Jack and Lody

Yesterday, Jack commented that our elderly Collie, Lody, no longer seemed to hear him call when he was ready to leave the horse field after feeding horses in the morning.  While we feed, we allow Lody to wander around the horse field.  Trust me, you don’t want to know why she likes to accompany us.

I responded that she still seems to hear me, though I have to pitch my voice a little higher than my normal speaking tone.  I suggested he try pitching his voice higher when he wanted Lody’s attention. 

So this morning, I heard Jack coo in a squeaky falsetto:  “Lody wanna go feed horses?”  It must have worked, because then I heard Jack coo “Good girl, good girl!” in the same high tone. I don’t think I had ever heard Jack’s falsetto before, though in theory I guess I knew he had one.

It was scary.

Book Burro

I haven’t shilled for the Book Burro Firefox extension recently. Once you install Book Burro, it pops up a little window in the upper left hand side of your window when it detects that you are looking at a book on the web. (I notice it most often when I am looking at Amazon Books. After you tell Book Burro your zip code in the preferences, it will use World Cat to find the closest copy of that book in a public library. If the closest library happens to be your library, you can click on the link and it will allow you to place a hold on the book. (Of course, this assumes that your library is using SIRSI, or some other system World Cat understands.) For bibliophiles who are trying not to spend all their money on books, this is very useful.

Bitter Cold

The high today was 10F. Days like this make me even more grateful for having electricity (to heat the stock tank) and a cold water hydrant in our small barn. It was brutal taking care of horses without either during the blizzards of 1997-1998. We installed electricity to the barn a year or so later, and kept running hoses out to fill the stock tank in the barn for another winter or so. That changed the day I went to water horses one morning when it was significantly below freezing, and I discovered that Jack had not drained the hose properly when he topped off the spa. (It took several hoses to get to the barn from the house hydrant.) Since we had discussed The Proper Draining of Hoses on several previous occasions, I told him I felt it was only fair that he water the horses until such time as we had water to the barn. I think he found the plumbing contractor within a week, and we had water to the barn within two weeks.

On days like this, it helps a lot. Keeping stock watered properly during extended cold snaps is brutal without running water and stock tank heaters.

Mindless

This little Flash program called Grid2 provides some mindless diversion when you start realizing how close we are to Christmas. (Move your mouse cursor over the grid to see how it works.)

The Nightly Feeding

Go to Jack’s weblog to see some photos he took of the horses during the the nightly feeding. Despite the difficulty of taking photos of dark (mainly) horses in the dark, you can determine that we don’t have the usual problem of keeping weight on elderly horses.  (I obsess a bit on the subject:  our first boarder was an elderly, very thin, Thoroughbred gelding named Dugan. I felt like hanging a sign on him:  “This horse gets as much food as is safe for him to eat.”)