Happy Birthday, Mocha!

Our Mocha turned 26 today!!

to sweet Mocha, who will forever be our "little man!"

You can see some of his baby pictures on this post. They grow up so fast! Or do they?… Mocha has always been playfully, mischievously coltish. In fact, on his latest boarding bill that arrived in our mail today, his caretaker wrote, "He's a big goof ball." She doesn't know the half of it! Despite its horrible lighting and composition (being a scanned 35mm photo doesn't do it any favors), this is one of my favorite Mocha pictures, taken one day in the winter of '91 when he decided to pretend he was a unicorn:

Those are big cockleburs tangled in his forelock! (I guess if you don't have access to dreadlocks wax, you make do!*) :-) He did that all by himself, and was so proud. There was no getting them out, either - they were there till spring, when we could work on them for hours with mineral oil, comb and scissors! But that's okay, he was a handsome unicorn. Maybe I should post this greeting for him instead! :-)

*I looked all through that article, and it didn't suggest the cockleburs option once! :-)

Update: After I'd posted this, Mocha requested I pass along this tip and assure you that in his experience, it's excellent advice…

Nature hike and Mocha howdy

Last Sunday was a perfect June day as well as the last day of BW's week of vacation, so we loaded up the girls and drove to the ranch where Mocha lives to go on a nature hike and then visit Mocha. I took along my easy-to-tote Kodak, so here are some photos from our expedition!

I took this photo of this antelope buck and his posse from the Jeep on our way to the gravel pit road where we hike. I was glad my Kodak has a good telephoto lens, because they had bounded quite a distance away before feeling safe enough to pose for a group photo!...

I don't know if we frightened this little Killdeer from her nesting area or what, but as we walked past a sandy area beside the road, she sort of jumped-flew out in front of us and did a funny little dance several times, then insisted on running ahead of us for the rest of our uphill walk! If we lagged behind too much she'd wait for us, looking back over her shoulder rather impatiently (as she was doing in this photo) till we caught up enough to satisfy her. She wouldn't let me get much closer than 10 yards or so, so I took this with my telephoto and cropped it so she'd be in the bottom left corner of the picture and easier to spot - she's really camouflaged against those beige stones and grasses!...

BW spied this pretty little cactus-looking flower, but I haven't had time to identify it yet. Do any of you know what it is? (Anyone? Anyone?) :-)...

Now this blooming flower I DO know. It's the infamous Crazy-Dog Plant! :-) Josie seems quite pleased with herself for posing so perfectly between these two budding Yucca flowers...

I love this photo so decided to have a little editing fun with it...

Mocha has been back in out in the pasture and reunited with his old buddies from last summer, Prairie and Flame, for for a couple of weeks and is looking great! He's put on weight and is sleek and shiny, and galloped and pranced like a colt when he saw us...

L-R Prairie, Flame and Mocha

He seemed eager to show off his hair accessories, of which he was quite proud, so I told him I'd put a photo of his new fashion statement on the blog for everyone to admire. When Josie overheard this, she insinuated herself into the photo - so please don't fail to admire her, too, 'cause that's how feelings can get hurt. ;-)

Speaking of Josie, for those of you keeping track, her heart function blood work came back inconclusive, scoring fairly near the low (good) end of the "gray area" range between definitely no heart disease and definite heart disease. Since she did well on this hike and on our walks since and has no other symptoms in her heart sounds or on her xrays, rather than running further tests our vet has me keeping a log of our walks - the temperature, distance walked, how far she gets before (and how many times) she demands a break. I call it the "Josie Crap-out Log" and between thee and me, I think Josie's quite pleased to have taken her high-maintenance reputation to a new level! :-)

Horsing around

On Saturday we went to visit Mocha, who turned 25 on April 4th! Poor old guy had to have two teeth pulled last month (one was loose and the other rotten), which caused him to have trouble chewing and made him lose weight over the winter. But since his dental procedure he's been eating far more and putting the weight back on. Until they start irrigating the pastures in the next couple of weeks, he's staying most of the time in the big corral where he spent the winter, and where he has a new roommate and best friend - a girlfriend this time - Tina. She's a very elderly mare who eats as slowly as he does so they both get to eat their fill without faster eaters stealing all the food. 

He's looking a bit raggedy since he's still in the process of loosing his winter coat, but was happy to see us and put on an entertaining display of his many remaining teeth! :-)=

Actually, this is how he demonstrates his bliss at having his throat scratched! BW took over the scratching so I could take these photos...

He's always been such an affectionate sweetie...

