Stuff And Goings-On

Date Night Monday: Kids at my Mom's. Agreeable weather. I'm in what I believe to be full-on PMS zombie mode. Mark takes the bull by the horns (surely you must know by now how much I love cliches) and offers to go horseback riding with me. I am in such a doldrums that all I want to do is crawl in bed, but prior experience tells me riding never fails to help. And also I appreciate the huge effort Mark is making.

So I drag my carcass out to the barn and we saddle up. I especially love riding with Mark, not just because he's my boyfriend, but because he's just as adventurous as I am. He shares with me the childlike silliness that can't resist riding up and down over piles of gravel and through puddles. Admiral is the four-wheeler I won't let Mark buy. (If that makes any sense?)

Our horses came from a horse farm not far from our place. An Appaloosa and Ara Appaloosa farm. Just give me an excuse to drive past its pastures full of multicolored beauties.

Anyway, there is a nice sized farm pond in one of the pastures where Admiral used to live and I was told by one of the boarders there that one cold day, when the pond was frozen over, standing there in the middle of the ice was Admiral. He was dubbed Admiral Pondwalker after that.

He loves water. And true to his Pondwalker name, he was into every puddle we came to on our ride that evening. He splashes with his front hooves and blows bubbles and submerges his face up to his eyeballs whenever possible. He cracked us up.

After that bit of playtime we rode up to Wagners Greenhouse and chatted with them until we were seriously running out of light. And our only path home is through the dark woods. I wasn't too concerned but it did make it more challenging. For the record, I did mention to Mark that the girth was pretty loose on his saddle...

So we headed home on our well worn paths. I'm in the woods fairly often enough to know where all the low hanging branches are located. Whenever I started losing sight of the path, I trusted Nikki to know where she was going. I'd call back a warning to Mark when low branches were coming.

We were nearly to the brighter paths close to home when I called out what was the last low bridge on our route. I lay forward onto Nikki's neck under the branches and walked on. Seconds later I heard a commotion behind me and automatically yelp out "Are you OK? Are you OK?"

When I turned around I could see a shadow of Admiral and a blob of white on the ground: Mark.

Remember that loose girth? Well, while Mark has very good balance in the saddle, and made it most of the way home just fine, leaning off to the side to avoid that tree branch maybe wasn't such a great idea. He forgot about the loose girth and all went tumbling to the side. And it was all made more exciting by the fact that I couldn't see a damn thing to confirm that he was OK. But it was. Except for the bright purple bruise on his thigh, of which he has taken half a dozen photos.

Date Night accomplished? I certainly think so.

******

So speaking of zombies, (apologies for including a dream in a blog post. Is there some sort of etiquette for that?) I had another one of my zombie dreams last night. It's just as likely to be zombies as it is aliens. Either way, in the dream, it is very difficult to discern who is human and who is an imposter.

Finally figured out that zombies and aliens represent something along the lines of PMS or a persistent bad mood I'm trying to shake.

In last night's dream, we humans were holed up in wooden shack of a house, zombies all around. But the twist was that we had one zombie hostage we were using for bargaining power. Makes sense, right?

The man in charge of our group of humans was shouting to the zombies outside in an attempt to negotiate our safety in exchange for their zombie buddy.

Trouble is, we all know how articulate zombies aren't. They're usually just making some guttural moaning groaning noises, right? But our human negotiator had no patience for that nonsense and was insisting that they speak and speak clearly.

And so their voices started to become sharper and even harmonized with one another. Buuuut...it wasn't coming clear into words, they were merely zombie moaning the tune to "Do You Love Me (Now That I Can Dance?)" by The Contours.

Do the Mashed Potato! Can ya do The Twist!

Afraid I can't tell you whether the negotiations were successful or not because I woke myself up thinking how stupid that was.

*****

Then I went downstairs to find that Sam had overslept. He was supposed to be out setting up the market at 7:30. I called in softly to him so I wouldn't startle him, but he jumped about 10 feet in the air anyway. He was so pissed that he accidentally slept in.

Don't you hate when that happens?

*****

We finally got around to the castration process on Sweet Pea the calf. While there are many ways to castrate a bull, in our tiny little operation we just use the rubber band like thingies that make the testicles fall off over a matter of time. No cutting, no crushing, no squeeze chute. Just a warm bottle of milk to bribe and distract him. He had no reaction to the band whatsoever. Good deal.

*****

This is YoYo. The cat previously known as Oreo. We adopted him from a friend when the kids were littler and for some reason they never called him Oreo. Check out the chalk mural all over our basement wall:

YoYo is a giant tuxedo cat. He had a torrid love affair with out dog Penny back in the day. Once, when Copper the Lab Dog was a puppy, he approached YoYo with playful but mindless aggression. The kind of approach that would send any other cat on a mad dash of escape. But not only was YoYo unflappable, he also placed one paw on Copper's head and just held it there performing some sort of hypnotism.

Copper was paralyzed and confused, putty in YoYo's paws. Cat is weird, I tell ya.

But he's also pretty fun. This is the second time the kids have packed him up in an old backpack like a baby in a sling and took him hiking through the woods.

I'm thinking....Appalachian Trail, here we come!