fall days

    The days are perfect!  We had been eating nice grass by our pond and after we ate that all up, now we are back in the other field.  There is only a little bit of grass out here so we have to look for it really hard and we almost get dirt in our teeth trying to bite it off.  But it's not like we have a whole lot of other stuff to do every day.  Now we are getting luxurious fur coats and all of us pony mares are glamorously Rubenesque.  There are hardly any bugs.  It is grand.
    The lady came down to our field with the big noisy orange machine and looked at a gate into my dad Bob's pasture that is right next to our field.  She never uses that gate, but I guess she wanted to do something different with the big orange machine. But there was a great big gray nest with a hole in the bottom of it hanging on the fence right next to the gate.  So the lady got one of those red metal can things and a long shiny stick and in the morning, she squirted white stuff on the nest and then she poked it with the stick.  All us ponies went over to watch.  We thought those skinny yellow bugs would come out of it.  But nothing happened. So the lady knocked it down and still nothing happened.  There was only one bug inside and it was big and black.  So that ended up being pretty boring.
   So then she came down to see us and she had carrots and was trying to give us the carrots but my brother Harley kept butting his nose in and biting us.  He wanted all the carrots for himself.  So the lady sat on his back and he didn't have a halter on his head or anything. The lady would say "Wo" and Harley would stop and then he'd get a carrot.  So then my little sister Elf came over to see if she could get a carrot. Harley is not big on sharing so he took off after Elf to try to bite her.  You should have seen that lady's face!  Wahoo! Harley did not stop when she said "Wo."  So she jumped off and told Harley he was naughty and he didn't get any more carrots. Harley was sad and he followed her all the way over to the fence.  So then none of us got any more carrots.  I think that Harley ruined it for everyone.           

sunny day

Can you believe that horse Rita came along and hijacked MY blog?   I was pretty annoyed when I saw it.  If she had been  here, I would have jumped at her and tried to bite her like I did with Toby when he came barging in between me and the lady the other day and the lady almost fell down.  But you know, yesterday was a perfect day, hardly any bugs and the sun was warm and it was breezy and we got to go out in the nice grass by the pond and there was even extra grass where the lady moved the fence, so I got over it pretty fast.  You know, that Rita is the same color as my Mom.  And I was that color when I was little too. So MAYBE I will let her do that again some time.
   So, like I was saying, yesterday was super fun and all us ponies were standing around in the sun with our bellies full and here comes that lady with a halter.  Well, there was no way we were going to leave that nice grass forever, never, at all, ever.  So we turned around and pretended that lady was nowhere around.  We stuck our noses in the grass so she could see how starving and busy we were. I guess she could see how important it was for us to eat that grass, because she just walked up to one of the ponies and started one of the carrot-getting games.  It is a simple game once you figure it out.  The lady paws at her face and makes a funny noise with her mouth and kind of sticks her lips out.  "Kiss," she says.  At first, when she did that we thought she had flies on her face and was trying to get them off.  So we stayed back because we have enough of our own flies.  So then she would hold a carrot up by her face and do it some more. Once I saw that carrot, I figured she wanted me to have it and I stuck my nose up toward it and she made that other funny noise that means "carrot!" and then I got the carrot.  So it turns out that all you have to do is stick your nose against her face and you get a carrot.  The hard part is waiting.  You don't get a carrot if you just stick your nose in her face.  Some of the ponies haven't figured that out yet.  So anyway, as soon as we saw the carrot game was underway, we all wanted to get in on it. My brother Harley, of course, got right in the middle and then he followed the lady around and warned everyone else away.  So she put the halter on him and had him do some of the other carrot games.  He got a lot of carrots.
   It is nice by our pond because the stupid geese are not there.  A couple of days ago, right when the sun came up, there were lots of bangs in the field by where Rita lives and some geese fell out of the sky.  So maybe that is why the geese are gone.  That big yellow coyote has been hanging around here, but  I don't think he made the geese go away.  He tries to sneak up on the geese but they laugh at him and fly away.  I think the lady calls him Wily.                      

