Day In The Life – Early Spring
This is the first in a series of Day In The Life posts. I love reading these from other people and have always been a fan of journals and diaries. It’s about as close as you can get to walking a mile in someone else’s shoes. I don’t view myself as an average horse person but if you’re wondering what a day might be like when you have horses and a little land, you might find this interesting. This is a pretty long post so if you’re reading it on the front page of our site, make sure you click the link at the bottom of the post to see the rest.
It was a weekday and as much as I romanticize what life would be like if I earned my living in a horse business, the truth is it’s just a hobby for me. Like many and perhaps most horse people, I have day job that doesn’t involve my hobby. So for the first part of my day I sat at a computer. Sometimes I wear a cowboy hat but my Skype headset doesn’t fit over it so on that day I was hat-less.
At quitting time, I was waiting for my computer to do something and grabbed the book I’ve been reading and read a few more pages. I wasn’t going to mention the name of the book because I don’t want you to get the impression I like girl books but I’ll tell you anyway. Mikki recommended a book called These Is My Words (Nancy Turner, author), an historical fiction and the first in a series of three about a frontier woman in late 19th-century Arizona. Being practically from Arizona and a lover of the history of this era, I picked the book up one day and haven’t yet put the series down. The story is very close to a western and is especially remarkable because it’s based on the real life recollections of the author’s great-grandmother. She fought warring Indians, bandits and the elements while building a cattle ranch and a life in the desert. The stories are written in the form of journal entries. I mention it here because on this day I read a passage where the woman (Sarah Prine) talks about how there is never a lack of work to be done on a ranch, from fences to feeding to repairs and hauling water. Thankfully I didn’t have to haul water by bucket but I was reminded that even on this small property of less than 10 acres, there is a seemingly endless list of things to do and I should get to them.
Before heading outside I decided to change into work clothes. Over the years I’ve skipped this step a few times and that laziness has cost me many pairs of jeans and shoes and a few shirts as well. I have a whole collection of clothes that I try not to wear off the farm, even though the smell of horse manure isn’t uncommon in these parts. I talked about how the barn claims our clothes way back in 2006 and I guess I’ve actually learned something since then. …