More comical than anything else, but at least Lily had her ears forward. She was probably expecting a treat at the time.
Author: Elaine
Gift
A friend gave these to me for my birthday, expecting I would be so horrified I would give them back. I don’t imagine, between the UV and the wind, they can last for more than a season.
New saying
Treat an abscess first thing in the morning, and nothing worse will happen to you all day, at least until you have to treat it again in the evening.
Rags, Again
This is beginning to feel like The Year of the Abscess. First, Hap, with the abscess under his jaw caused by a fractured tooth, which took several months to completely heal. Yesterday, the vet came out and opened an abscess which formed where Rags got one of his vaccinations three weeks ago on his butt.
I will spare my readers the details required to care for Rags’ abscess. Horse people will probably already know, and the process has a high ick factor. As far as my personal ick factor scale goes, only eye injuries rate higher.
I was feeling apprehensive when Jack and I went out to treat Rags this morning, after having watched Rags acting almost belligerent with the vet and her assistant yesterday. Fortunately, I suppose the area didn’t feel as sore this morning, because Rags was comparatively well-behaved. I told Jack to let him walk in a small circle, because I didn’t want Rags to feel trapped as I treated him. The abscess is on the near side, and I was able to treat it by standing on the off-side and reaching over, on the theory that if he was inclined to kick, he would kick to the near side.
When Rags had pigeon fever (aka dry land strangles) several years ago, I was able to treat his chest abscesses without help. I doubt I will be able to do that with this abscess, but at least he is cooperative enough that I shouldn’t have to go to Plan B, which involves getting Rags to my trainer’s place, so I have an experienced horse person to help.
Where the bee sucks….
At least the hail didn’t get the columbines.
Surprise!
While I was busy straightening out the maitre’d at the Margarita at Pine Creek that we needed a table for three (for Jack, my mother, and myself) instead of a table for five, I looked over my shoulder and saw my sister and brother-in-law, just flown in from California to help celebrate my fiftieth birthday.
Sky Scape
Breakfast
There were at least four hummingbirds at the feeder this morning. I managed to get this photo of two of them.
Furry Golden Horde
We are hosting my sister-in-law’s dogs, Lily and Lightning, this weekend. They earned the name “The Furry Golden Horde” when they first visited years ago, and actually did constitute a two dog invasion. (After the first visit, I went around muttering for weeks, “She ate my hat. I can’t believe she ate my hat.”) Lily (yes, she has the same name as my mare, but we can usually tell whether we are referring to the horse or the Golden Retriever) no longer destroys things, though she does like to carry soft objects around in her mouth. Lightning likes to bark at the horses, but is otherwise an exemplary Sheltie. The two are getting along with Lody and Mia quite well, and it is very entertaining to watch them try to figure out the hierarchy thing without doing anything so uncivilized as growling.
Kflickr
One drawback of running Linux as a desktop is we frequently lack cool utilities for things like Flickr. However, during a recent search through the Dapper Drake Ubuntu repository I found a slick tool called Kflickr. Kflickr allows you to drag and drop images from konqueror, gthumb or digiKam, and then quickly title, tag and upload them. It is a much quicker process than uploaded through the browser. You can seem some of my photos at my Flickr account.