Perk, owner of the place where Mocha's boarded, took us into her "horspital" to see a new foal. She was born 2 weeks earlier, the smaller member of a set of twins, and was so tiny at birth - just 37 pounds!! - that no one expected her to make it. But she was born a feisty redhead, and now here she was, weighing in at a respectable 80 pounds (a typical weight for a newborn foal), and looking for trouble. :-) (Sadly, her bigger twin was the one who didn't survive - she was positioned wrong in the birth canal, and deprived of oxygen too long). :-(

Little Red here doesn't have an official name yet, but she's sure got a full supply of moxie*, which you can probably tell from her mischievous expression! 

She's wearing "support hose" for a bit longer to help keep her legs straight. :-)

(*I thought "Moxie" would be a good name for her, but was told since her mom's name is "Ghiardelli," they were trying to come up with a diminiative chocolatey name like "chips." I frankly thought that was stupid, so suggested something still along the Italian candy-ish theme: "Dulce." As in "la dulce vita." But was shot down again. So I gave up. If you've got a good name suggestion for this little darling, please leave it in the comments! Not that I'll give it to Perk. I frankly can't take any more rejection. LOL)

It wasn't long before she got up and came over to the stall doorway, where Perk, BW and I were, and tried several times to slip past us and go off on some Grand Adventure! I was crouched down to get her photos, and when I took this one, the sound of the shutter startled her. But not enough to keep her from trying to give us the slip several more times! What a stinker...

All those escape attempts sure worked up an appetite! Perk said that the filly was so tiny that until recently she could walk under her mom's belly without ducking, and couldn't reach her milk...

Exciting stuff for the rest of us, but Mom seemed pretty bored with it all!...

Getting to hike with the girls, visit my boy and meet this new baby and her Mom on the day before Mother's Day made for a pretty nice Mother's Day weekend! Hope yours was too. :-)

Thursday Challenge: Friends

This week's Thursday Challenge is

FRIENDS (Gatherings, Parties, Time Together, Sharing,...)

Friends come in all shapes, sizes, colors, creeds, and species! Here are some photos of friends, a couple from my archives and most fresh off my camera...

Some friends really stick their necks out, while others can act a bit snooty at times...

Jane Doe and Willow hang out on our front porch

Other friends are great at teamwork, dutifully staffing their posts and sharing the responsibility of keeping watch. (For what, exactly, only they know)...

Josie, Willow and Tess stand guard among the lupine,

perhaps watching for the Lupine Express!

And when one of them (we won't name names, but her initials are Tess) falls asleep on the job, the others cover for her...

Las Tres Amigas at Whitney Commons

Sometimes one friend inspires the other to stick with their exercise program by running circles around them...

Robyn's granddog Ani leads Willow a merry chase

Some friends work together to figure things out...

When brothers Val & Tino came to live with us in mid-Feb 2008,

they were baffled by the purpose of their exercise wheel!

But working together, they not only figured it out quickly,

they started inventing various games for it,

many of which they still play well into their golden years!

This theme gave me an opportunity to share additional photos that Andrea and Robyn emailed me recently of our fun little Vegan Meetup breakfast picnic...

Now I have proof I was actually there! :-)

Robyn, me and Ken (photo by Andrea)

Me, Andrea, Ken and Buffy (photo by Robyn)

And it also provides an opportunity to share some very recent photos of Mocha (and his pasture buddy "Prairie") in his wonderful new home!

Prairie and Mocha (wearing his fly mask) abandon

grazing along the lovely creek to come get some cookies!

Cookies eaten, the boys bid farewell.

As do I, till next week's challenge!

Visit this week's friendly Thursday Challenge!

Burros and babies and news, oh my!

OMG, it's alive! And it remembers (though just barely) how to blog! :-)

I can't tell you how much I appreciate your patience, understanding and supportive comments, though I wouldn't blame any of you if you stopped being my followers! After all, I don't seem to be going anywhere, so what's to follow? :-) But thank you for sticking with me so far anyway.

As Daphne astutely observed in her comment today, at least a brief blog blurb is better than nothing, so I will share some updates. Though I doubt it will be brief (I have too much bottled-up blogging to release!), it will be sparser in details than it could be (oh, the stories I could tell!) but extravagantly abundant in photos to make up for my month of silence.

So without further ado, here's some latest news on...

Our House:

Not our house. Bears no resemblance to our house.

Merely a facsimile of a house I hope to live in one day!

