![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Ah, the Glamour!
Apr. 26th, 2004 09:15 pmHere we have a day in the life of the glamourous Lipizzaner breeder--lying around under crystal chandeliers, sipping champagne and nibbling Linzertorte and watching the white horses dance.
Right.
The barn has needed cleaning for a Long time. Years, actually. All sorts of odd bits of things were piled up all over the place. Storage boxes were disintegrating around their contents--plastic decay, horses kicking them or stepping on them, people getting a little too enthusiastic about rummaging through them. There were boxes of things so old they were unusable, and other boxes and buckets of things so dirty they were unidentifiable. And everything was creeping out into the spaces where the horses come and go.
So this morning, after the usual turn horses out-feed and water them all-clean corrals routine, fortified with a big jug of water, I tackled the mess. And tackled it. And tackled it some more.
Took all morning and then some. There's still a pile of very dirty tack and equipment to clean, and I need some more storage boxes. And some tarps. But there is now room to maneuver. And the horses didn't trip over things on their way in for dinner. Most of them just ran on through, but Camilla had to check out the rearranged space, and da Pook (who is her brother, after all) wanted to explore the whole feed area, which had suddenly quadrupled in size.
I am, to put it mildly, knackered. There was also a hay delivery, so there was more raking and sweeping to do, followed by tarping and fortifying--but it was worth it to get two truckloads of bee-YOOtiful bermuda and a few bales of alfalfa so rich the hay guy warned me to go easy on it. I feed it as a supplement anyway, not a staple, so that's OK. And he did all the heaving and stacking--bales run around 100lbs apiece, that's more than I can handle--so I got a break there.
70 bales. Three and a half tons. That's about seven weeks' worth for this crew. Maybe eight, if they all go on summer diets. Forget riding anybody--I done toted too dang many bales.
And tonight, there are still pages to write. A bale of another sort--baleful, one might say.
Right.
The barn has needed cleaning for a Long time. Years, actually. All sorts of odd bits of things were piled up all over the place. Storage boxes were disintegrating around their contents--plastic decay, horses kicking them or stepping on them, people getting a little too enthusiastic about rummaging through them. There were boxes of things so old they were unusable, and other boxes and buckets of things so dirty they were unidentifiable. And everything was creeping out into the spaces where the horses come and go.
So this morning, after the usual turn horses out-feed and water them all-clean corrals routine, fortified with a big jug of water, I tackled the mess. And tackled it. And tackled it some more.
Took all morning and then some. There's still a pile of very dirty tack and equipment to clean, and I need some more storage boxes. And some tarps. But there is now room to maneuver. And the horses didn't trip over things on their way in for dinner. Most of them just ran on through, but Camilla had to check out the rearranged space, and da Pook (who is her brother, after all) wanted to explore the whole feed area, which had suddenly quadrupled in size.
I am, to put it mildly, knackered. There was also a hay delivery, so there was more raking and sweeping to do, followed by tarping and fortifying--but it was worth it to get two truckloads of bee-YOOtiful bermuda and a few bales of alfalfa so rich the hay guy warned me to go easy on it. I feed it as a supplement anyway, not a staple, so that's OK. And he did all the heaving and stacking--bales run around 100lbs apiece, that's more than I can handle--so I got a break there.
70 bales. Three and a half tons. That's about seven weeks' worth for this crew. Maybe eight, if they all go on summer diets. Forget riding anybody--I done toted too dang many bales.
And tonight, there are still pages to write. A bale of another sort--baleful, one might say.
