Horse Lifestyle – Page 8 – Our First Horse

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?

Horse Christmas Stockings?

December 8, 2006 Bill Comments 0 Comment

We’re animal people. We snuggle with our dogs at night and hug our horses when they come in at night. Every Christmas it’s always been a tradition of ours to have a Christmas stocking for each of our dogs. Inside we…I mean Santa…puts doggie treats, maybe a new collar, etc. This is our first Christmas with our horses and I’m wondering what to do for Valentine and Moonshine. Maybe we should buy two of those giant stockings and fill them with horse goodies. We could stuff them with Stud Muffins, peppermint treats, new grooming combs, his and her horse Santa hats and Tractor Supply gift cards!

Salutory Horse Gas?

November 30, 2006 Bill Comments 0 Comment

Okay, I was going to say “horse farts” but it just seemed uncivilized. Both of our horses have what I would consider a peculiar habit. Each time we let them in the barn they lift their tails and pass gas as they walk by us. What is THAT all about? Is this some kind of horse greeting I’m just supposed to know about or are they trying to insult me? I’m sure “horse gas” is what I’m smelling too because I can hear it escaping as they walk passed me. If you’re offended by horse gas, stop reading now, as it only gets worse. I remember reading something about the ozone layer and how methane from cow gas was causing measurable damage to the atmosphere. I’m not surprised if that’s true because my 1,000-pound horse can almost cause me to lose consciousness. I no longer wonder about the cause of all the barn fires in the olden days. Farmers used lanterns with flames! What were they thinking? It’s a wonder we don’t hear more about EXPLOSIONS in the barns of yesteryear with all that methane floating around.

But seriously, they don’t seem gassy (is that a word?) all the time we’re around them, just when we let them in for oats at night. I suppose it has something to do with the grass they’re eating during the day out in the pasture. Or maybe my neighbors are playing a joke on us by feeding our horses burritos. Haha, funny, I get it. Please stop now.

Note to self – let horses in early when romantic evenings are planned.

An update on The Kid

November 26, 2006 Bill Comments 3 comments

Y’all know we have a 10-year-old son we call “The Kid” in these parts. Well, we had hoped he’d take to the horses more than he has and would write some posts here and there. It hasn’t happened. Yet. We haven’t given up hope but he’s not showing much interest. Mikki and I can’t really understand this since we would have both LOVED to have had a horse at his age, but as I mentioned before, he’s more of an “indoors” kid. I think if he was to ride a horse he’d get into them more, but our two horses are both pretty spirited and I’m not sure I’m ready for him to ride either of them yet. We’ve toyed with the idea of buying him his own horse but I refuse to buy him something I’m not convinced he’ll take care of and we don’t need any more pasture ornaments!

I’d love to hear from some of you who have kids who aren’t into horses as much as you. Have you had any luck forcing them to be interested :-)?

We need a carriage

November 25, 2006 Bill Comments 0 Comment

We went to a small town Christmas event tonight and one of the prominent attractions was horse-drawn carriage rides, as well as hayrides. We paid $6, stood in line and boarded a small, white one-horse carriage for a ride down Main Street. It was awesome. Clack, clack, clack as we rode past merrymakers, Christmas displays and antique stores with awnings covered with fake snow. Ah, Christmas. Despite a temperature of around 75 here today, it really felt like Christmas after dark in this little town.

Oh, and the carriage. How cool would that be? We recently saw one advertised in the local classifieds for $1,000. I wonder how much use we’d get out of it. We could be in the Christmas parade and load up for an old-fashioned ride over to a friends house nearby (also horse lovers). And this way we could all go, even though there are 3 of us and only two horses. We’d have to get a one-horse carriage though. Valentine is so much bigger than Moonshine, they’d surely be out of sync. Oh well, it’s an idea we’ll toss around until some money comes our way.

A fun little side note – there is a carriage maker at Dollywood that really make real horse carriages the old fashioned way – by hand.

900 pounds of horse manure!

November 20, 2006 Bill Comments 4 comments

It all began with me wondering how much horse manure I shovel each day. So armed with a fish scale (a scale with a handle and a hook used for weighing fish), I filled a few buckets with manure tonight, subtracted the weight of the bucket and discovered that I shovel around 30 pounds of horse manure daily for my 1,000-pound horse, Moonshine. Tomorrow I’ll measure our 1,200-pound horse, Valentine. So just for fun, here are some other measurements to help put things into perspective. Remember, this is for my horse Moonshine only:

Output (manure only)

30 lbs. daily
900 lbs. monthly (almost half a ton)
10,950 lbs. annually (almost 5.5 tons)

*note: this is manure that’s about half a day old. As it dries, I’d guess the weight drops dramatically. Also note this only covers manure inside her stall, where she spends 8-10 hours a day.

Input (food and water)

80 lbs. water daily (10 gallons) or 29,200 lbs. annually (3,650 gallons/14.6 tons)
10 lbs. hay daily or 3,650 lbs. annually (almost 2 tons)
1.5 lbs. oats daily or 548 lbs. annually

*note: hay figure does not include hay fed in pasture. Grazing on grass not included. Does include water consumed in pasture.

Wow, so I’m shoveling about 5.5 tons a year in manure. Horse chores provide good exercise! As my biceps grow I’m looking forward to answering the question “wow, what’s your secret?” with “horse manure!”.

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.

1:30 AM Stall Mucking

November 11, 2006 Bill Comments 2 comments

Moon — *Photo by Ganapathy Kumar on Unsplash*

Mikki and are night people. We prefer staying up late and getting up later. Fridays are the worst days to try and resist this tendency because most of the time we don’t have to get up early on Saturday. So here we were 10 minutes ago in the middle of the night diligently cleaning horse stalls. And it occurs to me…what the heck are we doing? It’s the middle of the night, most of the eastern time zone is in bed and here we are mucking horse stalls. That’s some kind of crazy. We mentioned to a friend recently if she ever finds she can’t get to sleep around 2 AM and needs some company, head over to our barn. We’re bound to be there. Any other night time stall cleaners out there?

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.

Our First Horse

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

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