Conditioning for our first ride of the year!

I've been busy with my friend Monica, getting our horses (and ourselves!) ready for our first endurance ride of the year. For Monica and Ari, it will be their first ride ever. Ari has done one 'trail ride' at an endurance ride a few years back with my daughter, but nothing longer. Monica has been riding Ari for several months now, as Callie, my daughter, decided she no longer wanted to (sigh). We've been doing our LSD, long, slow, distance, and have just recently started to speed things up a bit. Our first ride will be at Home on the Range, in Othello, WA, assuming we were two of the first 100 entries. We'll be doing a 25, so it's not really an endurance ride, but this early in the year I'd prefer shorter and slower. Plenty of time to speed things up! Monica has been blogging quite a bit about our rides at http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/horsebytes/ and has certainly done a better job at it than I could! Check it out and see for yourselves.

I'll be sure to post how our ride went, after the fact.

Cathy

Magnatli's Pot-bellied Pig!

Now for the possible blog topic. You all will remember my blogs last year about the pot-bellied pig Fat Albert and Magnatli, and their apparent fondness for each other. Well, I have a Fat Albert tale to tell this year, but not involving a horse. About a month ago Karl (my husband) was mowing the yard next to Albert's paddock. There was a dried up palm frond right in his path which I picked up and tossed over into Albert's paddock to get it out of the way. The next morning I looked out of the window and the palm frond was gone - totally disappeared. No, Karl had not moved it. So I'm staring at the doorway to Albert's house - and it looks to me like there are palm frond pieces sticking out of it. Sure enough, Albert had taken the palm frond into his house and shredded it for bedding! So I put a couple more palm fronds in with him, and lo and behold he picked them up and carried them to his house, broke them up so he could get them in, and shredded them. I have since given him a number more - that house is well bedded down and our 32 degree a.m. temperatures (once in a while) don't bother him a bit. There are several pictures of Fat Albert attached - including one mug shot showing how handsome he is ! :>) !


Hope you all are doing well and keeping as warm as possible.

Shirley