Good Friday morning y’all! I cannot believe we are into the double digits dates of August! Soon school will be starting around here and traffic will be bad and the weather will start cooling off and all that comes with the change of seasons.

I’m trying to let myself enjoy the cooler temps we are having right now, but I’m having a hard time not being bitter about the lack of rain. We have been surrounded by rain clouds for a couple days and seen a lot of lightening and even some rainbows. But no rain.

When it gets warm, Tuffy gets in the water trough to cool off. This always cracks me up and it makes him SO happy!

Quila is a saint about letting the puppies climb on her. Some of the tan ones look a lot like her, so she’s extra cute with her doppelgangers!

This is Jackie, she is our newest foster. She had been in the Joshua shelter since about April. They had gotten to the point that where going to have to euthanize dogs to make room for all the new ones coming in the door, so we offered to foster her. She is a DELIGHTFUL little dog! Only about 27lb with lots of love and energy. We are smitten.

PLAY PLAY PLAY PLAY PLAY PLAY PLAY PLAY PLAY PLAY PLAY ……………………………….. pass out. That is the theme of Dickens. He adores playing with Jackie!

Simon is lame right now with an apparent stifle injury (WTF, Simon!) and since Sterling is gone Coco is getting ALL the love! And it appears to make her very sleepy.

And speaking of Sterling, things seem to be going OK with his kid. Do you see his happy eyes? I think he REALLY loves his kid! I’m the proudest horse Mom this side of the Mississippi!

I’ll be spending the weekend wishing, hoping, praying, begging, and doing whatever else I can try to encourage the rain to fall!

I love my vet, but man am I tired of seeing and talking to him! Sterling is MUCH improved and I should be able to start riding him again early next week. THANK GOODNESS! Next up is to “fix” Coco. I think she is having mare issues, but vet wanted to rule out lameness so we finish that experiment this weekend and I feel pretty strongly will address hormones next. Good times. Thank you Simon and Jaguar for being “normal” as of late. Keep up the good work!

I feel like every Farm Friday will feature a photo of Patches sitting on one of our other dogs until she gets adopted. If you like chihuahuas you should totally adopt her. She is the sweetest, funniest little dog EVER!

Dear Murtagh,
Don’t sunbath in the stall with the horse most likely to try to kill you.
Love,
Your family

Simon is getting lots of rides right now since he is pretty much the only horse I can ride. He is still cool as a cucumber 95% of the time. LOVE this OTTB!

Bunny participated in our pursuit to give the vets as much of our money as possible this month. We thought she had a rotten tooth, but turns out it was just a random abscess. She did get her teeth cleaned and a few removed, but the abscess was likely from a spider bite or something like that. It popped on the outside and is oozy now. Super gross.

I’m excited for a fun weekend with my girlfriends. I hope your weekend is wonderful and if you are in the great white north that your snow starts melting! Spring starts next week!

Happy Friday y’all! It is COLD here in Texas! It was in the 20’s overnight, but thankfully should be getting in the 40’s today. Life is much easier when it gets above freezing during the day. Much time is being spent blanketing and unblanketing horses, hauling hay, turning heaters on and off. All things I never had to do in Montana! The irony! As I write this it is -2F in my hometown.

Pablo the nuzzler. He’s such a weirdo!

Pablo’s left front foot has been sore for the past few weeks and when his feet hurt he WILL NOT let me catch him. I guess he knows I want to mess with the hurt foot and he just isn’t into that. I feel like a bad donkey parent, but I also don’t want to wrangle a donkey. Now that the ground has dried up he seems sound again. And now that he’s sound he is super snuggly. He likes to stand behind me and rest his chin on my shoulder, then ever so slowly he starts nuzzling my coat, hat and ear before he tries to bite. This donkey. He should write a book about himself.

Murtagh the cat and Dickens the Whippet are best buds. Murtagh LOVES to play with the sighthounds and often can be heard terrorizing them in the middle of the night.

I was trying to snap a photo of Samson in the snowflakes that we had for about 45 minutes yesterday, but he was not into the photo op!

Super hairy ponies have to be the cutest thing ever! Samson is still difficult to catch in the field, but he loves to come in the barn to steal hay and is easy peasy to catch then. He desperately wants to be with the big horses, but the one time we tried that Sterling chased him endlessly to the point I was worried about Samson. We will try it again one of these weekends and let Samson out with a smaller group of the big horses. He has been out with Jaguar once and that went really well. Jaguar ignored him the whole time.

These two are non-stop wrestlers!

I hope everyone has a fantastic weekend!

Happy Fri-YAY! Texas keeps teasing us with fall-like weather, then slaps us across the face with temps in the 90’s. I need to just enjoy the nice weather and appreciate sunlight to ride after work and not having to blanket horses. My least favorite thing about winter is the short days that make it nearly impossible to get rides in after work.