Robust Rita

So I am not Tinkerbelle.  All of us horses think that maybe Tink is a little biased and you are not getting enough of the right information about us.  So the other horses voted me to be the horse rep.  I am Rita.  We know we are in the minority here on the farm,  And we are not all dazzling different colors like those fancy ponies are, but someone ought to be extolling our virtues anyway.  Besides, everyone knows that the lady likes brown horses with black points and she isn't keen on white feet, so what would you expect most of us horses to look like?  So anyway,  I live in a big pasture with five other mares.  The lady calls us the "Bay Bunch."  There is a mare named A and her daughters Jewel and Alexis.  A actually has a long name that she used when she was at the racetrack.   But it is too long to use around the farm.  And there is a funny three year old named Fleur Scho.  Her Mom, Red, lives next door with a bunch of young ponies. Red used to be the boss of everyone, so Fleur thought she was quite the princess when she moved in here, but we taught her a thing or two.  And then there is my Mom, Mari.  Mari's full name is Mariposa because the lady thinks she looks like one of those Monarch butterflies.  (She used to go see lots of those butterflies when she lived in Mexico.)  Mari could have been a race horse too, like A, except that she doesn't have some kind of papers that horses need to do that.  Her dad won a fancy race a long time ago called the Kentucky Derby.   But she never met her dad and she doesn't have any racetrack stories.  My Dad. Lafleur, died last year.  He used to live next door where that Red mare lives with the ponies now.  My full name is La Florita, which means little flower.   I am very pretty and only a little bit bossy.  When I was just a year old, I saw that the one gate to our pasture was open a little bit, so I stuck my head in there to see if I could reach some of the grass on the other side. But it didn't open any further, so I tried to yank my head back out and the gate grabbed my head and held on to it.  AHHH!   I threw my head around and the latch pin from the gate went right into my head below my ear.  OWW!   When I got free, I had a hole about as big around as my eye and as deep as half my hoof  in my head.  Lots of the blood inside me ran out the hole and then I could hardly walk.  And then my face felt funny and didn't work right.  So then I got better and now I just have some white hairs where the hole was in my head, but my nose is crooked and half of my mouth is kind of floppy.  I think it is getting more like it used to be tho.  The lady tells me to eat grass for therapy, so I am good at that.  After my Dad died,  a lot of horses and ponies moved around to different pastures and me and A moved out back and lived with two ponies named Taca and Bob.  That Bob!  He is pushy and noisy and I just tried to ignore him when I got back there, but he kind of grows on you after a while.   So I decided he could be my boyfriend.   And then when the trees started to get leaves on them, me and A moved back up here with these mares again.  So I have only seen Bob in passing a few times since.  The lady says I look pregnant, but you know, we have a lot of green grass and so she says ALL of us mares look pregnant.  We are a robust bunch.      

tricks

Hooray!  It is raining, so we should be getting more nice grass.  And maybe we will even get to eat nice grass by our pond, where we can see the grass is very green.  If we go out there, then my dad Bob and his mares can't eat grass in the field next to us because Bob doesn't like some of us ponies being too close to his family.  He stands by the fence and makes nasty faces at us.  So sometimes we just go out there at night.  Today it is super windy and some big branches fell off the trees.  Some of us ponies went to the white hill, but it was flapping and making a lot of noise, so it was very scary.  The lady has a new game where we have to "step up" to get carrots.  There are wood slats on top of other pieces of wood and they are about a hoof height off the ground.  And on top of them is a bouncy black mat with lots of little round holes in it.  I do not think it is very scary and I got lots of carrots for stepping on it.  But some of the ponies are pretty sure that they are going to get sucked into those little holes, so they don't want to step on it.  They got a couple of carrots for standing next to it, but I got way more carrots than they did. Harley gets lots of carrots because he is a favorite.  We are all getting our winter coats already, so Harley is jet black and looks quite stunning.  You know, he is bossy, and he really likes carrots, so he tries everything to get more of them.  If he just knows the lady has carrots in her pockets, he starts doing all the stuff that got him carrots before, but it only works if the lady asks him to do it first, but he doesn't care. So he ends up nodding and prancing and pawing and shoving his head on her shoulder or under her arm.  I get tired just watching him.  Now he has been learning about taking her hanky in his mouth and he bit her twice today.  Hard.  Actually, he still got carrots, but she yelled anyway.  I never bite the lady, but I didn't even get to see that purple hanky.  Yet.          

No leaping!

