There are a hundred million different ways to train a horse. Natural horsemanship - the idea of working along with the horse's basic instinct, working together (so to speak) to come to a mutual agreement about what you want both of you to do. Sort of. Other ideas point to using a crop and whip to coerce the horse to do what you want, not cruelly, but making the horse understand who is in charge. Another philosophy I found via google involves spending a lot of time nuzzling your horse on the neck. I failed to find anything in the instructions that spoke to loading the horse on a trailer, or crossing streams, but at least I now know the proper way of nuzzling a horse.

The point is, horse training is complicated. It is also one of those skills that I have exactly 0 days of experience with. I ride, not too well, not too terribly. I'm the least horse savvy of the family. So naturally, when I buy a horse, I look for one that's already trained. Enter the newest member of the ranch:



She is an 11 year old mustang. What on earth possessed me to buy a mustang, I may never know, but for better or for worse, here she is.

She's scared of the world. Broke and partly trained, as much as I could get really for the price I was willing to pay, amazingly beautiful with a sweet temperament when it occurs to her. She doesn't kick or bite meanly (she finger nibbles which is a habit we'll have to break). She rears a bit if she gets super mad. She'll be a bit of a work before I have a ranch buddy that can tromp through the pastures with me and chase sheep, but el jefe promises to help me and in the meantime I have a lot of books and online websites to confuse me. And you can rub her nose, which is really the most important part of a horse.

The first of hopefully many summer posts

It's summer time now, and with summer time comes HOT weather and yard sales. We tried to have one of our own. It fell with a dramatic flop. For two days of sitting out in the yard perfecting our tans (or in my case: perfecting my sunburn. Lil'bit tans, I just turn pink), we earned less money than I'd like to report. There was a brief scary point wherein I thought we had lost money altogether, including the runs to the store for cinnamon rolls and my purchase of box of lipton to make iced tea.

A lot of people asked if we were moving. We're not. That was before they left without buying anything. They sweetly apologized for not buying anything, remarking that they didn't see anything they could use.
"Oh I agree. That's why we're selling it," I pointed out.

Apart from yard sales, we have been busy. I've spent most of the week shoveling out the barn and the lean-to in preparation for the horse I'm buying (pictures will follow). I, in true city kid fashion, shoved my mp3 player in my pocket, chock full of Disney songs and belted out songs from Beauty and The Beast at top volume while I shoveled poo. It occurs to me now that there may be a reason why our closest neighbors are moving.

Monday we took some sheep to the butcher, but with this somewhat sad occasion came babies. Chicken Mommy's little bantam hen had been sitting on her eggs for about a month, and three hatched, much to our surprise. They were so cute, and there was a lot of squealing as we discovered them.

That's enough random updating for now. I will prod the rest of my family into updating more regularly. I've been out of town for the past several months, and it's apparently up to me now to motivate everyone. And I promise that there will be more pictures in the next post.