Friday, August 28

[gottawonder]

Today I am grateful for:

Meeting the vet out at the riding barn, and she agreed that his breathing was likely from dusty hay rather than an infection, but alas it does mean taking him home and treating him for a while because the barn owner doesn't offer help with medication, and I cannot drive twice a day to the barn 12 hours apart to treat him.

The hay does look better in his pen, but I don't know if he would recover on his own without meds.

I was disappointed but not surprised at the barn owner's snarky remarks when I told her I was taking River home to treat him (at no loss of revenue to her). She basically made it sound like I was being a pansy for taking him home to treat him, and that he "would be fine in a few days on the better hay". Well, maybe, maybe not. She also told me a week ago that he would be fine in a few days, and I DID wait for a while before getting a vet out. It's really not fair to River to keep "just seeing how he does", and in the meantime I can't ride him either. I'm grateful that...it wasn't worse, I guess?

My sweetie helped me use the weed whacker to take down some long grass in a small corral that we'll use for River, and rake it up and get it out of there. I don't want him to have access to too much grass when he's used to mostly hay, and I hope we got rid of enough of it.

Getting him loaded and trailered home. He wasn't very interested in loading. He wasn't last time either, and it SUCKS to fight with a horse who doesn't want to get on a trailer. He's not afraid of the trailer, because once he decides to get in, he's fine. He just doesn't want to go in there. So, it was a lot of me circling him around and around, trying not to get him worked up, but not letting him rest except when he approached the entrance. Finally he got on, and then he was fine. It sucks that he can be like this, but the up side is that I was less freaked out than last time he did this, and I didn't buy into his drama. I knew that if I just stuck to it he would load, like last time. I'm thinking I might need to spend some time with him at home just working on loading, and see if we can cut down on the drama.

Earlier in the day my sweetie went to town on his own and got his hair cut (hard for him to find the time to do this, and his hair grows quickly), and ran some errands and picked up groceries.

What sucks is that the same guy at the Co-op who let us down about the house drawings and wasted a lot of our time, has also let us down because he was supposed to order trusses for us, BUT DIDN'T DO IT because he "still had some questions". My sweetie ordered those trusses weeks ago, but this guy didn't call us for clarification or anything, he just didn't order them. The good thing, is that my sweetie just went to the company that makes the trusses directly, and made the order, thus saving the mark-up through the Co-op. Why didn't we just do that before? I guess because my sweetie thought the Co-op was doing the drawings for us? So, apparently the Co-op is basically useless, and has wasted a TON of our time this summer.

I am grateful that we are generally resourceful and capable people, because it's been such a long stretch of events that keep demanding so much of us.