Author: Amanda

abscess · blog hop · surgery

TOABH: Costly

Amanda4 Comments

What has been your horse’s most expensive injury to date? Let’s exclude maintenance things, like hock injections and the magical monthly package of MSM. What single episode blew your savings or left you boiling ramen? If you want to get technical about it, time is money, too.


hahahahahaha.
 
ha.
ha.
I’ve covered this at length in the blog, but for newcomers, here’s the short version. In August 2012, Tristan blew his first ever abscess. It was really bad. He blew at the coronet band, and then at the toe, and then a few weeks later midway down the hoof. Cue 6 months of NQR; he would almost come sound, and then he wouldn’t. On and on. In March, he had surgery to remove the cause of the abscess: a bone chip from his coffin bone that had become badly infected, as well as portions of his coffin bone that had died from infection. Upon recovery from that surgery, which took months (if we’re counting the time back to normal hoof status), he came sound and has been ever since, though I would not call him 100% recovered – he still has to wear front shoes to keep that foot stabilized, because it is still not growing evenly enough to stay balanced barefoot, 2.5 years later.
Here’s what I call the foot progression collage: photos taken at monthly intervals from initial abscess to final recovery.
And here’s the post where I broke down and tallied up every penny I spent on that injury and what it went towards (three sets of x-rays, supplies, surgery, umpteen vet visits, specialty shoeing, the whole nine yards). So, to answer the original question: $6,100.08, which does not include lost opportunity costs or even begin to approximate time.
If you’re really feeling in a reading mood, check out the abscess and surgery tags. Dozens and dozens of update posts there.
road hack · winter

Wintering Over

Amanda1 Comment

On Sunday, it was 30 degrees. Thirty. Degrees!!!

I felt almost instantly more human again. I did a ton of laundry, worked around the house, and headed over to the barn for some actual time with my horse.

I tacked up and everything, and we went up and down the road for about 30 minutes. OUTSIDE! I rode him in one circuit of the outdoor ring, but he was less than enthused and I didn’t want him to strain himself. It’s one thing to ride through deep snow, but this had clearly drifted quite a lot in some places, and he was having trouble getting even steps. One step, fine, the next step, waaaaaay deeper, with no way to really see or tell which would be which.

So we did the roads.

There were horses in the turnouts just to the right who were deeply concerned that we were on the road.
 Winter apples, dried on the branch.

Road hacking in the winter is not without its travails, though. See the snow drifts on either side of the road? And the thicker snow? Down the middle of the road is the safest place to ride in some ways: it’s the most visible, and it’s the smoothest and flattest. On the other hand, it’s also the iciest, because it’s what melts first. So you’d think that it would be better, but right at the foot of those snow drifts are ditches, masked by lighter, fluffier snow that hasn’t settled and packed.
So I tend to keep him down the middle of the road, and if it feels too icy – if he’s slipping too much, I head inside. On Sunday, the warmth and the sun kept the middle of the road just fine, slushy and a bit muddy.
With so many indoors coming down lately, I was both worried and pleased to see someone on the roof digging snow off. Looking more closely, though, and chatting with the barn owner, it’s really just that corner, where the wind forces the snow into drifts. Removing the load in that corner made a huge difference.
In all, a nice ride and a productive day. Now we’re back to low single digits, though, so back inside for me.

blog roundup

Weekly Blog Roundup

Amanda2 Comments

Here are some interesting blog posts from the past week in the horse world.

I always ride with spurs, and between my longer legs and Tristan’s shorter height, I’ve found myself contorting in some not-great ways to get the spur on when it’s needed. I’ve always wondered what my other options might be, and Austen gives a great overview of another option here! I might give these a try this summer.
Have Trailer, Will Travel from The Adventures of a Floppy Ammy
I have a 1980 trailer, and everything here rings true about how to check out and handle an older rig.

What’s Your Opinion? Horse Racing Answers (Part One) from Racing to Ride
I posted the question last week; here are the answers. Lots to think about.

Brains before brawn: a rant from The $900 Facebook Pony
YES.

winter

Weekend Plans

Amanda3 Comments

First, in good news: puppy has finally pooped. Hooray! Nothing like sick animals and baby humans to make you track and celebrate poop. She seems to finally be fully on the mend.

I am a little stumped right now, to be honest – I have lots of things going on in my life, but so few of them are horsey. My interaction with my horse lately has been primarily to kiss him on the nose, check his blankets, and heat up his bucket. It’s too cold for both of us to pull his blankets and groom – I get stabbing pain in my fingers, even through gloves, after just a few minutes. So, nope.

I am reading. Crocheting. Watching waaaaaaaay too much HGTV, like to the point where the other day I thought positively about the turquoise paisley wallpaper one particular person had chosen for one room of her guest bedroom remodel. WTF, NO.

I have hit some kind of wall and had the fiance drag the stationary bike out of storage, and am committed to working on that for a while every night when I am not riding. I am not an exercise person; I tend to be a move-quickly type of person in my daily life, but ain’t nothin’ movin’ right now.

