Nag Snags and other Animal Problems

Jesse called about noon to say she was in Salt Lake City - the first leg of her trip to Hawaii. All was well and she would be emailing me later. I don't know if she will blog from there since her blog is mostly photos.

I babysat the Grand Girls this morning. When I left the house at 8:30 AM, it was about 73 degrees. I stopped at the end of the driveway to let down the fence (more on that in a moment). I had Ranger the Rat Terrier with me (he entertains the girls). Normally when I get out of the car for even a minute with Ranger still inside, I remember to roll a window down or take the key with me. This time, I forgot. I heard the click of the door locks, and looked to see Ranger looking out the window at me with his paw on the door locks. I had to walk back to the house to get a key, which was really no problem other than making me a few minutes late to the GG's. About the time I arrived at the GG's, a cold front blew in sending the temps down into the 60's with the wind howling. Great, I had on capris, short-sleeves, and sandals.

The reason there is a wire up across our entryway is that the horses are still escaping their fenced in area. We have been working on our driveway with building a pipe fence and gate on our to-do list, but at the present time, there is no gate. On Wed. afternoon I looked out the window of the house to see Windy (the mare that is horsin') running across the pasture - free as a bird. She ran to the fence and the neighbor's horses. Our other two horses were still penned. Hmm, how did Windy get out? She must have waded into the pond and gone around the end of the electric fence - smart horse. I caught her and put her back. Then I watched to see if she would escape again and to see how she did it. She seemed content or not sure how she had done it the first time - so I headed back to the house. I no more than got inside when I looked out to see her enter the pond. Rather than go around the end of the electric fence, she swam the entire pond! For those of you who do not know horses, that is unusual. This time our other mare, Snoopa, saw Windy swimming and joined her in the escape. Goldie, Bo's 26 year old roping horse, couldn't stand it. He swam the pond too! That is when I put up a wire across the entry way to our property basically keeping them from wandering out onto the highway. When Toby got home, we worked on the electric fence using it to block off the area in the pond where they were swimming across. It would not keep them from finding another place to cross, but they would have to be pretty smart to do so. It seemed to work well enough. Then at art yesterday afternoon, one of the girls said, "Did you know you have a horse in your backyard?" Only Windy had found her way out. The other two nags were still in the pen. Windy is just a crazy mare these days determined to be with the neighbor's horses. It reminds me of friends who bought a horse named Luna. They thought it was short for Lunar or something nice like that. It turns out that it was short for lunatic.

We will be working on fence this weekend. We may even move "building a gate" to the top of the to-do list here. Yeha.