Tuesday, September 13, 2005, 19:44
Inch by Inch
"Either I'm getting used to you -- or you're getting bigger, Isabelle," I said.
While I was cleaning up manure this morning, our new horse, Isabelle, was standing right by the gate where she likes to stand when she's not eating hay or picking grass. Isabelle has been here for three weeks now.
"You *can't* be getting bigger. Can you?" I said.
When I was finished dumping the wheelbarrow in the hayfield, I went up to the house and got a tape measure.
And sure enough, in the last month, Isabelle has grown one full inch.
But how is this possible? Four-year-old horses do *not* grow an inch in a month. Horses might gradually grow another inch between the ages of 4 and 6, but they do not grow an inch in a month.
Of course, there's a good reason why Isabelle has grown an inch in the last month.
She's not four years old.
"How old did you say this horse was?" asked my horseshoer, Jamie, who came over last Friday to trim Isabelle's feet.
"They told me four," I said.
"Two," Jamie said.
"Two?" I said.
"Two," he said.
"TWO?" I said.
"I've seen some small Quarter Horses, but never one this small," he said.
As Jamie set about the task of trimming Isabelle's feet, it became apparent that she had never had her feet trimmed before. She didn't do anything bad, but she didn't have the foggiest notion of what he wanted or how to hold her feet up.
By the time a horse is four years old, he or she ought to have had its feet trimmed maybe 10 times.
After Jamie left, I called Randy at work. He has an extremely speedy T-1 line and did a Google search on predicting height in horses.
I've never had a young horse before and have never had a reason to wonder how big a horse is going to get. When I boarded my horses at the Tennessee Walking Horse stable in the southern part of the state, every year, they would have 6 or 8 or 10 foals, but I never had a reason to wonder how big any of those horses would get, either.
We discovered that if you measure the distance from the middle of the knee to the coronet band at the top of the hoof (the coronet band is like a human's cuticle), the number of inches will indicate the number of hands a horse will be at maturity. A hand is four inches (measure the width of your hand from the thumb across to the outside of your hand by your little finger; the distance is four inches in most people). We also discovered another method of measuring from the elbow to the fetlock and then measuring from the elbow up toward the withers. This will indicate the horse's mature height, as well.
I tested it on Kajun. He's 24 and was done growing a long time ago. He is 15 hands and is exactly 15 inches from the middle of his knee to the coronet band. The other measurement holds up, too.
Isabelle, when we bought her, was 14 hands (or 56 inches). The distance from her knee to her coronet band is 15 inches. She will probably still grow another 4 inches. The reason this method is accurate, I discovered, is because the bone from the knee to the foot reaches its mature length by the time a horse is one year old; the rest of the body grows to catch up with that.
So, in other words, we don't have a greenbroke 4-year-old. We have a 2-year-old (or maybe 3 years or in between 2 and 3 years).
No WONDER Isabelle has been eating everything I put in front of her. She's still growing!
We have also discovered that Isabelle doesn't know anything about stopping, starting, turning right and left or backing. We can get on her back, but she doesn't know anything about being ridden. We can get a bridle on her, but she isn't used to the bit and doesn't like it.
This is by way of saying that we have an unbroken 2 to 3 year old -- and that we will have to start from square one. Since we were told she was a greenbroke 4-year-old, I assumed it would be a matter of refining and practicing what she already knew. I had no idea I was going to have to teach her *everything* beginning with the absolute basics.
Talk about your big surprises.
That's okay, though, I guess. I'm going to do a little work with her this fall. She can spend the winter eating, growing and filling out. Then next spring, we'll start working harder.
And here I was hoping to be going out for lots of glorious trail rides next spring.
Hmmmmm. . .now I'm going to have to figure out where I can put a riding arena. It's good to be in an enclosed area when you're working with a young horse. Maybe I can use the little "L" pasture that we created when we put in the lane this summer before Isabelle arrived.
All I can say is -- it's going to be an adventure. And a learning experience. For both of us. Or I should say, "all of us" -- because Randy will be putting in some cowboy time, too. I don't want Isabelle to get so used to only one person riding her that no one else *can* ride her.
I don't think I'm going to have to twist Randy's arm, though. He's already calling her "sweetheart." And bringing her extra grain. And giving her an extra flake of hay. And saying that he hopes she likes us. (Jeepers, I don't know about that one. Just because she starts nickering and comes on the run whenever someone walks out of the house. . .)
LeAnn R. Ralph
Monday, September 12, 2005, 03:23
It's Always SOMETHING
Talk about having a birds' eye view of my nephew's wedding. Randy and I sat up in the balcony so Randy could videotape the wedding. The pastor preferred that Randy tape from the balcony so that no one would get in anyone else's way -- and that was fine with Randy. He videotaped my other two nephew's weddings, but he in the thick of things then, and every time the congregation stood up or the bridal couple or the attendants moved around, someone was sure to end up in his way and would be blocking the view.