Our house went on the market three weeks ago tomorrow and has been through five showings plus a tour for several realtors in our listing agency, an MLS realtor open house, and two photography sessions. Each event required the same degree of cleaning, prepping and staging (e.g. hide the dish drain rack, laundry, toothbrush gear, toaster, ugly electric tea kettle, all evidence of our three dogs, put out the pretty hand towels, turn on all the lights, etc), and then finding somewhere for the dogs and I to go hang out for an hour or more. Plus I had to furnish treats for the realtor open house. Being a glutton for punishment, I actually baked organic cornbread (a healthier variation of Colleen's recipe in The Joy of Vegan Baking) along with furnishing fresh organic fruits and juice and some vegan store-bought goodies. At least I came home to crumbs (including on my carpet, grrr), much to BW's chagrin since he was wanting some of the cornbread himself. So I baked him a second batch. (See why I can never find time or energy to blog?)

Anyway, all five sets of potential buyers reportedly loved the property (though 80% of them came out in absolutely horrid weather, and 100% of them weren't offered cornbread), but none of them made an offer for various reasons. (Too far from town, need to sell their place, etc - and our personal favorite: there's no large, flat spot to put in a SWIMMING POOL! Oy.)

Three of them made loud noises about being very interested, wanting a second showing and planning to make an offer, only to disappear into the great Potential Buyer Black Hole. Well, except for one who hasn't officially vanished yet but we have only the dimmest hope of ever handing them our house keys at a closing. It's a roller coaster ride, and not the fun kind that makes you shriek with laughter and want to go for another turn. No, this is the kind that just makes you want to shriek with frustration and then throw up your cotton candy and popcorn. And so we keep our house immaculate, our dishes washed, our laundry laundered, our bed made, our grass cut, our trash emptied, our windows spotless, our faces scrubbed ~ ready to just run the "hide everything that suggests someone actually LIVES here" drill and vacate the premises. It's tuckering work! Oh, and having repaired, maintained and virtually scrubbed the surface off of everything inside the house, we're now working on landscaping and other outdoor projects. Because though it's not really spring here quite yet, it's close enough. After all, our first hummingbird arrived on Saturday! YAY!

Our Vacation:

We were supposed to leave for a two-week trip to Oregon at the end of this month during BW's vacation, driving there and taking Willow with us while Robyn house and critter-sat everyone else. But for several reasons (the rising cost of gas, chaos with the house sale and realtor, blowing vacation money on new gutters and other home improvement projects), we oh-so-painfully cancelled all our carefully researched and finalized reservations. We made new ones for a five-day consolation trip in early June to Fort Collins, CO instead, where we'll spend BW's birthday. Tasty Harmony, here we come! Robyn took three workdays off so she could stay at our house and critter-sit everyone the whole time we're gone, and make the house available for any showings that might pop up. Robyn is a real trooper and a good friend, don't know what we'd do without her! Willow will be staying home, but there will still be one less mouth for Robyn to feed, which brings us to the big (and happy) news about:

Mocha...

Since we plan to move to a place in town (or onto a sailboat in which we'll sail to an isolated turquoise lagoon in the Caribbean where we'll live happily ever after, according to BW's plan), we were going to need to find a place for Mocha to live. As much as we have on our plate these days, and as much as there will be for us to do when we finally get a bonafide offer on this place, we figured now was as good a time as any to find a place to board him. Besides, Mocha is very social and really loves the company of other horses, but since our neighbor moved and took away his three horses (who shared Mocha's fenceline) last fall, Mocha's been alone and we knew he'd be much happier with some companions.

We didn't think it would be hard to find a place to keep a horse in Wyoming, but we were mistaken! After exploring several seemingly promising leads that were dead ends, we found an ideal place thanks to our vet tech Marti. Owned by a really nice woman named Audra, it's halfway between our house and Sheridan and we drive past it all the time but had no idea it was there! It's a great horse set-up, with a wonderful 30-acre pasture with a year-round warm water spring, a great barn, huge horse runs with nice loafing sheds, and good, safe fencing. And best of all, there are lots of other horses, plus burros (most were rescues from Colorado), several dogs and lots of people around all the time, as Audra teaches classes and hosts clinics throughout the summer, and has a small staff plus her daughter who just finished her first year of vet school in Fort Collins. They use the same vet we do, feed the same kind of hay, take care of worming and vaccinations, know everything there is to know about horses, and we can visit Mocha any time of any day. And to our delight, the cost is very reasonable!

We took him there on Saturday morning, and usually when Mocha sees other horses for the first time, he screams his fool head off with excitement and works himself into a lather. We thought he was going to cause a dreadful scene, but he was thunderstruck into silence by it all. The photo above is of him newly ensconced in his private run, mouth agape, watching some horses and burros stroll by (most of the time, most of the critters can come and go at will between the sheltered runs and the pasture). He'd never seen a burro before and was enthralled. Though according to Mocha, one of the passing burros was very scary for reasons none of us dim humans could figure out.

