Wendy’s Incredible, Edible, Homemade, Humble Pie Recipe

Ingredients:

1 Favorite Travel Bag

1 Great Idea

64+  1×1 Wooden Stakes with Insulators

2 Rolls of Poly Wire

1 Solar Electric Fence Charger

3 Horses

1 Enormous Livestock Waterer

3 Helpers

1 Excavator

1 Bobcat (the mechanical kind)

6 Loads of Gravel (various types)

3 Hours of Mentally Writing Blog About : How to Keep Horses Safe Whilst Having Major Excavating Work Done

1 Enormous Ego Trip

 Directions:

First, pack bag tightly with Great Idea and Hours of Mental Blog Writing for EGO TRIP.  Stir in other ingredients, and mix well.  Bake in hot sun at 85 degrees, for a couple of hours, over a period of three days. 

Makes one herd of horses liberated for several days.

 

I planned and I planned and I planned and I planned, I just didn’t plan on the horses having a plan of their own. ~Monica on Friends, totally mangled to fit what I’m writing about…

So, I had a grand plan…the kind that tickles me pink.  I really liked my plan so well that I ignored a couple of niggles of doubt…shouted them down and buried them under piles of enthusiasm, and Jamal, and Alex and I went out and redid the temporary pasture to fit my grand plan the night before work was to commence.  The horses would be out back, and have access to the woods, and a giant water filled waterer, shade, and grass, oh my.  The next morning, I fixed my coffee and moved the horses into the pasture after chores, and pottered about checking emails and what not, and I started writing my blog in my head.

While I was writing the blog in my head, I was totally full of how clever I was being, and how careful with my horses I was being, and gosh wasn’t I just implementing a brilliant plan.  I checked on the horses and they were peacefully grazing in the temporary pasture, and I continued pottering about the house.  I heard the brush hogger out in the far pasture, and the beep, beep, beep of heavy equipment backing up down the front drive where some gravel was being laid, and I drank my coffee on the front porch watching the sun warm the distant hills.

Eventually, I came back into the house, refilled my coffee and went out the back door, still choosing this word and that word for my blog that would elucidate how one could successfully keep horses safe while having major work done, to find all three horses grazing loose and completely free in my back yard between the house, the pond, and the barn.

I very uncalmly ran into the barn and snatched up three halters with the lead ropes attached, noticed the giant dump truck and excavator stopped there on the drive, and thought : Oh, no!  I have to get the horses back to safety!! So, I tried haltering Hope (okay, I was obviously not thinking about this correctly!  This is what panic can do to people.) and when that didn’t work, I haltered Buddy.  I put him back in the temporary pasture, and turned off the fence, and came back to try and get Hope. Buddy started running back and forth inside the ‘fencing’, which is hardly more than a suggestion.  Hope ran back and forth around the pond, and clearly thought I had lost any remaining marbles, and she was absolutely not inclined to be haltered.

That’s when Buddy crashed through the fencing, and miraculously, or deliberately didn’t get tangled in the poly wire, and came galumphing back to the yard.  I forced myself to calm down, and went into the barn and closed the back doors, and then re-haltered Buddy, who’s always my best bet – although Canon is a close second, and took Buddy into the barn and unhaltered him.  As I opened my mouth to call Hope, she came on into the barn followed by Canon.  I shut the gate.  I spent the rest of the day refilling waterers and piles of hay, and cleaning out the barn, and being within visual range in case they got a bit jumpy in the close quarters, which they didn’t.  They spend most of any given hot day standing around in the barn, anyway.

When Jamal came out and asked, “How are the horses?” I explained what happened. 

“Were they excited or frightened?” he asked.

“No, in spite of my attempts to rile them up, they were amazingly calm,” I said.

Day Two

So the next day, I had a plan.  I didn’t think it was brilliant, but figured it might work if the wind were just right, and it was like so:  Once the horses came into the barn, I would shut them in and sit with them all day.  However, I didn’t know when the guy was coming back, so I let them go out to graze, figuring, that once the equipment came, they would make their way to the barn.  They didn’t.  They stayed out in the far pasture grazing, and Leanne, Alex and myself strung up some more temporary fencing to block off the area where the excavator took down some of the old fencing when re-doing the ditch work.

Sometime around 11AM-ish, the horses started to migrate back to the closer pasture.  The dump truck was coming and going with gravel to complete the road that goes through a back gate, around the barn and out the double gate along the drive (over the new culvert) and the double gates were propped open to let him.  The horses got out, just as we were trying to close the gates, Hope snuck through the gates, and when I rounded her back up fairly easily, but the next time the dump truck came back, all three horses snuck right out behind the dump truck as it was backing in through the double gates.

I remained calm.  The horses ate some grass under the pine trees.  I fetched halters.  I haltered Buddy and handed him off to Leanne, and then haltered Canon and walked him up to the back yard to be next to Buddy.  Hope followed.  She wouldn’t be haltered, so we put Canon and Buddy into the closed barn, and Hope followed them into it, and let me halter her. We spent the rest of the afternoon (the excavating guy quit early that day, so it wasn’t really long) hand grazing the horses in the back yard.

Day Three

The truck guy shows up and opens the gate, the horses get out, we shoo them up to the front yard and keep an eye on them.  They grazed around the house, getting some places we don’t like to mow, and they hung out with me while I weeded the herb garden, which I have ignored in the self-concious way people try to avoid a person they should have called months ago, but didn’t.  Canon, especially stayed by my shoulder, sniffing over the weeds and the grass I was pulling out, looking stupified but happy with this turn of events.  At one point all of the horses, some of the chickens, myself, Jamal, the kids, and at least one of the cats were all along the side of the house with the herb garden (which is not a large area) relaxed and hanging out. I discovered that the herbs did quite well without my constant or even intermittant attention.

After the equipment left for the day we still didn’t try to get the horses back…about an hour later, after I’d cleaned out the barn thoroughly, they all came trotting into the barn in case it might be time for dinner.  I closed the gate after them.  It finally occurred to me that the horses felt that the barn and myself were safe.  They then decided that if their barn were too close to danger, that they would hang out by our barn with us.  That made perfect sense to them.

Humble pie is best served hot, and with an extra larg heaping of reality on the side.