Day at the Spa

Not much is happening at the Shenandoah Gateway Farm. It is still unrelentingly, oppressively hot and humid. If there is a more moist and miserable word than humid, I would use it. Almost like being in a sauna, except you can't get naked and sit and feel rejuvenated. Just hot and sticky.

Lee has been building a run-in shed for us. Usually I help him with these kind of projects, but he is doing it when I am at work. It is really too much for one person, but he is doing it anyway. It looks great! We have some beams from our repair of the bridge to the lower part of the property. They were 9x5x16 or so, and some of them are in pretty good shape. They also look as though they were soaked in creosote, like railroad ties. Lee is using them as the upright poles to support the building. He is using the left over metal from the two new buildings we have, the barn and the shop. Also, there were some left over materials from the house that we found when we started clearing the land. It will be good to get this construction stuff out of the basement! Because we had some of the material, Lee only has to buy the new 2x4s and fasteners.

Lee dug the holes and set the post all alone. This is hard enough to do with a helper. I feel bad that I am not helping, but he is doing it when I am at work. It looks great. He has it all framed up and has the roof on.

We have two different pastures to rotate the horses on in order to consistently have grass during the growing season. This cuts way down on the hay consumption. That cuts down on the hay we need to store and feed. I only feed when the grass is too short to keep them well fed. Usually during late fall to early spring. The draw back is that the pastures do not have any shelter from the heat or the cold. Building shelters also means we have a place to put the tractor equipment that is not in use. But the best thing about it,from our point of view, is that we can get away for a few days and just have someone throw food and refill the water. They will not have to get the horses out, always a dicey proposition for a non-horse person. We can someone come feed the cats and board the dogs and freedom awaits!! FREEDOM! I feel like William Wallace in Braveheart!! (But before Mel went off the deep end!)

So, because Lee has been working so hard on the shelter and I really don't feel like making him work on it during the week-end when I could help, I decided to wash the dog.

Actually the dog has been shedding worse than the two cats. We called a local dog groomer and she wanted $45 to wash the dog! PetsMart only wanted $31, but it is quite a drive. So I got some horse curry combs and doggy shampoo and warm water and scrubbed away. It is not a hard job, but I am getting older and bending over while I tried to wash away all of the loose hair (and a bunch of the stuck in kind) is kind of a chore. I may have to invest in a tall doggy tub!

At any rate he is mostly clean and mostly not shedding and it didn't cost me anything. Not a bad deal in my mind.