We left him happily munching alfalfa and continuing to gape at all the critters and activity, unable to comprehend his good fortune. When we returned the next day to visit him, he was in the pasture with his new buddies. Of course the wind was blowing 50-60 mph (I'm not exaggerating) and he was in the FURTHEST part of the pasture, but we gamely walked out there to take him some cookies and assure him we hadn't abandoned him. Here's Mocha and one of his new BFFs grazing contentedly at the far end of the pasture. (The pink arrow is pointing to our house!)...

Mocha (on the left) with two other new friends...

When we'd gotten close enough for him to hear me, I called to him and he (on the right in this photo) and his friends all came to us at a trot...

He ran up to us, all excited, but when I went to give him cookies and hugs he acted like a teenager at the mall with his friends. He's WAY too cool for that mushy stuff now, you know, so instead of taking a cookie and letting me pet him, he showed off, prancing around the pasture and jumping over a small irrigation ditch with far more verve and showmanship than it required. :-)

When we left and I yelled goodbye to him (because he was now off in the distance again, grazing with yet another new buddy) and that we'd be back again soon to visit, I could swear he mumbled, "Yeah, whatev, Ma. Later!" LOL

We were thrilled to see how quickly he had settled in, how many friends he'd made, and how happy and content he was. But we were feeling a little rejected (is this what Empty Nest Syndrome feels like?) :-) So we decided to go hang out with the burros for a while before we left. Well, actually they decided to hang out with BW, seeing as how he still had Mocha's cookies with him since Mocha was much too busy and über cool now to eat any...

The horse was a co-conspirator in the Burro Gang Cookie Heist

I love this photo of the two pairs of burros nuzzling.

The pair on the right are mother and child. So sweet!

Speaking of sweet mothers and children, the day we dropped dropped Mocha off there were two new foals in the barn. This little colt was the newest, just a day or two old...

He's studiously watching the new colt in the next stall who had been born less than a week earlier and had fun playing peekaboo with me from behind his mom's butt...

And I have to include a photo of Audra's dog Sydney, because she has such a darling, fuzzy face...

Though it was ridiculously hard to get good head shot of her because the second you merely look at her, she assumes this position!...

Notice her little eyes all squinched tight in blissful anticipation of the belly rub she is completely confident she is about to receive. And her confidence was totally justified, for how could I possibly resist? :-)

I'm glad I finally had some news and photos to share, and the time to share them! I have more fun photos to post next time and am hoping to get a chance to at least work on that later this week, but hopes just like them have been hoped and dashed many times before. I'll also try to do a better job of replying to your comments than I've been able to, but even when I'm a laggard please know that I do take the time to read them and they never fail to make my day! xoxo

What happened to October?!

I know, I know... I've been a bad blogger! A thousand pardons. Where DID October go? Well, I spent part of it in California, attending the McDougall Clinic's 10 Day Live-In Program in Santa Rosa (a most awesome experience, so more on that later!), and the rest of it was spent doing the usual - dealing with the fire aftermath and Fall Cleaning, both of which continue (though much has been accomplished fire-wise, and it's slowed down for now as we merely await the contractors who will tear down the old shop, prep the new pad and erect the new building! Yeaaa!)

We also brought Mocha home the day after I returned from CA, though we had to spend a lot more time cleaning up all the fire debris in his big pasture. But that's all done, and he's once again enjoying the run of the place and we're so happy to have him home again! We again send huge thanks to our friends Sue and Morris who took such good care of him while he was an evacuee, and Mocha sends a big shout-out (whinny-out?) to his dear friend Bugs! :-)

All the other critters are doing well, and I'll try to do better about blogging! For now I'll leave you with some photos taken at the Luther Burbank Home & Gardens in Santa Rosa, CA, one of our fun McDougall Program field trips. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with him, Luther Burbank (1849 - 1926) was a horticulturist who introduced more than 800 new varieties of plants including over 200 varieties of fruits, many vegetables, nuts and grains, and hundreds of ornamental flowers (including the Burbank "Idaho" Potato, the Shasta Daisy and the California Poppy.)

The Luther Burbank home...

In the gardens: Susan from Colorado, Perry from Australia, me, David from Sacramento...

One of Luther's beautiful roses...

The Gingko Biloba tree...

And finally, Yours Truly, dwarfed by Luther's huge prickle-less prickly pear! (We ate a piece of the fruit for dessert that night!)...