So us ponies have been getting a lot of good carrot time in the big box and the White Hill.  Almost all us ponies walked into the box after we checked it our, except for that Tux.  He is really suspicious.  He didn't want to even put his toes on the ramp. He didn't get nearly as many carrots as the rest of us.  You know, that little bossy dog goes zipping by us all the time to run back to our pond and then she jumps into the water and makes a lot of noise and sticks her head in holes.  When she comes out, she is so muddy, we are thinking of making her an honorary pony.  The geese don't like it too much, but we wish those stupid geese would go away anyway.  There are like a hundred of them and we have feathers everywhere.
   Those big dogs have not been back to bite my dad Bob and his mares, but his face got sore again and had  red blood dripping from it.  The lady puts stuff on it to keep the flies off.  The lady was trimming Taca's hooves in their shed and she asked Taca why none of the other ponies were in the shed.  She could tell there were a lot of flies around because there was a lot of buzzing, but the ponies were standing outside the shed and even Taca wanted to leave to be with the others.  Then the lady looked up and saw a round gray nest as big as Taca's head on the wall right next to them.  There were yellow buzzing bugs flying in and out alot!  So she decided to finish Taca's feet outside the shed.  And then she went down later and put white stuff on the round thing and the bugs fell out and stopped buzzing.  So now Bob and the mares go back in the shed.
   This morning the lady took Harley to the White Hill and sat on his back.  She didn't have a saddle or bridle, she just had carrots, so when Harley went the right way he got a carrot.  Harley is overly enthusiastic about carrots. He has been ridden a lot and is a good jumper, but he never played this game before.  He really wanted the carrots and he didn't think he was getting them fast enough.  It is frustrating to have to wait for the lady to ask you to do stuff and then figure out what she wants before you get a carrot.  So Harley was pretty revved up about the carrot/riding game.  So he started leaping into the air.  He was thinking he was one of those Lipizzaners.  The lady didn't like the leaping.  She told him she didn't ask for leaping, so he didn't get any carrots for that.   I will be next and I will get a lot of carrots!     

gigantic box on wheels

    So there has been much excitement around here since those big bad dogs were here.  My dad Bob had to stay in the barn for a couple of days but now he is back out with his mares, although his face has sores and looks funny and the lady comes out with a big needle a couple of times during the day and pokes it in his neck.  Bob doesn't like that too much.   But we have not seen those big bad dogs again.  The lady doesn't let Bob and his mares go out in the pasture where the big bad dogs were, but she let us ponies go out to eat the nice grass by our pond yesterday.  The grass is better since we got all that rain.  There was like a horse hoof high of rain!    
    Some of us ponies and some of the horses got to look and walk into the gigantic box with wheels.  There is a noisy, kind of bouncy, dark ramp that you have to put your foot on before you can walk into the gigantic box.  She takes Ferris in there the most.  Ferris has a bump on his face but it isn't because of the gigantic box.  Yesterday she was making hissing noises with metal tubes inside the box and then some of those skinny bugs fell down from the top of it.  Then when Harley walked up the ramp to the box, one of those skinny bugs fell right on his head!  Harley was so surprised, he didn't think walking in the box was a good idea.  So the lady said he could wait and walk in the box another day.  I walked right into the box because there was a little bucket at the front of it and I know the lady carries good grain in those buckets.  I got carrots and grain!  I didn't ever want to leave that box, but I had to back out of it anyway.  Then I got carrots for backing out.  And then we went to the White Hill and the lady sat on top of me.  I still think she doesn't know what she is doing.  But whatever -- I walk around and get carrots and she wiggles her legs and shifts her weight around up there, which is not any big deal to me. I mostly just try to ignore her until it seems like a carrot is coming my way.          

Bad dogs!

Even tho it has been hot, we have had pretty much activity here.  The lady has been taking us to the White Hill and we get lots of carrots.   I mean LOTS!  She has a bag of carrots as big as a baby pony in that little green truck thing.  We get to walk and trot around and she sits on our backs.  It is kind of fun because there are hardly any bugs at all in the White Hill.  This morning  the lady pulled this big gigantic box with wheels around the White Hill with her gray truck.  When she got out of the truck, she looked around because there was a lot of dog barking going on.  She looked at the little bossy dog that was in the truck and the other two little dogs and they were not barking.  So she ran to the top of the hill and looked down by the pond.  All us ponies had already run down to the pond because that was where all the excitement was.  There were two big dogs dancing around my dad Bob and his mares and foal.  Bob would charge at the big dogs to try to keep them away, but the one big dog would run at Bob and bite his nose or his legs.  The other big dog was happy about it and kept jumping up and down and egging his friend on.  The lady grabbed her little dogs and put them in the barn and then ran down the hill with a lead rope.  She yelled at the big nasty dogs and they stopped attacking Bob and looked at her.  Then they decided to run off and ran to the end of the pasture.  Poor Bob had blood all over him and that is not a good look for a white pony.  Now Bob and his mares are back inside their "predator proof" fence in hopes that the big dogs won't be able to bite him any more.