Oops.

 Ugh.  The white stuff is back.  It was hard and hit us in our faces and we had to hide in our sheds.  There was wind blowing the white stuff everywhere.  All night and all day.  FINALLY, there was not as much wind and the white stuff got softer and fluffier and we came to get our Hey! but it was buried under white stuff and hard to dig out.  The lady was throwing more Hey! out with the buried Hey! but we had to dig it all out to make sure that the buried Hey! wasn't better than the new Hey!  So much for the nice green grass prospects.  What a disappointment!  

Yay!

 The white stuff that was on the ground is gone!  Hooray!  When the white stuff goes away, the nice grass will turn green!  Now everything is wet.   The ground is wet, the trees are wet and us ponies are wet.  But we are excited!  Yay!   

FREEDOM!

 As you know, when the ground has white stuff all over it, there is no nice green grass, so the lady has to bring us dried grass in square boxes that she calls Hey!  She used to drive the Hey! around in the back of the little green truck thing, but this year she is mostly dragging the Hey! to us on a little sled.  We are thinking maybe this is because she has been looking kind of like a very short pony at the end of a very wet summer, so maybe she is too heavy for the green truck thing to carry around. But for Marco and his band, she takes the Hey! back to their storage shed on a little flat trailer that the little orange noisy machine pulls around.  She doesn't do it that often because she takes enough Hey! for the ponies to eat for several days at a time.  So yesterday she went back there with the little orange machine and the big pile of Hey!, drove across the fence tape that is around their extended pasture that they don't use when it is cold and drove to the gate where Marco and his band were waiting.  They have done this a bunch of times before.  When she opened the gate, Marco ran through the gate and the little ponies ran through behind him.  The lady thought they would come back because she had Marco's dinner and there was all that yummy Hey!, but they didn't. The lady closed the gate on LaPerlita and then ran to grab the fence tape to pull it up, but she was too late,  The ponies made a pony-line for the far end of the pasture and jumped right over that tape on the ground, so the lady was only able to keep one of them -- little Mat, inside.  They were FREEE!!!!!!  The ponies were so happy.  Marco was flagging his tail in that Araby way that they have and boing-ing around the white field right next to us.  Of course, we live right next to them so we know them and didn't get too excited, but we watched as they ran back and forth across the field and made the young ponies in the next pasture over run to their fence and yell at them.  So the lady came hiking back up the hill to the barn where she got a bucket and a halter and she said things to the ponies that I should not repeat here.  The free ponies were happy to be eating old grass under the white stuff in the field instead of Hey!, but they were okay with the lady walking over to them and putting the halter on Marco and taking him back to his pasture.  The other ponies said "See ya!" and did not follow Marco, so the lady had to make several trips to lead each pony back to their regular pasture.  Even my mom Tudi was happier to stay in the field eating old grass all by herself until the lady asked her to come home for dinner. So THAT was very exciting!  And we are thinking the lady might be able to ride the little green truck thing again if she keeps up with that exercise.           

Horse chestnuts

 The big black dog is really weird.  All dogs are kind of weird compared to ponies, but this one is especially strange.  You know, he lives in the red barn with the little white dog and the lady that feeds us Hey!  He comes along with the lady, but the little white dog has not been along while the white stuff is on the ground.  So you know how when the lady cuts pieces off our feet, the dogs will grab them and chew them up?  The big dog does that, so even tho that seems a little weird, apparently that is normal for dogs.  But NOW, the big dog has decided that he wants to eat pieces off our legs too!  Right by our knees and our hocks, there are small crusty gray patches that the lady calls chestnuts.  EVERYONE has them, and usually they are only a little bit raised from our skin, but they don't have any hair on them and they are kind of flaky.  The big dog has been sneaking around the ponies and trying to nibble them off the ponies' legs. So one minute, you are diving your nose into a new fresh pile of Hey! and warning off  your sisters Elfe and LuLu and the next thing you know, some doofus dog has his head between your legs, chewing on your knee!   It is ridiculous.  And two of the ponies, my big sister Gypsy and the beautiful LaPerlita, both had ouchy feet last year after the white stuff left.  And now, even tho they don't have ouchy feet,  they have chestnuts that are hard and rubbery and don't break off, so the lady has to trim them when she cuts pieces off their feet.  But the big dog really wants to chew on them, so he is definitely moving into precarious territory there.  But then, it's not like he's the brightest star in the sky --  after all, his day is made when he finds a chunk of frozen pony poop.       

Marco! Ponio!

