(More) Advice for Aspiring Horse Owners

The washer can handle one horse blanket, not two.

This spring’s newest challenge: keeping the bird from building a nest in the barn.

You’ll schedule the days you wash your hair based on what chores you’re doing that week.

Some days you learn something that feels really useful but you’re not sure exactly how concerned you need to be. Like today when I learned that every tractor is made with the same key. So it’s quite possible any person with that key can come take your tractor right off your property.

When filling a backup water bucket before a big freeze, make sure you don’t fill it so full you can’t lift it.

Mist is a tough weather phase, when every surface, especially the surfaces that are in covered areas, get impossibly soaked.

Wind is also a weather. It can be beautiful sunny and in the 70s but when the wind blows so hard the house moans, and dust covers the dining table, and you come back inside covered in shavings, hay, and dirt that never quite gets out of your hair without a wash, and the sky is orange, and the air is gritty, and there is an endless drip from your nose, it feels like its own bad weather day.

Any hired help will help with the very specific task you solicited, but they won’t go a step beyond. Like in the case of the giant cactus bush that grows right on the fence line. You’ll be the one to have to rip it out for the fence guy. And, following our previous lesson, you’ll think it will only take a few minutes. Nope. Over an hour.

It’s better to drag and dump the wheelbarrow while the ground is still frozen.

I burst into tears today as I tried to drag the completely full wheelbarrow through inches of slick mud. Heat, snow, ice, hail, tornados, it is always the mud that will break you.

The snow is really beautiful until it’s really not.

“I don’t know.” is a common answer for a lot of things. Is it too warm to blanket tonight? I don’t know. Are they better if their blanket is wet but they are dry underneath? Or are they better without a blanket? I don’t know. Do I need to take their blanket off during the day? I don’t know. Did I get it right? I don’t know.

Took the blankets off during breakfast. Put them back on an hour and a half later. I don’t know.

Two days is about the max to go without running water in the barn. After two days, you really need a working hose.

If you want your life to get easier, don’t buy wood screws made in China and don’t get horses.

Wet socks are something I just cannot tolerate.

When you must do something but there is truly nothing you can do, pull the weeds.

I sometimes buy a new bag of a different kind of feed because someone recommended it or I read some article somewhere or saw some ad which sparked my attention, but then it sits in my garage for a few weeks as I contemplate if I want to actually use it…Still contemplating as I write this.

Gate latches usually need to be lifted slightly in order to open.

Introduce new feed or medicine in the morning so you can keep an eye on any reactions throughout the day.

Keep those random metal clips. They always come in handy.

I washed my saddle pads…and regretted it.

…I learned how to use the Clean Drum setting on my washer.

No task will take “only five minutes.” Even the seemingly simplest thing will somehow, impossibly, take a least 20 minutes.

Taking care of horses by myself can be incredibly lonely.

The number one most frequent question I ask my animals is “What are you doing?!”