For two or three weeks starting the week before Thanksgiving Rion had some very scary symptoms, starting with some infected wounds close to his eyes, and including lethargy, high respirations, and refusing to eat. (Oddly, he kept drinking and never became dehydrated. His blood work wasn’t that far off normal, either.) He had six or seven vet visits in that three week period, ending with a thorough follow-up exam when he didn’t react to any of the palpitations and manipulations.
While I was nursing him, I swore that if he survived, I was going to have the groomer do a full clip, because the long hair of his eyebrows and beard really interfered with medicating his eyes and giving him oral drugs. At the last exam, his vet said that I could take him to the groomers.
It is so much easier to administer his medications now. It’s also easier to clip his nails. I rather like the look, now that I’ve gotten used to it.
Back in August, I decided to start a morning practice of yoga, with the goal of doing at least a little yoga every day. My craft room has enough empty floor space to put out a yoga mat, and a door to keep the dogs from joining me. (Sometimes I let one in, but it’s very hard to do yoga around a dog.)
I’m not sure how I discovered Adriene, a Texas yoga instructor who has a million instructive yoga videos on Youtube, but I decided her 30 Days of Yoga would be a good start. She has several thirty-day programs, recorded in different Januarys, that are sequences that build on one another.
Her style(s) seemed quite similar to the instructor of the small yoga classes I attended in person a couple of years ago. My initial rule was to stick with the whole practice, even if I had to considerably modify things depending on how decrepit I was feeling on a particular day. I was quite pleased at the end of the month because I practiced every day but three. Two of those days involved our trip to Nebraska to see the eclipse.
In September, I changed the rules a bit: if I wasn’t getting into a particular practice, even with modifications, I could quit after fifteen minutes and still consider it a success. I enjoyed the 30 Days of Yoga program so much that I repeated it, and practiced every day in September.
In October, I changed the “rules” again while doing her Yoga Revolution thirty-day program. On days that I didn’t feel like doing the practice from Yoga Revolution, I would switch in one of her other practices. I practiced every day but one in October.
In November, I fell on ice early in the month and my upper back went into a spasm for over a week. I had to find some very easy practices that didn’t involve the neck and back much. I had planned to do the thirty day Yoga Camp program, but have only done a handful. I’ll probably pick those up again in February. So far I’ve practiced every day in November one way or another.
After years of wanting some sort of daily yoga practice, I am very pleased how I am doing now. With a few exceptions, I practice first thing in the morning, before I feed the dogs. I have a much better chance of getting it done before the day starts. I usually finish up with five minutes of chavasana after the practice ends.
After several cold and grumpy days, we are due for some warmer, drier weather. This is our first colorful sunrise in several days, and we can see a cloud in the valley below us.
Bandit and Rion both went to the Bad Place on Saturday. Bandit’s white areas are no longer dingy and Rion’s coat is no longer a magnet for burrs and other debris.
Five years ago, on June 23, 2012, I was reading Twitter when it blew up with reports of the so-called Pyramid Mountain Fire. I walked out of my garage and took this photo. A few hours later it was renamed the Waldo Canyon Fire, notorious as being the most expensive wildfire in Colorado until the Black Forest Fire not quite one year later.
With the decision to euthanize Lily Monday, we had to decide what to do about Rags, a thirty-two-year-old horse who is frail, has very few working teeth, and is suffering from Cushings disease. Originally we decided to have the vet put him down as well, though that decision pretty much gutted us. We knew he would be incredibly stressed by being alone. However, my friend texted me telling me to bring him to her place. She has several other very old horses that she boards. Better yet, Rags lived there for several years before we set up the horse facilities here and knew her three remaining geldings, so he would have a ready-made herd. I told her that I would discuss Rags’ condition with the vet and make the decision then.
After putting Lily down we discussed Rags’ condition with the vet. She was quite supportive, though suggested it might not be a kindness to try to get Rags through another Colorado winter.
Another friend dropped what he was doing to haul Rags to his new home. Although it seemed to take forever to work out the details, I led Rags into our friend’s horse trailer a little after midday. He had been screaming for Lily since we put him back in the main horse field, ignoring food and water. I was afraid he would colic from the stress.
Rags was quite cooperative while loading and rode quietly. (In fact, I knew the trailer was here because Rags does a little happy dance when he sees a trailer pull onto our property.) After a short ride, we installed Rags into the corral where he will live until we can supervise his reintroduction into the gelding herd. The other horses, in an adjacent field, nickered when they saw Rags. He has a small shelter and his own stock tank. He immediately started eating some hay.
This morning I checked my records and we first had horses here in November of 1996. Aside from a few week long gaps due to wildfire evacuations that’s about twenty years.
This morning I did some clean up around the barn before the next rain storm. I couldn’t face doing so yesterday. I inventoried the remaining hay bales and drained the stock tank. My feelings resembled those when I cleaned out my mother’s closets after she died.
