And So On.......

Just stuff.

 This is my barn, the photo was taken a few years ago. Dairy barn becomes horse barn.

 

Baby Zing (WF Last of Roses), my orphan foal, born June 2, 2001. I think back to the seeming insurmountable task of keeping him alive and then getting him to understand he is a horse. He turned into more than I could ever have imagined or hoped for.

Zing and Kristina, his last trainer,  2012.

I had an eggplant to use.

We had a tornado alert last night, crazy wind and then rain. No tornado, but the weather was intense. I see this becoming our new normal. A small town in southern Minnesota got wiped out, a town I hadn't heard of. Tornados in May...not the old normal. We are adjusting what's normal.

It's a dreary, windy day. The horses love it, the no-see-ems have  hatched and are bothersome to them. Next will come gnats. Windy days are welcome in their world. It's also cool, another welcome as far as they are concerned. They may be desert horses, but they are from Minnesota. 

Monday

A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth. A simple morning's greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.

-Maya Angelo

Perfectly captures the times in which we live. 

Be Like Frieda

Frieda believes one should stop and smell the lilacs.

 

Sunshine, No Lolipops

I got three side dish meals from an eggplant gratin I made a few days ago. It's now gone.

 It took me years to learn to eat beef any other way than well-done. 

It's a bright sunshiny day. I'm not feeling as low as I did yesterday. Sunshine helps. I read an article a couple of days ago on protein. It seems seniors (I don't think of myself as one, but I guess I am) need more of it. And those carrying weight like me need even more. I'm incorporating cannellini beans in our lunch today with the remainder of the roasted peppers from a couple of days ago. I'll come up with something. 

Anyway....it's a beautiful day, I'm not in the depths of despair and one of the barn cats who went missing is home and just fine. He's not talking. Be happy, eat well.......

Civic Responsibility

Many of us are feeling a deep sadness and a sense of futility. I know I am. I've chosen to not write about it, I find I cannot. What I would say I've said so many times over so many years....and yet again, here we are.

So, I go to my place of some comfort.

Find your place of comfort. Come November, vote. Like someone's life depends on it.

 

Try to Find the Good

I was outside for part of the afternoon yesterday supervising Mark. I had lots of plans in my mind. My back cancelled them. I did take some photos, it's more difficult in sunshine to see what you are doing with a phone camera.

I planted these trees in 2008 along the indoor area, now hay and machine shed. They were small.

Keetah's out of here

We have compost that has turned to soil. Mark is adding fresh soil to the old water tanks I plant zucchini in. 

This was the outdoor arena. It hasn't been a riding arena since 2012, I used it as a large vegetable garden for four years, ending in 2017. The fence line became overgrown with wild grapevine, Mark pulled it off last month. So many of the posts had rotted and just toppled over without the support of the vines.  

Mark is too busy to get the fencing taken down right now. Realistically, it could be July before it's gone. 

These junipers grew so large. They and some of the other conifers are showing stress from the drought we had last year.

Madame Apple Tree. She is old and heirloom, she produces when she wants to. When she does the apples are small and sweet. Bill says he can't remember the tree not being there and Bill is 72. We need to cut the suckers out, they aren't helping the old tree.

So much horridness is happening in this world and this country I thought I'd take a little photo stroll through the good, the bad and the ugly at my home. 

 

Echo of the Past

 I was prompted to recall this post I wrote in 2009 when I read something on Boud's post yesterday. I had scrolled through my old posts when I restarted this blog, curious about what I had been thinking and writing those years past. There was a phrase I read yesterday about our not being able to see what is on the inside. How we can see something and think it's idyllic and wish. It brought this to mind. What was my inside 13 years ago.

   Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.

John W. Gardner

The blogosphere hosts an abundance of smart, educated, interesting and unique individuals. There is a range of Ph.D, JD, MD, you and me and everything in between. People who travel all over the world, often to far off places, people who live in countries not of their birth. People native to countries that I will never visit. Artists, writers, dreamers, smart, witty, urbane people who can delight you, make you think beyond your borders and people within your borders who through their intellect make you wonder about their lives and your own.