Unfortunately, it was hotter than an oven up in the balcony. The church has air conditioning, but you'd never know it in the balcony. (For the record, I heard from the happy couple and their attendants that it wasn't any cooler at the front of the church.)
The church was packed, too. During the rehearsal, the pastor said that, at capacity, the church would hold 260 people -- and the church was packed to capacity -- including the balcony.
The ceremony went along nicely. No major hitches and no disasters. No one fainted. No one tripped and fell. The cute little ringbearer and the flower girl did everything they were supposed to. (Although, if there WAS a disaster, at least Randy would be videotaping it, and then we could submit it to America's Funniest Home Videos and if we won any money, we could split it with my nephew and his wife.)
After the ceremony, Randy and I and many of the other guests headed out to the golf course where the reception was going to be held. The bridal party didn't show up for quite a while because they were finishing up with taking pictures. I really didn't care to stand around outside in the sun and wait, so off we went.
If I thought the church was packed, it was nothing compared to the reception. There were probably 300 people at the reception, if not more, and we were jammed into the reception hall for dinner like sardines in a can.
Well, okay, sardines is a cliche. We were packed into the reception hall like . . .cows being hauled in a cattle trailer. If the banquet facility had air conditioning -- which I suppose it did -- the air conditioning was having a hard time keeping up with 300 warm bodies and a temperature outside of more than 90 degrees.
That's right. 90 degrees. Did I mention that before? The forecasters were absolutely correct in their forecast. The temperature was 90 degrees. (Today, Sunday, the temperature topped out at 95 degrees.)
Anyway, it was a lovely dinner and a beautiful reception, and a good time was had by all, as they say, and then it was after 8 p.m. and starting to get dark outside, and Randy and I figured we'd better head home because we had an hour's drive ahead of us and still had to feed our horses and take the dogs for a walk and feed the dogs and kitty-cats and so forth.
And that's when the trouble started.
Randy had driven to the wedding, so I was going to drive home. We got into our pickup truck, put on our seat belts, I put the key in the ignition, the dash lights came on, everything looked good to go -- I turned the key in the ignition, I heard a "pop" -- the dash lights went dark . . .
And that was it.
So -- it was back inside to the reception to find my other nephew, who is a tech. ed. teacher and teaches classes in automotive repair. He brought another young man outside with him and they set about trying to figure out what was wrong with our truck. They checked fuses. They checked more fuses. They checked still more fuses.
Nothing.
Then they brought the other young man's truck over and tried a jump start.
Nothing.
Then they checked some more fuses.
Still nothing.
By this time, an hour had gone by. My brother and sister-in-law were waiting for us because my nephew said that even if the truck started, we should probably have someone follow behind us.
We ended up leaving the truck 40 miles from home and riding home with my brother and sister-in-law (they only live a half mile away from us).
It was midnight by the time we got all of the animals squared away.
At church this morning, my husband asked a friend of ours, who is a mechanical genius in every sense of the word, if he would go with him to Mondovi, and if he would also bring his gooseneck trailer in case they couldn't get our truck started and had to haul it home.
Right after church, my husband changed his clothes, I took him over to our friend's house, and not long after -- with the gooseneck trailer in tow -- they headed off to see if they could fix our truck or if they were going to have it haul it back.
In the meantime, I went home to feed the horses and to take care of the dogs and cats. My nephew and his wife were having their gift opening today (as I said to Randy, since when did weddings turn into three-day affairs?). The gift opening was starting at noon. My brother and sister-in-law kindly offered me a ride. They were planning on leaving at 11 a.m. My morning chores take about an hour and a half to two hours, depending on how much water I've got to carry, whether I have to scrub out tubs and buckets, how much horse manure I've got to haul out to the hayfield, how dirty the horses are and how much I have to brush them before I can put fly spray on them (because fly spray won't do much good if they are dusty and dirty from rolling and at this time of year, the flies are just ridiculous, especially the faceflies), whether I have to go back to house to get more cat food and that sort of thing. I didn't start until 10:30 a.m. today what with church and taking Randy over to our friend's house. So, I called my brother and sister-in-law and told them to go ahead without me.
At 1 p.m. Randy called -- they had gotten our truck started. The battery had gone dead and was completely out of commission -- wouldn't take a charge and had to replaced -- and they also found a loose fuse -- which is what prevented truck from starting last night from the jump start.
Now, here's my question. . .
WHY COULDN'T THE TRUCK HAVE PULLED SOMETHING LIKE THAT WHEN RANDY WAS IN MENOMONIE AND OUR MECHANICAL GENIUS WAS ONLY 20 MINUTES AWAY?
I mean, really. Couldn't it have waited a day to do that until Monday, when Randy was at work and closer to home?
Apparently not.
LeAnn R. Ralph