Wonderful day!

The weather has been perfect today.  Absolutely PERFECT!  Buddy and Lisa cleared out the entire front room of the barn and Buddy moved about 10 bales of hale over from the porch to the barn so they'll be right at hand when it gets cold and rainy next time -- AND so that there's room on the porch for me to use the ramp over near the barn and not have to go down the front steps and walk clear across the front of the house when it's pouring rain either.   Excellent.

And Mike Bayer who has a welding business nearby came over with his wife and picked up those iron mesh gates from the barn.  He's going to cut them in half so that the gates to the horses' stalls can be opened from either side, though (hopefully) NOT by the horses.  He's also going to prime and paint them with some sort of vinyl paint that they use on wrought iron fences so they will be a bit less rough on the horses' noses if they stick their noses up against them.  We had  two full-height doors and there are three interior stall entries, so he's going to cut the 2 doors in half and make short doors to the 3 stalls then use the fourth half as a door going out of Bug's stall to the outside.  We often need to keep her in for one reason or another and she pushes against anything screwed into the door frame until the screw eye just opens up.  A 2-foot high steel mesh gate should take care of that problem until we get the full dutch doors down the road.

Then he's going to take the other 36" wide steel mesh door we used on the dog room in the garage and cut that one in half and frame the two pieces to be used as windows in the walls between the horse stalls.  That way we can make the walls high and still have good air circulation and the horses will still be able to see each other - but NOT bite each other.

And THEN (down the road), he's going to build us welded frames for dutch doors on all five 4' wide by 9' tall exterior stall doors.  Then Mark will just have to cut 3/4" plywood and screw it to those frames and trim it out with boards in that x-shape you always see on dutch doors.  

He brought his wife over with him to meet the horses and she fell in love with Duke.  She was telling me how she thought her little (18 month old) boy would love him, so I told her she could bring him with her when they come back with the gates.  That should be fun.   The woman we bought Duke from had several little girls and she said Duke was always very good with them.  They were in the 6 to 10 age range and rode him all together.  She told us that at one time they were bathing him and one of the girls was actually UNDERNEATH him when he slipped, but he managed to hold himself up in front and not flatten her.  That's a good boy.  A very good boy.

Then this evening I went over to PetSmart to pick up dog food and cash in a coupon and while I was there I found a new bone that is (theoretically) indestructible -- PERFECT for Joey!

"Virtually indestructible" ???  We shall see!

I love that . . . "even your big dog cannot destroy it!"
Well, whoever wrote that sure knew what he was doing.
Once I read that, I HAD to buy the thing!

I handed it to Joey a few minutes ago and he carried it over to his bed and was happily chewing away when I came upstairs, so I'll be veeeery interested to see what it looks like by tomorrow.

Remember that hanger I mentioned a day or two ago?  Check this out.

That hanger is what those pieces USED to be.  But that horse psyllium worked like a champ.  Joey's been going  out at least twice as often these last two days, but by golly those plastic chips DID go on through.  Great stuff!  What a relief!

Okay.  Time to go eat.  Way PAST time actually but hey - eating late is soooo fashionable.  

Fashionable?  Truth be told, we tend to eat late just because we've been too lazy to get to it earlier.  But what the heck - it's  just us, so who cares.  The dogs and cats and horses all eat on time.  ;-D