Ordinary Time

I leave a little too bright and early to fly to New Hampshire for the Equine Assisted Learning training I am leading. I've spent all day either driving children around or trying to get everything I need together. This means you get bugs. Well, to be more precise, you get two insect pictures that K. took recently. Thank goodness for children who provide blog fodder. I return next Wednesday. Will I blog while I'm gone? I have no idea. I suggest you keep your expectations low. Since I am now packed, I'm going to curl up with a book in the hopes it will cause my whirling brain to stop whirling. I really am prepared and just have a few things left to pack that have to wait until tomorrow morning. 

The land of extreme weather would be Illinois if you were curious. The Internet has decided to play nice again, so here is the story I was going to share last night. Over the weekend we decided to go to a Cougar's game on Monday. (That would be the AAA club, Kane County Cougars.) On Sunday when we were ordering tickets, we checked the weather. There was a storm with potential extreme weather (who are we kidding... all storms seem to have extreme weather these days) due to roll through overnight and be gone by mid-morning. We decided to trust the weather report and bought the tickets.  The anticipated storm did not come through. Instead, we woke up to a house whose windows couldn't be seen through due to the amount of condensation from the very warm and extremely humid weather. L. went out to take care of the birds and came back in saying, "I might as well grow gills." Yes, that humid. Not exactly ideal baseball weather. Some rain came through midday (there were tornad...

You'll have to wait until tomorrow for what I was going to write this evening, but because of the storms passing through, I have only been able to upload one photo.  At the Kane County Cougars game before the storm. 

"The solution to the craving for possessions is not to stifle it, but to transfer it to nature and art, there to be embraced. Instead of going to a big box store to buy an object that has stimulated your craving, go into a forest or park, hungry for the natural world displaying itself. You will not be surprised at the store, but nature will startle you and offer you new discoveries. The gift of nature will satisfy more than the expected thrill of a new possession, which may succumb quickly to buyer's remorse and soon fade away. You bring things into your house and hold onto them, but in nature you encounter potent displays of layered richness." (p. 19) from The Cure at Walden Pond by Thomas Moore I find this to be so accurate, both from an experiential point of view as well as a brain science one. We want what we focus on. Having worked in a department store I can tell you that exposure is everything. A dress would come in and we would all think it was so ugly no one woul...

Owning horses often feels as though it is an endless procession of repairs, both to the infrastructure and to the horses themselves. This was the state of one of the stalls this morning.  My money is on Major as the perpetrator because he does like to lean and has quite a bit of body mass to put behind that leaning. J. did some temporary repairs this afternoon and will reinforce everything tomorrow. He keeps wood on hand because he's always needing to repair something, but the supply is dwindling.  That's the infrastructure piece, now into the horses. The ponies are now sporting five poultices on their feet between the two of them. When the farrier was out a few days ago, she found the beginnings of an abscess in one of Buddy's hooves. That's one poultice. Moving on to Vienna, she has them on all four feet. The good news is that the farrier didn't see any damage from her insulin spike which means we caught it and acted in time. But she still has some soreness becaus...

This won't be a terribly eventful post as life has been pretty calm lately. Last week when we were driving to church we came across a helicopter sitting on top of a truck looking as though it was being refueled. It was a very odd sight.  Coming home we heard a helicopter and realized it was crop dusting instead of the small plane we're used to seeing. Suddenly it all made sense... both why we saw a helicopter in what felt to be a very random area and what they were doing with it. It wasn't refueling, but filling the tanks to spray the crops. Basil likes to sit in sinks. The other day as I was coming in from the barn I heard a weird scrambling sound behind the chicken coop. I was worried it was some sort of predator so went to check it out. No, not a predator, but a hen who had been hiding from the sun under an old towel that had been left out. When I disturbed her she poked her head out from under the towel.  When it was so smoky here a week ago, P. shared this picture from...