Altivo

I got so distracted worrying about Gary's potential root canal (and yes, he's going to have one tomnorrow) and work that I forgot to bring Tess in from the pasture. Gary got her at 6 pm, which means she was out there for over 7 hours today. I've been holding her to no more than 3 hours a day, so this will require watching. Last time this happened, she turned up with grass founder (mild case) the next day and had us worried for a couple of weeks. Went out to look at her in her stall but that's inconclusive. I need to see her walk or run in the open to be sure she's OK.

Work was the usual crazy stuff for a Wednesday. Got a strong compliment on my story in Allasso from a non-furry coworker, which was unexpected.

Now have two ereaders in transit. The replacement Literati is supposed to arrive tomorrow, and the Kobo on Saturday. The library owns a Kindle (boo) and a Nook, so I'll be able to compare all of them.

Now to bed I think.

Sleep deprived, and only part of what should have been done got accomplished. Well, to be fair, yesterday was completely eaten up by the bird counting obligation...

Guild newsletter edited and released. Horses and sheep cared for (with Gary's help.) Groceries for the week shopped. Dinner made and eaten. And the evening and the morning were the seventh day. Tess went out to the pasture only to be brought back in after 90 minutes due to severe thunderstorm warnings and a lot of thunder. She seemed to have gotten the picture on her own and was waiting by the gate for me to get her.

We were not actually in the warned zone, and in fact our official forecast called for no rain this morning. Half an hour after I went and brought Tess back in, it did rain. In fact, it poured. We got about a half inch in 20 minutes or so. Then it stopped and that was the rain for today, though it may still rain before midnight. Who knows? Not me, and certainly not NOAA either.

No,not the former US president. Just another long and draggy Wednesday.

Farrier this morning, horses have pretty feets again.

Colder weather, with frost warning for tomorrow night.

Only 4 hours of work until vacation.

And I'm going to bed.

Snow turning to puddles in one day. The boys had to almost swim to get back into their stalls. Well, no, that's a bit exaggerated. But their water trough overflowed from roof runoff, and there is a deep puddle right outside their doors.

Someone didn't want me to make any desserts because it's Lent and he's trying to lose weight. Now he's unhappy about that. ;p Fortunately there is some cake in the freezer that his sister-in-law made at Christmas.

Tess was antsy with spring fever today but I didn't want to put her out. The wet would be good for her feet, but everything is still snow covered out there, though the snow is slushy. She doesn't really like being out in a snowy pasture, as I well know. She gets very loud and vocal about it.

Not eager to get back to work tomorrow, but no choice. And now it's time to sleep.

No, that's not "Monday with a cold" it's Mudday. I took Tess out to the pasture for the first time this year, since the surface water has subsided after the rapid snow melt and she needs to get her hooves wet anyway. She was delighted, of course, until she realized that there's only freeze dried grass out there and it's a lot tougher than even her regular hay. Anyway, the lane out there through the woodlot is ankle deep mud. When I let her loose inside the gate, she squealed and took off at a full gallop, dollops of mud from her hooves flying through the air like angry crows. You can guess who got hit.

I had a longish "to-do" list for today, arranged by priority, and got almost all of it done. The two bits that failed were applying the charger to the battery for Tess's fence (the battery had ice crystals floating in the electrolyte. Thus not safe to be charging it right now) and airbrushing the first coat on that GP7 locomotive (just ran out of time on that, it was the lowest priority.) Most important were getting dinner into the crockpot, editing and distributing a guild newsletter, and barn chores. Laundry got done too, which is often a high priority but is also the household task I hate most.

I could have completely ignored the "stupid bowl" except that it flooded twitter with inane blathering. No simple way to filter all that out, and I browsed through some 300 twittertwats in order to avoid missing two posts that I really wanted to see. That's a terrible signal to noise ratio.

I figured out how to get rid of the ads that Echofon has started forcing into my client. It was simple really. Back up to the previous version. Version 2.4 of the Firefox add-on apparently introduces the ability to insert pointless random advertising at the head of every timeline. Backed up to 2.3.6 and like magic the irritating ads are gone.

This is not a longterm fix, as I'm sure 2.3.6 will be "incompatible" with some future release of Firefox, if it doesn't die sooner of some irritating and pointless change in the Twitter API. (Remember how Oauth killed so many clients when it became a requirement?) The downgrade does, however, give me some breathing space while I hunt for a better twitter client for Linux. The first few I tried seem not to have been updated for Oauth and therefore are useless today. Qwit looked particularly promising, especially after I installed it on my netbook (Linux Mint Katya) and played with it, but when installed on my desktop machine (Xubuntu Lucid Lynx) it fails. Apparently it needs a newer version of openssl than what is available on Lucid. Twitvim does work, but is too complex to use (at least for me, I'm not into twitter at that level of complication.)

