Friday Evening

Titus, my parents' adopted bird dog.
He wants all the hugs.

A very curious Joey Joey while we walked the
lower pasture.

My weekend kicked off pretty great. (See how it ended up.)

I left you guys on Friday afternoon, counting the hours until I got to go out and see my best boy. (On a normal day, I get off around 5ish.)
My boss came into my office a little before 4:30 and asked me what I was doing.
"Um... work?" I replied. (I quickly replaced homemade showsheen recipes with my email inbox in case he looked around the desk.)
"No, turn off your computer and get going. Any paper work or emails that come in the next 30 minutes can wait until Monday."

I can't tell you how quickly I jumped up out of there. When I went out to my car, the sky was super duper overcast and dark with the threat of a heavy thunderstorm; so I raced the 10 minutes to my parents' farm to see my boy. I had run an errand for the office manager earlier that day and it had been the perfect opportunity to stop and buy some sponges and spray bottles for the tackroom. (Joey got a shower last time, but I had done nothing to his sweaty, patchy face. I was planning on using the sponges to clean him up a little bit.)

Mom's garden that never was to be this year.

But, alas, upon arriving at the barn, I was just in time for the first raindrops. I went into the house to change into my barn clothes and my mom chased me out the door laughing about how I was about to get soaked and shouldn't be out. She followed me down to the barn where I slipped some treats over the fence before she recruited me to walk the lower pasture with her before the serious rain started. We talked over all the fencing that was in disrepair from the last couple of years and also the tornadoes that had ripped through my parents' yard this last spring. (It it honestly by the grace of God that I even have my little blind pony anymore after that.) Joey's been locked out of the lower pasture so that we could let it grow back; but then the fencing pretty much all fell to disrepair in the weather since it's all downhill, and it needs to be picked back up before he can be let out to graze down there. The tornadoes ripped up the entire fence around my parents' pool, and we've already seen what the outcome of combining that with a blind horse was...

Some feline friends: Tiger, the king of our barn.

Feline friends: This is Aubbie, one of our younger toms.
(See the chicken wire? Yeahhh he's not supposed to be in
the tackroom....)

This is Maggie, my parents' sweet black lab.
Is there any other kind?

Some views of the inside of the barn. This really needs to be the next project: What was supposed to be a five-stall barn, including a wash stall, has turned into a catch-all -- isn't that always the way?

Walking in from the front massive sliding door.
The tack room (where Aubbie was laying on the bookshelf) is directly to your left.

The panels make up one stall that is adjacent to the other stall that you see. Both are open to the paddock.
(They both used to have double-dutch doors to them; but they rotted away last summer.)

"But WHEN can I eat all the grass in the lower pasture, Mom??"

Needless to say, Joey didn't get much attention from me on Friday after work (*sad face*); but my sister had gone out to groom him already earlier that day, so he was sleek and beautiful. \o/ And I can tell he's much happier and peppier since I started coming out to give him some TLC. I think my presence and reason for being over there has sparked something in my family, as well, as they seem to spend more time doting on him lately.













I went inside to try out making some homemade showsheen from a recipe I found online while it rained a little outside. Then I went home to make THE PERFECT chocolate chip cookies. O.O (very tedious recipe that requires patience -- which I don't have when in the kitchen -- but SOOOO worth it!!)




And I knew I was going to have to make amends with Lexi for visiting her long-lost family without her; so of course when I bought the sponges and spray bottles earlier, a pack of rawhide bones had to go in the basket as well.