Life on the Other Farm

So I mentioned having interviewed for a job, that I haven’t had one in about a year. So I accepted it and promptly turned around and found a different job. A job that paid more. On a horse farm. How cool is that? It only took me 27 years to get back here.

But this week I have two jobs. Which is not very cool. Oh well.

The barn job looks to be a largely non-stop nine or ten hour day -- feeding, bringing in from turn out, watering, turning out, mucking, barn maintenance stuff, field maintenance stuff, more mucking, bringing in, feeding, turning out, topping water, haying for night. If the vet or farrier comes, add that. If it is cold, add blanketing. Lots of different people at this barn, but it’s relaxed and pretty quiet. Of course, I’ll just be two days a week.

Fringe benefit is plenty of manure. There might be more fringes but we’ll have to wait and see on that. A 47 year old girl can still dream. And clean and oil her tack.

But I do have some other thoughts. Like that I am 47 years old and that I can still do that kind of hard day’s work. That’s pretty good testimony for 17 years of a hard working, active farm lifestyle, eating mostly real food, avoiding diagnoses and doctors and the like. And I do so value those 27 years gone by and how it has left me less earnest about the whole horse thing, more joyful. I don’t seem to have lost a great deal of competence, at least nothing that won’t come back. Not that anything I’m being asked to do it actually hard. But you can’t be stupid around big, sometimes high strung and gosh darned expensive animals (we’re talking Friesians and Hanoverians and Thoroughbreds and Quarters and Gypsies here) that don’t belong to you either.

Even around chickens or rabbits, it is best to not be stupid.

Here it is still so dry. So dry. And hot. Freaky hot. We usually have maybe 5 days over 90 degrees and this year all of August and most of September has been over 90 degrees. Our normal would be 70 now, not 90. We’ve opened the field we usually use for January grazing, and are talking to people about hay now although we won’t need it for at least a couple of months. Even the big creek is little more than a trickle. It is just almost scary. Couple that with the plunging dollar, inflation that the fed wants to ignore for the sake of Wall Street, peak oil, and other things and what do you get? A really good time to not have your head in the sand I’d say.