Productive Weekend

This past weekend was very productive. On Saturday I attended the third class of Empowerment Ventures. Oh how I wish those classes were longer so we could do more brainstorming! Our teacher lined up a guest speaker, Holly from Fluxxr. Wow. Simply Wow. Talk about a great opportunity. Fluxxr sounds like an amazing company that's looking to help small businesses really get up and running. I'm hoping that even though I'm focusing on non-profit, that Fluxxr will be able to help the Sanctuary out as well.  These Empowerment Venture classes really have me excited about the Sanctuary and wanting to get the word out. I've spent years simply working with the horses and not focusing on anything else. Of course the welfare of the horses comes first but there's so much more that could help the Sanctuary if I simply get out of my comfort zone.

On Sunday mom and dad came down to help work on the place. Mike worked on fixing the house. It's not Sanctuary related but without a house for us to live in, it's hard to keep the Sanctuary going. So the house is 90% fixed. When his buddy Jon showed up, the tackled the fun job of fencing. With the help of the tractor, they were able to dig 14 holes for the new fenceline that HAS to go in before winter. We'd put up a fence two years ago but the horses managed to bend and mangle that fence. Dude took to standing on the cattle panels to reach the grass on the other side. I'm not sure what we'll do for an actual fence, but the fence posts are going in. We have five in the ground permanently, but need to finish up the rest this coming weekend. We also have more fence post holes to dig but we ran out of daylight (and energy).

While Mike and Jon were digging holes, Dad and I got on the roof of the barn to nail down the loose tin and to bend back the two sheets of tin that had blown up during the tornado. It hadn't been too big of an issue over the summer because the wind was never that strong and if it was, it was out of the west. We've had some doozies of wind storms come through over the past month or so and now it was very apparently that the barn needed to be fixed immediately.

In the afternoon our farrier came out to trim up Dude, King, and Tommy. It's a good thing he stopped out because Dude was off in the front, which means that there's more pain in the back end. Dude is 17 and in my eyes, fairly young, but that hip is going to be the death of him. He's not going to see mid to late 20s because of that hip I'm afraid. But the farrier knew not to push it and did a quick trim to make the experience tolerable. It's nice to have everyone trimmed going into winter.

We also had volunteers come out just before the sun set to help groom some of the horses. This daylight savings time really does a number on everyone. We took advantage of the extra hour to get more stuff done around the Sanctuary but now I'll be doing chores in the dark. I'm ready for March to be here already!