Friday, June 25

Today I am grateful for:

A full-on hot summer day. While it really is a little too hot to be comfortable, there is a part of me that is still happy to have a few (hopefully not too many) actually hot days every summer, because sometimes we have crappy wet cold summers that leave you feeling like all you got was a prolonged spring and an early fall.

We are still getting lovely cooler evenings and nights.

I stuck with figuring out how to get the video from doing the obstacle course to work property (be in the right orientation) and jumped through all the hoops to register online with the International Liberty Horse Association so I could enter the virtual show, for basically one class (novice obstacle), but now that I've done it once it should be easier.

That said, I suppose it's good to kind of push my limits, as uncomfortable as I am with that. In order to enter this class I had to first work on the obstacle course all spring, then get a YouTube account, then learn how to download a video, THEN I had to join this association and learn how to register for a class and download a video to them (they only accepted YouTube or Vimeo formats).

Funny how doing work with my horse means pushing my limited computer literacy.

Then there's the odd discomfort of watching a video of myself and River in order to assess our performance. I find it deeply weird to watch a video of myself.

For getting 100 square bales of nice, straight grass hay. It is by no means our winter supply, but I'm making sure I buy from this guy every year because I want more than one hay supplier.

Bale pick up went smoothly and all is well.

I went to see River, and his breathing isn't great in this heat, but otherwise he's okay. Today we worked on the baby Liberty work and I rode him very gently mostly at a walk in the shade, but focused on the quality of his giving at the poll and being soft laterally.

Coming home and managing to let Wonder and the goats and ponies out for a while, and watered the veggie garden.

I'm mentally processing the death of my brother in law. I know I've mentions his illness, and the strange feelings, or lack thereof of his impending death. This man was an abusive, scary man when I was a kid. At some point he was an alcoholic, and at some point he sobered up, but I'm not sure when. My sister L is about 18 years older than I am, and her children are roughly my age. We grew up playing together like siblings, not as aunt and niece and nephew. I would spend some overnights of the summer there, we rode the same bus to school all the way through school, and we were always at each other's house since my sister only lived a few miles from my Mom's farm. My brother in law would come storming into the house from working outside, yelling at everyone, demanding that my sister hurry up and feed him, or make more coffee, or whatever, and I was always afraid of him. Sure, he could also smile and tell jokes, but that was for the adults, not the kids. Even with my sister, he was gruff and was only a little nicer once she had satisfied whatever his current demands of her were. I don't really recall him being all that nice to me as a kid, or if he tried, I probably didn't trust it. I watched him beat the shit out of my nephew with a leather belt on several occasions, and the rest of the time he yelled and raged at him, and mostly told him he was weak and useless and stupid.

I think this is a side of him that no one else in my family saw, or not the really bad stuff, because they were older. I don't think he beat my nephew in front of the older kids or the adults. P forgot that I was an outside witness. Plus I was a girl. I know I went home and told my Mom everything, and she didn't do anything. My sister didn't do anything either. It sucks big time not to be able to protect someone you loved like a brother. I wonder if it was worse when I wasn't there.

My nephew hung himself when he was 15. No one in my family ever laid blame on my brother in law. I do.

My brother in law apparently went through some kind of epiphany and tried to be a better person to my sister and their daughter. I've seen him with his grand daughter who he treated like a little princess. I don't know how to process that shift.

I can't say I tried to spend any real time with him as soon as I didn't have to. He was around for Christmases and such, and he was certainly pleasant and so on. I don't know, maybe he was a changed man, but he never apologized to me, and I don't know what I would have done if he'd tried.

So now he's dead. I'm not going to any kind of service for him, and it's going to be just mostly his wife and daughter and his own surviving siblings. Funny that he didn't want anyone from our side attending, since they treated him well.

Our family posted an obituary on our own family page in Facebook, and people are saying all those nice things we say about dead people. Maybe some of them are true. Maybe he wasn't all bad, but I can't really ever forget what he did to my nephew, and how afraid of him I always was. My niece even seems to have forgiven him, and was saying that "so many people loved and respected my Dad that he could have filled a stadium with people who would have attended his funeral, but his wishes were for a small service".

Isn't it funny, how differently people can perceive the same person. Even my sister E, that I have talked to about how P was, still seemed to think he was a good guy.

I still cry all the time, thinking about my nephew. I still have flashbacks to him screaming and crying while my brother in law held him down and hit him with the belt.

How can anyone just say that's all forgiven? How can he really have been "such a good guy"?



Thursday.

Our friend brought his lawnmowers over, and he and my husband mowed the lawn. Our lawnmower is STILL being repaired.

I felt frustrated because one of our hay suppliers has square hay, and it's cheaper if we can get over there ASAP to hand pick it from the field. That said, our trailer has three big pallets of bricks on it, and I had to move ALL OF THOSE DAMN BRICKS off of the trailer BY HAND to clear off the trailer. I was NOT HAPPY. It took me over two hours to move them all, in the heat too.

I am just tired of having to do hours of manual labor that doesn't result in progress. That's just moving one pile over to another spot.

I cleaned for the family, and that was good. It's barely worth bothering to keep Thursdays open for them, because he's getting very erratic with having me clean. Sometimes it's every other week, this time it was three weeks. It's not that hard cleaning for them, and they're nice people, but it's not easy when you don't know if you're cleaning for them or not. I know though, that if I need to do something else on Thursday, I'll likely not clear my schedule to clean for them if I don't feel like it.

A nice picture.

This is just a nice picture of the hay field where we picked up bales today. How very rural and wholesome of us.