As a result of that ad I placed on Craigslist for an entire HALF a day, we have ended up with two terrific people helping us! One, Carl, is a security guard at L'Auberge Casino. He works there three days a week so he is available about anytime we really need him. And he works FAST! I'm telling you, in just four hours he cleaned up the entire back pasture and tidied up the stalls as well. Amazing!
And even better (from my perspective, anyway) is Ashley who is going to be helping clean up my saddles and bridles and things, and organize the entire barn storage areas. She's a vet tech at LSU's large animal clinic, so she's great with everything about horses. She used to work for the woman down the road from us who boards a LOT of horses, and she even worked over at Live Oak Arabians, a really large, high-end Arabian horse farm that's been over on Jefferson Highway inside the city for many decades. The police horses are even boarded there these days. It really is gorgeous. I'll have to remember to ask her what she did there, exactly. Look how lovely it is:
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| Nice barn, huh? . . . don't think we'll ever have a chandelier in ours. ;-D |
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| All these pictures were online - this is one of their stallions. |
Anyway, Ashley had knee surgery a while back so she's had to be working at the front desk at the vet school and hasn't been able to work out in those barns for a while. But she's supposed to get a release in another week or two and will be able to do whatever we need. In the meantime, though, I LOVE that she's cleaning up all my mold-covered saddles and deciding what would be a good way to arrange everything in the barn that Jerry has made a mess of while he's been painting in there! Of course, it's MY fault that all the leather is moldy. I didn't realize that high humidity would make them all absolutely green with mold, even if they were stored inside one of those big plastic storage boxes! Anyway, I got a dehumidifier a couple weeks ago, so they SHOULD be okay once that mold has been killed.
Last night Ashley came over for just a couple hours and got Duke's huge western saddle looking GREAT! I was completely discouraged about dealing with it, but it looks perfectly fine now.
I didn't take any "before" pictures of Duke's saddle because I was completely demoralized with it then. But now that I know Ashley can deal with them, I've taken some pictures of the one she'll probably be dealing with tomorrow:
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| Can you BELIEVE how awful that is??? That area behind the seat is definitely leather -- given all the mold, it almost looks like cardboard, but it IS leather. |
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| That whole thing is just awful, isn't it? But given how well she dealt with Duke's saddle, I'm sure this one will also be fine when she's done! |
Ashley said she would be back again Thursday evening and I'm sure she'll deal with another of those really yukky saddles. And when she's done cleaning up the saddles, we'll start opening up all those storage boxes and getting everything out where we can see it. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with those empty storage boxes -- maybe we can use them back in that back storage building once we clean that place up (the building that the horses went in and trashed last summer) -- but anyway, those boxes will NOT be stacked in the barn any longer! Yeaaaa!
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Oh - got a note last night from Lisa Krohn down at New Orleans Bulldog Rescue. She and their dog trainer will be bringing Bettie -- soon to be called something else -- up here on Friday morning. (Maybe I'll call her "Nettie," or "Betsy," or "Bella," or "Babette" . . . but SOMETHING different from "Bettie" since Jan's Great Pyrenees' name is Betty).
Hey . . . that visit is another great excuse for taking off work on a Friday and having a long weekend! Lisa said she has to go to work Friday afternoon, so it would either be Friday morning or Sunday when she comes up, and I'd rather be able to spend several days with now-Bettie before leaving her home by herself while I go to work. So -- Friday it is.
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