What’s Been Happening With The Home Team

Awareness of the outside world. The Big Picture: Surviving the Next Four Years, The Big Picture and Jay Kuo, Dec 24, 2024. Useful activist advice for any time. If you don’t want to sign up, look for the small print “no thanks” to click thru.

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Happy Birthday

As Thoroughbreds, both horses age up on the first of January.

Rodney, born in 1999, is 26.

Milton, born in 2008, is 17.

Hand Over The Alfalfa

While we’ve all been partying for the holidays, Rodney has decided that he now eats alfalfa, thank you very much. Technically it’s an 80/20 mix with timothy. The result is slightly cheaper and much easier to handle. The 20/80 – timothy with a touch of alfalfa – is only good for bedding, in Rodney’s opinion.

I held out for a while, insisting he clean his plate. In theory, he would get hungry enough to eat. But I also worried that he needs the calories. I caved first. He now gets close to free choice 80/20.

He’s made it this far. Who am I to argue.

Bring The Blankets

Milton has decided he likes more blanket, thank you very much.

We started blanketing during a cold snap last month. [Let The Blanketing Begin, Weather Wednesday Continues]

As the degrees bounced up and down, we would mix and match the level of blanket to the particular horse and the expected temperature. Sometimes they both got blankets. Sometime only Rodney did. We left Milton au natural more often than not. We thought it was what he preferred. Milton made it clear that we were mistaken.

Milton is the second horse to warm up, so to speak, to blankets as the years go by. Mathilda turned her nose us at blankets for years, only to become a blanket hog in her old age.

Onwards!
Katherine