Back on the more usual schedule, day still seems long. But this morning was hoof trimming day, so I got to snuggle all three very fuzzy horses while they had a pedicure. Tess is particularly cute about it, though she sometimes gives the poor guy a hard time by leaning on him. She nibbles and licks at my neck and clothing the whole time. But if she starts leaning too much I put her chin on my shoulder and make her lean the other way. She gets very heavy like that, and I do mean heavy. It's taken all summer but her feet are back to normal after the big lopsided chunk she lost on one of them last spring.

In lieu of cake, Gary made an apricot slump for dessert tonight. It's really good and also very rich so a two inch square of it is all anyone should eat. This is going to last for a few days.

Still raining. Just a constant cold drizzle, though the air is quite warm for December. I'm sure we've had over an inch of rain in the last 24 hours. Had that been snow, it would have been a foot or more, and given the time of year, I think I might prefer the snow.

We got distracted on changing water in the aquariums so I didn't get started on my threading until pretty late. I did another inch then discovered an error back in yesterday's work that will make me undo it all the way back to there to correct. Oh, well, at least I found it now and not when I had the whole warp threaded and came up short of warp threads at the end.

More thunderboomers and water today, but at least it stayed nice and cool. Damper than I'd like, but only up to around 71F.

Farrier coming tomorrow, but I won't see him. Due to Gary's class schedule, I'll be going to work in the morning, coming home in the afternoon, and going back in for the evening. That way the critters get fed on time and someone is here to put them in if the weather goes bad.

Happened to go look at my [dormant for now] DA page and found it has acquired a thousand views while I was neglecting it. There are only nine pictures and a few journal entries on it. Weird.

Some teaser photos from the Boone County Fair today. I could watch the horses all day, but just didn't have time to stay there. Fortunately I was able to time our visit to allow me to catch some of the draft horses in the ring, including the "Ladies' cart, Clydesdale division." Sample photos under cut. I also have a two minute video but I'll upload that from work due to bandwidth issues. (It's 112 MB.)

( Clydesdale photos )

All in all, I took 74 photos of the Clydesdales, Percherons, and a few ponies, plus two videos before running out of space on my memory card. Oops, I hadn't cleared it off for a while.

EDIT: The video is now available on YouTube.

Another scorching day, high humidity, sunny, no wind or rain.

Had a note from a friend (who is older than we are, see, we're not impossibly old yet) asking about the bugs that were bothering her flowers. Her description was clear enough: Japanese beetles. Hard to kill and very prolific as a rule. Gary called to give her that bad news, and learned that she was down an air conditioner because she couldn't get it into the window by herself.

We went over and put it in the window for her and stayed long enough to make sure it was working. Then decided to have dinner out since it was already getting late. So, not much else will get done tonight.

We left the horses out tonight, that's how hot it is. Gave them hay in their yards rather than putting them in their stalls. Tomorrow may be worse, though it looks like it will break a bit after that. Ground is hard and dry, No real rain for nearly a month now.

Oh, I think I mentioned the fact that the foxes had apparently eaten a turtle. Gary showed me the remains of the shell today, and it was an eastern painted turtle. That's a bit of a puzzle, since they usually stick pretty close to water and we have no significant amounts of water now within more than a mile. I could imagine turtles in the Kishwaukee River, but that's too far away for one to have traveled on its own power and ended up on our land. Presumably whoever caught and ate it had carried it here from somewhere else. It was pretty good size too, about seven or eight inches in diameter.

...were the weekend.

Saturday was pleasant. Sunday started to get too steamy for comfort, so in the end we closed the windows and turned on the air. That will make it easier to sleep tonight. Tomorrow is supposed to be downright nasty, probably with an excessive heat alert and maybe an air quality warning too.

Tess was out in the pasture for the longest she has been this year, about four hours. Even though I had sprayed and anointed her with fly stuff, the flies were after her by then and she was eager to come in. We've been over two weeks without any rain now, so the grass is getting tough and dry. Not as tasty and nice I suppose, but a lot safer for her since it now starts to resemble hay. She's still eating it with apparent relish, but I'm not worried about grass founder now until we get enough rain to start some new growth.

Gary's starting to talk about a second dog, as I predicted. He's looking at older golden retrievers, which should be fine. I told him it was up to him, since he will be primary caregiver anyway, but probably we don't want a puppy with teething and chewing issues. Just about any dog over two years old should be fine, and dogs over about six often go begging for new homes, so I'm encouraging him to look in that direction.

As for me, I'm still looking for Simon in all the places he isn't any more. Not seeing ghosts, just not seeing him. This morning in the spot where I would have to be careful to step over him I found instead a dead meadow vole brought in by one of the cats. It was not a suitable substitute, though I did in fact step over it.

DECnet workarounds seem to be stable now, but I still have to fix the last few steps so that they happen automatically at boot time rather than requiring manual intervention on my part. I know how to do that, and Ubuntu's "upstart" system be damned. Since they can't be bothered to adequately map it out and explain it, I can't be bothered to use it. Ubuntu gets dumped next time I upgrade. They had promise, but they're heading off a cliff as far as I'm concerned rather than building a usable future.