Horses and Houses, Oh My!

A log home for sale / Sweetums and Dante in their new pasture.

May 23, 2009

Are you one of those people whose house is always camera ready?

I’m convinced that the house magazines where everything is beautiful, clean, in place, and perfectly staged is to frustrate us.

You probably guessed I’m not one of those people, but yesterday I was getting our home camera ready. We’re putting it on the market, and the Realtors were coming at 3 o’clock to film a virtual tour. Wow, they did a thorough job, were here for two hours. We even hiked up the hill to find a property boundary. A giant seed-baring Douglas fir marked the corner. The Realtor said it was against the law to cut that tree, so I can rest assured that one Grandmother tree is safe. I began at 7:30 in the morning, meant to shower eventually, but figured they were filming the house not me, so I just changed my clothes and stayed down-wind.

Fifteen minutes before they arrived I was praying frantically, “Please God let me fix this railing before they come.”

If you are thinking of buying this house, don’t worry, the railing boards will be replaced. They were gnawed on by Sierra my mustang. I filled the chew marks with wood filler, but it didn’t stain as the package said it would, and I was sure that in a photo they would look as though a Pterodactyl had pooped on them. So I applied make-up. Isn’t that what they do for a photo shoot?

I used some of Daughter D’s craft paint and covered my boo boos.

Now I say, “Don’t walk on the floor, don’t touch anything, just levitate through the house."

We moved Daughter D’s horses a couple of days ago and left the horse trailer in my horse corral, and now Sierra is dismantling that. That horse loves to chew on whatever she can wrap her teeth around—she isn’t a cribber though--just likes to chew on the truck, the railing, the horse trailer. She also loves a cardboard box filled with empty Pepsi bottles. The rattling scares Velvet, but Sierra takes to it like a toddler at the seashore throwing sand.

As I said, we moved Daughter D’s horses out of their soggy bog and down the hill to the neighbor’s pasture. They had been there before until that ground transformed into a bog, so we moved them up here beside our horses. Now that pasture is wonderful, filled with green grass, and not soggy. Moving the horses, however, was like taking an odd number of cannibals and missionaries across the river without one getting eaten—old riddle. First I put my horses in the round pen to make sure they didn’t jump the fence and follow DD’s horses. Then with DD leading Dante, John, our helper, leading Sweetums, and while I carried Baby D, we started our trek down the hill. Soon Dante came galloping past me like a horse aiming for the barn—which he was. Next came Sweetums' thundering hoofbeats zipping past me like a freight train.

Our solution: call husband, ask him bring home the heavy-duty company truck, hook up trailer, and load Dante. Then with DD leading Sweetums, and me carrying Baby D. we trekked down the hill. Success!

Velvet spent the next day calling for them, and she stands there looking longingly at their empty enclosure. Sierra says “Whatever.”

Now I'm off to the redwood store for railing replacements.

Ta! Da!

P.S. Regarding my attempt to hatch chicken eggs—4 days before they were scheduled to hatch, they disappeared down Bear’s throat. (I do believe they were rotten and he didn’t eat baby chicks.)

May 10 Mother’s Day

Baby D's mode of transportation at Disneyland.

“Be yourself," said Oscar Wilde, "everyone else is taken,”

From the Shakespearean gift shop in Ashland Oregon.

It was cold and blustery, a drizzly day in Ashland when the play, The Music Man, sold out its Saturday’s fully integrated performance, (Marian the Librarian was black, and the Music Man’s partner- in-crime was deaf.) People clutched their coats and ran through the water, and waited in line outside the door until we were let into a land of enchantment. What a performance! Daughter D bought the last two seats as a gift for husband and me. What a girl!

“Seventy Six Trombones lead the big parade.” When my husband and I were in college, the movie The Music Man showed at a local theater. After the show we sang down the sidewalk and marched home. (Better than Psycho where we walked down the middle of the street fearful of anything that rattled in the bushes.)


This weekend was the end of Daughter D’s three month maternity leave. She works nights and took Baby D with her. We shared a motel room, with DD and BD sleeping days and us sleeping nights. Husband and I drove to Redding California to look at property. Nope. Drove back exhausted.

I’ve been circumscribing the globe looking for a place to land. From California, to New Mexico’s adobes, to the Arizona’s red rock canyons. We think we found it, and it’s in our own backyard, well almost. It means an hour’s commute for my husband. Now comes the how-to-do-it part, and I’m trying not to freak out. I am though. I’ve been a nervous wreck, and I didn’t want to tell you--since I'm trying to be positive and all.

Here is a book I found but haven’t read. It sounds pertinent though. It is entitled Dread, How Fear and Fantasy Have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to the Avian Flu by Philip Alcabes. According to Alcabes, we are more likely to die in a car accident than from a communicable disease, yet we are more fearful of an epidemic. Our anxieties about epidemics are created not so much by the germ,” says Alcabes, “but from the unknown, the misunderstood.” Alcabes dissects the fascinating story of the imagined epidemics. (Dr. Dean Edell says that 800 people die each week from the common flu, and it is not even recorded, yet if the media uses the word Pandemic, we fly into a tizzy.)

In The Music Man, Harold Hill first creates panic, “There’s a pool table in River City. Are words creeping into your son’s vocabulary? Words like Swell?”

And then he comes up with a solution that benefits him. Hum. Makes you wonder doesn’t it?

Regarding the chicken eggs that are still in the incubator. I don’t know how they are fairing. First the sun shown on them and I thought I had them in a safe place. The temperature might have boiled them. Second, we were gone that weekend in Ashland and I didn’t turn them. On top of that the electricity was off for awhile while we were gone, and maybe they suffered a chill. Did you know that the eggs need turned daily? The mother chicken knows that, I didn’t. The turning is necessary so the yolk doesn’t stick to the side of the shell, for that will kill the embryo. Another piece of information—probably more than you wanted to know—and that is that the eggs need to rest so the large part of the egg is slightly tilted up. The baby chick’s head develops on the large end of the egg, near the air space. Is that the reason for a dish-shaped nest? It tilts the eggs?

Ta Da!
Joyce
P.S. Don’t forget to order my book from www.wishonawhitehorse.com
Another factoid: If an author sells 10,000 books in one weekend it could hit the NY best seller list. If it sells 365 books per week it won’t. Like the movies, they count opening weekends.