This week has been moderately eventful at the farm. We finally got a handyman/contractor out to give us a bid on doing some outside repairs on the house. Boot City had started some of the repairs, then quickly realized a carpenter he is not! Now we have brown spots on the ceiling in the kitchen from rain getting into the attic where the repairs were started. Oops! Fingers crossed that next year is THE year for a total renovation inside the house.

This isn’t the best photograph, but I had to memorialize Jaguar’s molting chicken friend. This chicken has commandeered Jaguar’s water buckets as her nightly perch for over a week. She is molting (shedding old and growing new feathers) so she looks ridiculous. Every night Jaguar munches on his hay while she poops in his water.

Don’t worry. He has a second water bucket (with water in it) that she doesn’t perch on and poop in.

Jaguar and his molting chicken bestie.

Now that Sterling is back in action Coco isn’t getting as many rides during the week, but she is still progressing nicely. She has an appointment with an equine acupuncturist next week that I’m looking forward to getting some answers about her back soreness. When I brush her back from her left side she kicks at me with her left hind foot. She may be just being sassy, but I think it is only fair to her to see if there is an actual issue. The acupuncturist is also a veterinarian and chiropractor so is highly qualified for the task. Sterling does a similar thing so I will probably have him looked at, too.

Coco being Coco

Dickens had a BIG day this week. He had brain surgery! Not actual brain surgery, he got neutered. Up until about 2 weeks ago he was the easiest puppy in the whole wide world. Then, for no apparent reason, he started marking spots in the house and going wandering to the neighbors’ properties. We figured this was the universe telling us that it was time for his family jewels to be removed. The breeder recommended waiting until he was at least a year old to have him neutered because the hormones help them grow stronger bones and be overall healthier. He turned 1 in early September so the timing was right. He is still sore and I think he generally hates us right now, but he’ll be back in action with his beerhound besties in just a couple weeks.

Dickens the goober Whippet.

I had a really sappy moment earlier in the week reminiscing about some of the fun things Jaguar and I have done together over the years and got mad at myself for taking him for granted now that he’s an old man. I went out to his stall super late (like 1a, which is crazy late for me) to just give him a hug. He looked at me like I was nuts and was absolutely insulted that I hadn’t brought any treats for him. Reason number 4,086 that I love him!

“Hi Mom. I will bite your noggin because I LOVE you!”

Boot City and I love dogs. We REALLY love dogs. This past summer I was able to talk Boot City into fostering dogs for the Fort Worth Animal Shelter. The way it works is you identify a dog that you’re interested in fostering, confirm it is eligible for fostering (some dogs have major health issues that need more funds to treat and are only eligible to be adopted or rescued) then pick up the dog and take it home. The Fort Worth shelter works with a few are PetSmart locations to find dogs new homes. Fosters can drop off their foster dog for the day to stay at a PetSmart and potentially find a new family. Meanwhile the dog gets to live in a home with people and possibly other pets making it a more adoptable animal than if it were living in the highly stressful shelter environment.

Our first foster dog was Quila. Or, as we like to call her, Quildabeast. She had an upper respiratory infection, was pretty chubby and an older dog so could be high on the list for euthanasia should the shelter get too full, which it often does.

Quila was an amazing foster dog. She was loving, got along with all the other animals, figured out the doggy door easily, was generally perfect. She got adopted on her second trip to PetSmart. We were sad to see her go, but so excited for her to get a family! Then, just a week later, we were notified by the Shelter’s foster coordinator that Quila had been returned to the shelter. We were so disappointed for her! The family that adopted her said that they were moving and couldn’t keep her. Who adopts a dog a week before they move and then returns it to the shelter because they can’t keep it?! Boot City had fallen a lot in love with Quila, so she was our very first Foster Fail. Foster Failing means you adopt the dog you were fostering. 🙂

This event led Boot City and I to have a conversation about our dog collection and Christmas. How many dogs is too many? Should we rearrange where they live during the day? What do you want for Christmas? What does Christmas have to do with our dogs? This is what Christmas has to do with our dogs; I have a family friend who has long had Whippets. I have always loved her Whippets and have always wanted to have one of my own. Boot City has become close with this family friend and learned that they were breeding their Whippet and would have puppies available in November or December. Boot City was getting me a puppy for Christmas! I haven’t had a puppy since I was in high school! By adopting Quila our collection had risen to 8 dogs, so we needed to discuss and confirm the future of our pack size.

We agreed to continue fostering until we got the puppy, but no more adopting. We had two near misses for another Foster Fail, but both dogs got adopted to wonderful homes. On September 7 our puppy was born. He was the runt of 10 puppies. They were all given adorable British names. We had the option to change his name, but it fits him perfectly so we opted to keep it.

Meet Dickens! This is his 5 week old photo.

He came home for good on November 4. He is the cutest, sweetest, most fun puppy ever! He’s been pretty easy as far as puppies go. Potty training is going well. He gets along with the other dogs, other than trying incessantly to play with Bunny who has zero interest in playing. We are in love! Look forward to lots of future pictures of him as he grows up!