Gorgeous

The weather this weekend has been absolutely incredible.  It's sunny, around 80 degrees, with a soft breeze blowing constantly.  Beautiful.   So beautiful that I finally stripped the bed on the sleeping porch and remade it so I could sleep outside again last night.  Before Joey came, I used to sleep out there most of the time when Mark was offshore.  But Joey was just awful about destroying the bedding (when he first got here, he ate a hole in the electric mattress pad - thankfully it was NOT plugged in at the time!).  So I ended up piling empty dog beds and all sorts of things on the bed out there so he couldn't get to it.  Unfortunately, I couldn't get to it very conveniently either so I went back to sleeping inside.  But Joey has pretty much given up chewing up blankets and comforters these days.  He's chosen sheet rock in lieu of bedding lately -- but hey, I digress.

I had forgotten how much I enjoyed sleeping out there on the screened porch -- hearing the birds and crickets and frogs, the sound of the wind and the trains in the distance - none of which can be heard at all from inside.  It was a lovely night.

Today - less so.  I've been washing clothes all day today -- I probably need to have fewer clothes because by the time the supply gets down to the point where I feel like I "need" to wash clothes there are so many to wash that it takes most of the weekend to deal with them. 

I'm going to take a break in a few minutes and head over to the barn early and spend a couple hours grooming the horses.  That's so calming and relaxing to me. 

Speaking of horses, I was looking online for some new fly masks for Duke since "someone" in the pasture ripped his last one off of him, when I came across a "nose net" made by Cashel.  The thing fastens onto a halter and covers ONLY their nose so the poor guy won't have to look out through that netting over his eyes all day - he hates that.  But until now, if I didn't put one on him in summer, that huge white nose of his would blister and sometimes even get infected. 

So now he will only have to wear his breakaway halter with the nose thing attached.  I think he's going to be much happier that way. 

When I went to the feed store yesterday, I also discovered a new kind of chopped alfalfa for Ladybug that I'm hoping will help put some weight back on her.  She loves her feed, but isn't much on hay.  The new kind is called Chaffhaye.  After they chop up fresh alfalfa, they mist it with a fine mist of molasses before compressing it into bales.  It's partially fermented and when you open it, the stuff smells like liquor!   You have to use each bale within 10 days of opening it or it ferments too much and has to be discarded.  Well - I'm thinking it should work for Bug.  She LOVES that super dark ale she gets to drink in summer for her anhydrosis (inability to sweat), so she will probably like liquor-smelling hay, too!