So as I explore these places, these often deeply personal spaces, sometimes flip and irreverent glimpses of life, I wonder at my own ordinariness. Where, I wonder, do I fit into this unbelievable arena of extraordinary? I read their words, I am pulled into their places and I think, whoa. I'm so ordinary. 

  Just Jules    is doing something called 'I Am' and you fill in the blank. I must put a photo of my response on my blog on white paper in black marker. Those of you who have followed me from the start know I am Wonder Woman and you know why. My answer got me thinking about my extraordinary ordinariness. How we are all extraordinary, but we don't look and see. We see the lives of others and we sigh. That is so much different from my ordinary life. And it is. It really is, and it probably is wonderful and exciting and fulfilling. But in some way it is also ordinary to the person living it.

I thought of my ordinary life. I thought about the things in my life that are extraordinary and yet so ordinary.

The ordinary things: giving birth to a child and rearing him to a kind, productive manhood. Or witnessing and sometimes aiding in dozens of lives being born to my mares over the long years. Listening to that nicker as mama talks to her baby for the first time, seeing that small body attached to so much leg struggle to rise and stay standing. Hearing the first suckling sound as baby finds the source of life in mama's udder. Watching them run for pure joy and being so fortunate to see them thrive.

Facing the extraordinary that sometimes happens in an ordinary life. Working in concert with volunteer firefighters to free a pregnant mare from a collapsed pole barn on a February morning. Feeling the rush throughout the body of relief when she is up and out of the wreckage and alive. Then the heartbreaking sadness when the filly she carried and nurtured dies at four months.

Ordinary on a breeding farm, but not in my core, to watch my foundation mare bleed to death after foaling her colt. Realizing I can't mourn the mare, I have her son to raise. Keeping him alive and raising him to be Zing. So I mourn the mare still, because I never got the opportunity to do it when I needed to. So I cry as I write about her.  And I wonder in amazement at the foal I raised to this gentle horse.

I have managed to stay married to my second husband for many years. This is not always easy, I think because it becomes so ordinary. Maintaining a marriage is ordinary and very extraordinary.

Being bitten, stomped, tossed, pushed, trampled, dragged. And I still like raising horses. An often ordinary day on a breeding farm. Watching the breeding horses talk to one another over the fence line and knowing its not all ordinary, sometimes it's magic. 

Holding an animal in your arms as it takes its first or its last breath, around here that is ordinary. And it is another moment of magic. The coming of life and the final wisp of breath as life leaves its shell. It's just as important to tend to dying as to arriving. Very ordinary, but so extraordinary. 

 Knowing I'm so much more than I ever thought I was, but realizing I'm less than I could be. And having to live with it.

And I am Wonder Woman because I am. I don't live in an exotic location, I don't spend my days with clever people. I spend my days with clever horses and annoying dogs. I go to these places via the internet and I yearn a bit for the lives so different from my own, these people who look beautiful, are funny and smart and chic. I look at my ever expanding waist, my feet encased in work boots, my gnarled hands with dirt under the nails and my wardrobe that consists of elastic waistbands and tee shirts. I tell stallions to put it away, I give a balding horse his herbs and hope he will be OK, I pull burrs out of manes, notice when they are sick, spend my life in their company. I often believe I speak their language better than my own. I made the call to live this ordinary life. They in turn made me Wonder Woman. I am deeply grateful.

Next Time I'll Bring the Wine

It was chilly and overcast yesterday, perfect for soup. But then, isn't everyday?

 

I thought I'd try a video, the soup always steams so much photos often seem blurred.

I have been finding it rather strange being here. I'm new, even though I'm not. I had a decade-long absence, I had a traumatic brain injury, I got older. I'm not the person I was when I started, which isn't unusual, but I didn't become this person along the way with those of you I followed from the start. I don't know your story for the past decade. I show up, life has moved on and I feel... odd. My life has been the square peg fitting into the round hole, but this is a different odd. Perhaps I'm drawn back in time, before smartphones, when I used my Mac exclusively, before I got dragged into Facebook because nearly everyone I knew here migrated there. Maybe because I dumped Facebook three years ago and spend very little time with Instagram, this has sort of become a return to the 2000s, leaving me feeling a little disoriented. Different from how I would feel if I had stayed all along? Anyway, I feel a bit like a stranger in a strange land, just showing up and I forgot to bring the wine.

