Whew!

Okay!  We're home again after Mark had his heart arrhythmia "fixed" this morning.  Hooray!  Wendy says that it often requires only that single treatment to repair the problem permanently, so I hope it's been cured for the duration.  Gotta go back in when he comes back home next time and get rechecked, so we'll see.

And now that I can stop worrying about that for the time being, here's where we are on the horse homecoming project.  First of all, ALL of the fence posts have loosened up as a result of the record drought down here.  When they were originally cemented in,  the ground was soaked.  But now that it has dried out completely (and I mean COMPLETELY), the soil around the concrete has drawn back leaving a gap of almost an inch all the way around!  So Mark says he's going to have to pull all the corner posts, dig a larger hole, and re-cement them while the ground is dry.  But in the meantime, he's just resetting some of the gate posts and leaving the fencing loose so it doesn't pull too hard on the posts.  I don't think that's going to be a real problem since our horses aren't all that fence aggressive.  At least I hope it won't. 

In the photo below, Mark has reset Bug's gate post and installed braces, and they are in the process of running the five fence wires around the interior sides of her paddock.  (The outside four-rail fencing was already in place.)

 So here's her paddock - finished!



Bug's paddock



Below is the front of Duke's paddock.  I'm thinking we will probably need to put a grid or some pea gravel or something on the ground across there.  When Knight was here at the house that area got to be a horrible muddy mess because that's where he would come and run back and forth when it was time to eat each evening.  But we'll see how it goes.  All in good time.

And below is the fence that divides the front yard from the back pasture on the canal side.  That's the area where we cut down all those trees and bushes a while back.

 Below you can see that those bushes that were cut all the way back to the ground are already halfway up that 6-foot chain link fence!  This IS Louisiana!



And that little "bush"in the foreground I'm calling a "birch bush"-- it's that river birch tree that they cut down last month!   (I'm telling you, you can't kill ANYTHING down here just by cutting it back to the ground!)