’re not all that good for them, but apparently won’t hurt them.

Bill’s horse has a thing for wood – she chews on her stall door and the fence – so I told him, my horse thinks he’s a burro and yours thinks she’s a beaver.

That reminds me, we need to discuss bad horse habits. Maybe for the next post!

Becoming a Horse Person

November 2, 2006 Mikki Comments 4 comments

If you’ve followed this blog from the beginning or skimmed over previous posts, you know that we moved to a small Tennessee town from the big city (Phoenix, Arizona) a year ago. Bill and I both grew up in small towns, but we had lived in cities for a very long time – 20 years for me. That’s long enough to become pretty “citified.” Now, I’m not your typical girl. I don’t mind getting my hands dirty, my hair and makeup are not always perfect, and I’m no Martha Stewart around the house. But we had pretty comfortable, civilized lives and our house was a pretty typical city house. But all that has changed.

It started with the acquisition of “barn shoes.” If you have a horse, you have to have barn shoes and barn clothes, because stuff is going to get on them that looks bad, smells bad and probably won’t ever come off.

The next thing you notice is the creeping invasion of “horse stuff” into your life and your house. A new halter will hang on a dining room chair until you remember to take it up to the tack room. Saddle blankets make it to your laundry room. Horse medicines sit out on your kitchen counter. A few weeks ago, I had a bit drying in my dish rack. You don’t notice it happening until it’s too late.

And then the decor you swore would never be seen in your house appears. I just had a birthday (29 again, of course), and a dear friend gave me the most wonderful gift:

Now, here’s my dilemma. This cool sign doesn’t fit with my current decor. I don’t have a big enough house to have a “horse room.” But I’m not sure the sign would survive the weather in the tack room. So, is a horse-and-pony bedroom set far behind?

Only time will tell. But we’re definitely becoming horse people. And I think that’s a good thing to be.

Christmas is Coming!

October 28, 2006 Mikki Comments 0 Comment

But why wait? Bill found a really great site and he made the mistake of sending me the link. It’s called Cafe Press and they have a really neat concept. You find a design you like (they have over 23,500 designs for “horse lovers!”) and put it on a choice of items, such as T-shirts, hoodies, coffee cups, tote bags, calendars, journals, clocks, ornaments – dozens of choices that vary with the design you choose. Their prices are reasonable and the designs are just great. Some are beautiful, some are funky, some are witty. I like the witty ones myself, such as “I do my own stunts” with a cartoon silhouette of a rider thrown from his horse (see below). These were also my favorites, although I certainly haven’t viewed all 23,500 – yet:

“All I Need to Know In Life I Learned from My Horse” (you have to read that one)

“If this shirt is clean I haven’t been to the barn yet”

“Horses are only afraid of two things – things that move, and things that don’t.”

“Thank you for flying Air Amateur…” (you have to read that one too!)

“I’m being raised in a barn” (for kids, of course – or not)

And my personal favorite (click for products with this image):

Good advice, there!

And here is Bill’s favorite (click for products with this image):

Bill: “I have been there! It’s funny because it’s true. I’ll write about my stunt incident sometime soon.”

What’s your favorite? Happy shopping!

Our First Horse

A family's experience with first-time horse ownership, since 2006.

Browsed by
Author: Mikki