Thursday, February 16, 2017

Feb. 16/2017

I had today off and we got more snow. We got a lot on Monday into Tuesday and a lot of stuff was closed all three days - Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. My youngest daughter who has her friend visiting from England for the week had all three days off as Dalhousie was shut down because of the storms. She works part-time and her regular day off is Friday.

Nick is downstairs banging things around and slamming whatever he can as usual. He seems to be more angry this week than he normally is. I guess it has been a trying week, a lot of things have gone wrong. Actually, mostly things that should have been looked after a long time ago and weren't, and now the consequences of that procrastination have reared their ugly heads.
The barn is filled with snow. And I mean inside. The new addition was never finished. Not even close. Nick didn't even re-seal the roof, when it became obvious by the amount of rain that dripped from the inside beams onto the horses and made quite good-sized puddles in their stalls, that a patch job would be required. Two summers have gone by now - the summer the new part was built and last summer. The tin of tar to seal the roof is even sitting up there. I guess it is too heavy to move up and down and I guess there is no harm in storing it up there.
Three of the stalls have snow coming in where there are spaces to the outside, where the new barn butts up against the old barn and also where the old barn is attached to the foaling stall and the chicken coop. These two spots were covered over with plexi-glass like stuff when we bought the place but it has since been broken. I know I nagged until we fixed it once about two years ago with some heavy plastic but the horses in those respective stalls pulled it down about a day after we put it up.
The fences are down in a couple of places. Well, actually about four that I know of. There are three spots in the stallion's pasture, one a clear break where he has gotten out every day since he first discovered he could. I even videoed him stepping over the fence and coming through the woods into the back yard by the house and making his way over past the barn where the mares are. Today he was pressed up against the barbed wire as far as he could bend it trying to reach Epona with his nose, one of our mares and the one who happens to be in heat at the moment. Mares are quite receptive to stallions when they are in heat and will seek them out almost as eagerly as the guys chase after the gals. I can't imagine what would have happened if we hadn't noticed he was on the lam as soon as he was out. Someone would have been tangled up in that barbed wire I am sure.
There are two more spots in the stallion's pasture on the same side as he already escapes that he can walk through if he finds them, the wood rails that are left standing are like toothpicks. There has been no maintenance done on our fences except to fix escape holes since we arrived here nearly four years ago.
The fourth spot where a fence is down happened sometime this evening after it got dark around 5pm or so. Nick was plowing the driveway and I was shovelling out the stalls, and when I went out behind the barn to empty the manure from the wheelbarrow, I noticed that the three paint horses were in with the five Dutch Warm Bloods. Normally they are in adjoining pastures. I could really see only two of the paint horses, the two that were ours, and I immediately began to worry where the third one was because she is does not belong to us, but to a fellow who boards her with us. I went around to the pasture where she should have been but she wasn't there and so I went back through the barn to the pasture where they all had ended up. I didn't want a fight to break out and someone ending up getting kicked or bitten. Horses can be extremely nasty to each other as newcomers are forced to find their spot in the 'pecking order'. A stallion will defend his right to keep his ladies but the real fury belongs to the lead mare.
I got lucky and as I opened the barn door to go out to look again for the boarder's paint, she was timidly standing almost next to me. I clucked at her and called her name, and gave her the motion with my arm and hand that looks like 'please, go ahead, after you' and she came right into the safety of the barn quickly enough that I was able to get the door closed before anyone else could follow her inside. She walked ahead of me, making sounds that a horse makes when they are apprehensive about something, but she continued on and was brave and smart enough to find her own stall, even though she had never entered the barn from that door before. There are three doors, the front, the back and the one she usually comes in - the side door.
I grabbed her grain and dumped it into her feed dish to show her how pleased I was, and then I dumped the grain for the other two into their dishes and went to see if I could get them inside as smoothly as I had gotten Sage to safety. As I slid open the back door, the black and white paint Zack was close by and I called his name as he looked towards me. Of course it was the open barn door at suppertime that got him moving in my direction, and I could see that the third paint was right behind him. He scooted in, but I had to cut off one of the other horses who also liked the look of the open door and my quick movement caused the final paint to hesitate for a second, watching me. I gave her the 'go ahead' motion and nodded my head, calming and quietly encouraging her to keep coming. I was very relieved and very proud of myself to have them all in their stalls, eating contentedly. I went back outside to see where they had gone through the fence and then I began bringing in the remaining five horses. They were all around at the side door, peering in through the chain link door at the paints having their supper. I walked around to them from the outside and stood at the break in the fence and called the big guy and the boss, Invictus. I had his grain in a dish in my hands and this is the routine to bring them in. He comes first and gets his grain in his feeder ahead of the others, who follow him inside and then make their way to their own stalls. The doors are closed and latched and their suppers are served. They also get as much water as they want and a huge pile of hay.
Nick came in from his plowing just after I had closed Invictus into his stall and we finished the rest of the evening routine together.

Another one of life's unpleasant surprises arrived Tuesday morning while Nick was clearing the driveway after the first storm, and digging my car out so I could get to work. As I climbed into the car, he pulled up beside me in the tractor and started yelling at me in a furious rage. I was so astonished at his behavior it took me a few seconds to comprehend what he was saying. The huge chains that were on the back tires of the tractor had caught the foot ladder on the left side, it was all bent up, and somehow part of the door, the rubber trim or something, had also gotten caught and the entire glass door panel on that side was shattered and the pieces were scattered about on the cab floor.
He had previously told me that the Chris person had taken the tractor over to his brother's property next door to use it and had to take the chains off of the tires to drive it on the asphalt. He claims that when then the chains were re-installed that the clip that was used to hook them together onto the tire was small and dinky. He complained that the chains on the tire was now way to loose, and was flopping around. And was the fault of this Chris guy, who Nicks says said that I had given him permission to use the tractor whenever he wanted. When I asked how Chris got the key to the tractor that Nick always kept in his pocket from the time he got dressed in the morning until he went to bed each night, he replied 'we don't want to get into how that happened'.

Tonight after we came inside Nick went upstairs to shave. He flew into a rage because he couldn't find the extra cartridges for his razor. Of course he starts saying that he has had it with that prick, etc., etc. Lots of foul language. I had heard him banging things around upstairs and I came up to see what he was doing. The garbage can in the bathroom was upside down on the floor and the toilet seat and been slammed off of its hinges. He claimed that he had put the cartridges in the same drawer in the vanity as his hairbrush, but I looked around for them after he had gone downstairs and I found them under the sink. I told him I had tidied that bathroom up a few weeks ago, which was true, and that I had probably just put them somewhere. I did remember taking them out of the cardboard package they were fastened into.
He is going to town tomorrow to take his daughter's cat to the vet to have the stitches out where she had surgery to have a piece of a lump removed for a biopsy. The diagnosis is cancer. The cat was rolling around on the bed behind the computer where Nick was sitting as he told me this and I was scratching her head. Nick noticed that the spot were the biopsy was was red and on closer inspection, a little too red for a healthy wound. We put some antibiotic ointment on it but Nick was very upset because his daughter would know he hadn't checked the incision every day like he said he would. And there was no way it will be much better tomorrow than it is tonight.