So, I post food photos. I think I was more interesting once, but that could be memory making me more than I was. 

Life Things

These two are fast friends. They are Frieda and Keetah, so perhaps that was the start of their connection. They also have matching coats. Frieda rubs on Keetah often, there is no threat emanating from this big girl. Keetah did live with a cat before coming to live with us. Murphy, the cat, went to live with my son and has helped their very nervous cat calm down.

I got the bread making thing rolling again after a week of store bread. It was a high of 52F degrees yesterday, which helped prompt me. I tend to slack off on bread making over the summer. Somehow heating an oven doesn't have the same feeling for me when it's godawful hot and humid. Mark got happy when he saw the loaf cooling. He's so easily pleased!

Speaking of Mark, he spent all of yesterday and will do the same today, lopping saplings along the pasture fencing. We've always had to control the woodlands desire to spread but we have noticed a marked difference over the past eight-to-ten years. It's almost uncontrollable. Softwood trees like our warmer, more humid weather.   It's a lot of work for him.

The geldings got their first two hours on pasture yesterday. I have to let them get accustomed to grass, I cannot do it as gradually as is advised because there are too many of them, but I give it three days, increasing the time on grass by an hour per day. If there were fewer of them or if I had much more pasture land they could just be left on pasture and get used to it gradually, but I don't so they can't. When they are settled I will start the process with the mares. My stallion gets to do it the easy way, as he has a pasture to himself which is large enough his grazing won't affect the grass growth. It was much more work when I had up to forty horses here! Yes, I was not sane.

It's 49F degrees and cloudy, not springlike at all, unless we are talking Minnesota spring. Which we are, so never mind. I lit a fire last evening and will again tonight. I don't want to run the furnace. Which as I write this I hear it, so, yah.

I think I'm going to make soup for lunch. We have a crusty bread, it's chilly outside and Mark will have spent a morning working outside. Sounds like a good plan.

Ciao, bella

A Tale of Food

We had a nice, easy dinner last night of chicken, potatoes and onion made on a sheet pan.

I really appreciate the simplicity of a sheet pan and a moderately hot oven.

An interesting person, Boud, I follow had a link to a podcast I listened to   onbeing 

I found it interesting and I learned a couple of new things. I learned of microbiomes several years ago through a documentary on the gut and how absolutely important they are to our health. I didn't know there were these organisms living in the colon feeding on things like fiber and pointing out how essential to our well-being fiber actually is. And...how little is in the standard American diet. When I had influenza and then pneumonia I spent a considerable amount of hours streaming and much of that time was with documentaries, often about food and health.

I changed my diet after the financial crash in 2008. I had turned to mostly processed food after we moved here because I was so busy I had neither time nor energy to cook. I changed not because I was thinking of my health but rather my wallet. I was in the grocery store, picked up a jar of marinara and actually looked at the price. I knew how to make sauce. I knew how to cook. I simply had stopped. That was the beginning of my redemption. 

We do not eat highly processed food and haven't since that lightbulb moment in the grocery aisle. I make bread, whole grain, mostly, and try hard to get those vegetables in. The ones with high fiber and bright colors. I am insulin resistant and have been for years, but in all those years I have not tipped into diabetes. I watch my carbs and I do not eat foods filled with those things we can't pronounce that all come down to being sugar in one form or another. 

All of this is to get to here: I had results from an extensive blood panel  yesterday. Speaking to the doctor she said looking at your blood work no one would know your age. She said I am remarkably healthy. She said this knowing I am obese! I pointed that out, the response was the body doesn't lie. I told her I didn't know about that. So, I thought about this and then listened to this podcast and wondered if my dietary habits are why this obese person doesn't show the expected results of an obese person in blood work, nor did a stress test for that matter? I'm going to think so, because I can't think of another reason. My parents had multiple health problems, multiple medications by my age. I take no meds. 

The phrase "You are what you eat" was brought up in the podcast. It's true, isn't it.