Catch 22

As the days progress, I am more and more behind. The past couple of weeks have been an absolute blur. The paying job has me so busy that there's absolutely no free time to do anything extra other than normal chores.

But this weekend we were able to squeeze in a little bit of work at the Sanctuary. We are finally getting nice weather, which we desperately need. Saturday morning rolled around and Mike was up before dawn to get the tractor he rented. He and L had a plan for reseeding L's and our pasture. Unfortunately there was a very expensive learning curve to the seed drill. Hopefully there will be some lush pastures in our neck of the woods.

While Mike and L were working in the pastures, the farrier came out to do some much needed and long overdo trims. We started with King. What a disappointment. We found out that King has textbook laminitis. I am devastated. Oh sure, there's nothing I can do about it now and there's probably  nothing I could have done to stop it but I still feel bad. The horses are in "my" care. If they come to me with laminitis, so what. But if they get it while in MY care, that's a problem, at least in my eyes. I'm here to protect them from such things and instead I was part of the problem. So least to say my heart dropped when I heard the news. Apparently laminitis starts in the left front foot, goes to the right front foot, and then works its way to the back feet. It's not too severe in the left front but it's there and there's early signs of it in the right front. I was actually thinking of using King this year. He has to have shoes on but I'm going to look at putting boots on instead. I bought them specifically for him but he was lame and then I was pregnant so that stopped all riding on him. But this year I want him to get back into shape. Maybe it was the pasture, maybe it was the hay. Who knows. He was on a couple different pastures last year. Tommy and Skippy however dont' have laminitis. I'll be curious to see if anyone else is showing signs. If anyone else in the big herd is showing signs, I'm guessing it'll be due to the pasture but  maybe not. King was never across the road at the neighbor's but he was in Madison with Dude last summer. But in the past we used to run four horses in the Madison pasture. Who knows what caused it.Now we need to focus on making sure it doesn't progress.  I may consider a grazing muzzle for him. He came out of winter plump.

Tommy and Skippy also had their feet trimmed. Skippy was naughty and gave the farrier a run for his money. The farrier is to come back out tonight. I can't decide who to trim up at t his appointment. We still have Rain, Ivan, Dude, and Maverick to trim but I have a meeting at 7pm I need to get to so who knows which will be the easiest. I also got half of Rabbit trimmed up Saturday too. I'd like to get her trimmed up better but she's a handful when it comes to trimming. Her heaves are getting worse.

I decided this weekend that I might as well use those last two round bales that broke open earlier this winter/spring. Not gonna happen. We lost a bale. When I started unraveling the hay, I discovered mold. So now we have a rotten bale. Makes me mad. Hay is at a premium and we lost at least one bale if not two. I haven't dug into the second bale yet to see if that one is no good but I have a feeling they are both bad. Hay is too expensive to lose even a half a bale to mold. Now we need to figure out how to get rid of this bale.

I am hoping this week to start doing some fencing in the yard to get the horses out on grass.  It'll be a lot tougher because the grass is only just now beginning to grow. The other catch, the new grass seed we just put down will probably start sprouting and taking hold about the first of June. The horses shouldn't be out on that grass until the roots of the new grass are established enough so that the horses don't pull out the grass and make it all for not. But if that's the case, we either need to look for emergency pasture for a month or have to find more hay. The other catch is that I haven't yet paid for all of my hay this year. I was hoping to not use all of this past winter's hay so that I'd have a small amount of carryover for emergencies during the summer and a few bales to get me started in the winter (to help ease the cost of hay this year). It's all a catch 22.

So lots going on but almost all of it caught up in catch 22s. I know there is more going on but my mind is blank. By the end of the day, my mind is mush so I struggled to find time to post anything. But we are here and we are slowly plugging away.