A very productive day

Until now, we've been putting a hundred and fifty bales or so of hay on the front porch for the winter, and putting 10 or 12 bales at a time inside the barn.  Well, now that we have that white tent thing up in back, we will be putting the winter supply of hay out there next winter and bringing it up to the barn a dozen or so bales at a time.  But since this was such a warm winter, we still have a good 50 bales of hay left on the front porch!  A bit tacky-looking - especially in summer.   

And that hay inside the barn makes everything in there such a mess that I wanted to put it somewhere else, too. 

I had just finished sweeping up the hay that was all over the floor in here,
but you can still see that having the hay inside makes everything a dusty mess.     

Well, it finally occurred to me that we could get it OUT of the barn and put it outside on the BARN porch -- if we could figure out a way to keep it dry.  I got a big brown tarp to try out for protecting the back porch of the house from storms, but we decided to try using it out on the barn porch first.  So we went over to Home Depot this morning and picked up some hooks and a piece of heavy pipe and hung that tarp around half of the barn porch.  It worked great!  It makes about a 7 1/2 X 4 1/2-foot waterproof "room" out there that will hold as many as 20 bales of hay plus maybe half a dozen bags of shavings. 

Here's the barn porch before we added the tarp.

And here it is with the tarp up. 
It was a pretty breezy day, but that pipe fastened to the bottom of the tarp 
does a fine job of keeping it from blowing around.

I started to move the hay out there, but I found that the bottom bales inside the barn were beginning to get moldy on the bottom from sitting directly on the concrete.  So Mark's going to go get some pallets tomorrow to keep them off the ground and THEN I'll move all the unmoldy ones out there and clean up the inside of the barn.



This isn't a very good picture - the space looks way smaller than it actually is.  But you can see how handy the hay is going to be to the door into the stalls. 
(We don't use that door at the back of that space at the moment.) 

Duke's hay container is just on the opposite side of that porch so I can almost stand in one spot and move the hay from the storage area to his container.  Nice. 



While we were working out there at the barn, Joey was "napping" on my bed on the sleeping porch.  He looks pretty  comfy, doesn't he? 

He opened his eyes when I took his picture, but he made no attempt to move. 
He just went right back to sleep.  ;-D

I always put that white comforter on top and set that dog bed up there to keep all the dogs from climbing under the "real" covers.  (The fact that it's white lets me know immediately if there are fleas or any kind of bugs so I can deal with them right away.) 

Boo usually curls up inside that dog bed, but Joey prefers to just sleep on the bed with the comforter OVER him.  In fact, if it weren't for that dog bed, he would be under ALL the covers.  He loves sleeping out there as much as I do.  Boo and Rocky only stay there if we won't let them in, but unless it's really really cold or stormy, I have to MAKE Joey come in if he's asleep out there.  That's my boy.

While I was getting these pictures off my camera I found pictures I took a week or so ago of Arthur that I really like. 

Here he's just standing there in Duke's paddock right outside the sleeping porch.

When I called him, he looked over at me and just stood there for a minute or more . . .
(I think I woke him up.)

Then he finally walked over to me.  Progress.
(I'm outside a chain link fence - that's what's over the corner of this photo.)

Obviously these pictures were taken LAST week -- before he got his mane cut.   But he was still a cutie!

Okay.  Time to go feed the dogs and get ready for bed.  Back to work tomorrow for another difficult week. 

Gee.  Can't wait.