 Marco is a bay pony that lives in the pasture next to us.  He lives with my Mom, Tudi, and some gray ponies and Little Mat. Sometimes people ask the lady if she has "rescues" and then she points to Marco. His name didn't used to be Marco, but she thinks this name fits him.   When Marco eats grass and Hey!, it wads up in his mouth and falls back out.   So he has to eat special food that none of his pasture mates are allowed to eat.  He eats his special feed out of a bag that the lady hangs on his head every morning and afternoon.  This morning, when the lady went back to retrieve the bag off Marco's head, Marco was lying down on top of a big puddle that had gotten hard because it was really really cold out.  The puddle is about twice as wide as a pony and had white stuff on top of it.  When Marco tried to get up, his hooves would just scrape across the hard water.  The big dog was really excited about seeing him lying down like that and acted like he really wanted to eat him, but that is silly because who would eat a pony?  The lady took his feed bag and then she tried to push him but her big floppy feet were sliding on the hard water too.  Then she got ahold of his tail and thought if she could just slide him a little bit, he could get his feet under him.  But then he flailed his legs and next thing she knew, she was lying on the hard puddle too!   So then she and the big dog decided to go back up to the barn and bring the orange machine down to pull Marco to the side of the hard puddle.  But when they were about ten pony lengths away, Marco thrashed around a little bit and got up.   So then the lady and the big dog watched him for a while to make sure he could walk okay as he went over to the other ponies and chased them away from Hey! that he can't eat.       

The bridge

 Today was horrible!  We left before the lady threw out our Hey! and then she didn't come back to see where we were until she gave the old ponies their lunch.  She was walking toward the pond to take pictures of the ducks and she could see that we were running in our pasture.  So she walked all the way back and went into Marco's pasture and then she crawled under the predator-proof fence (which is apparently not very predator proof) and then under the wire fence and then under the electric fence rope and then she was in our pasture.   She asked us why were were running back and forth by the creek, so we went over to the bridge so she could see the terrible problem.  The board at the other end of the bridge was loose and had slid over about the width of a pony hoof.  It was really really scary.  The bridge is all white and now there was a horrific dark gap at the end of the bridge.  The lady walked across the bridge and petted some of us ponies.  Then she said "C'mon Harley" and Harley followed her onto the bridge.  She stopped when she got to the end of the bridge and told Harley he should jump over the dark gap. Then she jumped to show him and Harley jumped too and then they were on the other side of the creek.   Harley was happy to be over there away from the rest of us.  He thought there would be carrots and riding and fun stuff, but instead, the lady came back over to our side and asked my big sister Gypsy to come across the bridge.  Harley is our big brother, but Gypsy is the boss of us.   Gypsy walked on the bridge.  She sniffed it and pawed it and looked at the dark gap and then she said "No way" and backed off the bridge  She told the rest of the ponies to back away, so we all ran over to the creek to see if we could find another way across that had miraculously opened since the last time we looked.  So the lady came over to the creek and walked across where we usually drink water and ford the creek when there isn't white stuff everywhere. You know, now with the white stuff, the water gets hard and gray and slippy on top and then it gets white stuff on top of that, so it is especially scary. The lady walked on the hard water and it made loud banging noises and then it came apart and you could see some of the dark wet water underneath it. So there was no way we could walk in that.  She did that to a couple of places, but they were all dangerous. So she went back to the bridge and took off the wobbly board because she said she didn't want anyone to step on it.  Under where the board used to be there was now a gigantic hole  The hole was so deep that if a pony put its foot in the hole, it would go way way down to where you would not even be able to see its ankle.  She then asked some of us other ponies to cross the bridge.  So Pinke trotted up and jumped across the hole and then Lulu. And then Sienna.   I thought about crossing the bridge, but it really was super scary and Gypsy did not think it was a good idea.  Then the lady got some Hey! from Marco's shed and she did that funny clop noise  thing with her tongue and next thing we knew,  Gypsy got bold and so the rest of us decided to go too. So our breakfast was super late and turned into dinner and we almost all died falling through the bridge.  So tomorrow, we are not going anywhere near that bridge.  Maybe.      

Coyote

 In the morning, there was a funny noise coming from behind the trees  over toward where the big scary black cows hang out.  The noise was kind of like when there is a a squeaky wheel, going "Ooh-ah!" over and over and over again.  The lady looked at the big dog and asked "Is that a dog barking?"  The big dog agreed that it sounded like a dog, but he didn't care because he couldn't see any dog around and he can't be bothered being worried about far away dogs that he has never even met.  Then the sound came from behind the woods by our out-back pasture, except we weren't out-back there because we were up-front eating Hey! The lady took some Hey! to Marco and his buddies with the big orange machine.  While the ponies were eating their Hey!, they stopped and all stared and pointed their noses at an animal that came running across the pasture out of the woods.  At first, the lady thought it was a fox, but when it got closer, she could see that it was a small coyote.  The coyote hardly looked at the ponies as it was loping by.  Ponies do not care about coyotes, so the ponies went back to eating their Hey! The lady walked toward the woods where the coyote came from and she heard another lady calling something, but then there was no more noise.  The lady was glad that no dogs or other ladies came into the pasture to chase the coyote.  She would like the coyote to stay in her woods.  She thinks there are plenty of bunnies for the coyote to eat.  She also thinks that the summer population of Canada honkers exceeds the optimum pond capacity and would not mind if the coyote ate 50 or 60 of them.