On the plus side, it might be 30 degrees on Sunday, which would be amaaaaaazing. I am supposed to be in the next state over meeting friends on that day, but it’s a 7 hour round trip drive for ~6 hours of interaction, and it would mean giving up literally the one day in the last two months when it has a chance of getting above freezing. (I am not exaggerating. Weather stations are starting to rank us in top 10 lists in terms of consistently coldest winters.)

I’m trying to kick some life into my Figuring History blog, and have made some small headway recently. So, follow that if you want Morgan horse history.

Anyone else have exciting weekend plans I can live through vicariously?

adventures with the vet · puppy

Arya’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Amanda13 Comments

Last week Arya threw up once or twice. She’s a dog who eats many stupid things, and she was acting 100% normally other than that. We registered concern but didn’t take it to heart.

Tuesday night, she threw up again, so I gave her a handful or two of rice for dinner instead. Then Wednesday morning, I woke up to her snuggled next to me with her stomach rumbling so loudly I could hear it clearly. I gave her a very little bit more rice and took a shower.
When I got out of the shower she clung to me like glue, and then put herself into her LL Bean bed – which she likes very much, but rarely uses when we are doing things. She snuggled up and looked generally pathetic, and then she started shivering, hard.
Snuggled up and miserable.
I piled a blanket on her and turned the heat way up and sat with her. She did slow down her shivering after about 15 minutes, but did not look any less miserable. I checked in with the vet before she finished shivering, and they had a 9:30 am appointment. I called work and they could cover without me, so I took the appointment.
I gave the vet her history, and the vet had already pulled her file and noticed she was an idiot dog who had already been a Dog of Concern a few times for eating random stupid things. Her vitals checked out okay, but she was clearly too quiet, miserable, and started shivering again on the exam table. The vet thought that the shivering wasn’t cold, but pain and anxiety.
Way way way calmer than usual at the vet.
The vet said, “If she were my dog, I’d get her x-rayed.” I swallowed back bile, sighed, and said, “Well, then, let’s do that.” The vet tech took her down to the exam room, and they gave her a mild sedative and took some x-rays.
When the vet called me in to talk about them, she pointed out that the colon and intestines looked fine, but there was an area of distension on her stomach that should not be there. The vet thought that there was a blockage – possibly some cloth, as it wasn’t showing up clearly on the x-ray. She confessed to not being an expert at reading the x-rays, and wanted to send it out to a specialty radiologist. We’d hear by noon.
So I left the office with a very wobbly and sad puppy as well as two cans of prescription bland diet wet food. My instructions were to give her about a tablespoon every hour, and to call back about 1:00 pm. If the radiologist agreed with the vet, or if she reacted badly in any way to the food, she would have to go back for a second set of x-rays with barium tracer, to see if her digestive system was working at all.
I had carry her up our steps and place her on the couch, she was so out of it from the sedative. She just flopped on the couch in the most uncomfortable position imaginable. I straightened her out and sat down next to her to keep an eye on her. I had to coax her off the couch for her first little bit of food. She lapped it, turned to stare sadly at me, lapped it again, sighed deeply, and finally ate it. Then back to the couch. She was not enthused about her second feeding either, but she wasn’t in any more pain.
When I called the vet, she said that the radiologist actually wasn’t concerned. He saw the distension but thought it was sort of normal/generalized GI distress. She clearly wasn’t quite right, but it didn’t look like she was going to have to have a second set of x-rays or, God forbid, surgery.
So we set a second check-in time for later in the afternoon, and I kept giving her small bits of the bland food. She started getting up from the couch on her own to take drinks of water, and asked to go out. She peed quite a bit and while she still wasn’t her usual self, she wanted to walk around the yard for a bit and sniff things, and she took a long hard stare into a neighbor’s yard.
I canceled an afternoon hair appointment, drove in to work briefly to pick up my computer, and stayed beside her on the couch. She slowly, slowly improved and by about 4:00 pm she got up of her own volition and laid in front of the heater, which is one of her preferred spots in the apartment. She also started getting excited for her little bits of food.
When my fiance got home at 5:30, she was excited enough to get up and look out the window, and jumped around a little bit with him, then snuggled back on the couch.
I’m writing this around 7:30 pm on that same night, and just a few minutes ago she jumped off the couch to chase the cat. It seems like she’ll be just fine. The fiance is staying home with her tomorrow to keep an eye, just in case, but hopefully she just had a weird bout of GI distress and will be just fine going forward.
Uncategorized

What do you do for extra cash?

Amanda10 Comments

Horse people know that money is always in short supply, right? 

I’m curious as to what people have done to earn some extra money for showing, vet bills, or just to shore their bank accounts up on a tough month. As we start to get ready to buy a house, money is even more on my mind. My savings are still not rebounding as quickly as I’d like, so I need to start tightening spending and focusing on ways to save and to add more value overall to my budget.
I’ve been thinking about the ways that I’ve done that in the past so I thought I’d toss a few of them out there and get your feedback. (I’ll intersperse with horse photos so that you’re not bored silly!)
In grad school, I picked up a few odd jobs for professors: I spent a few weeks proofing and copyediting in French, checking all the footnotes and bibliographic entries for a new book. I also worked briefly for an educational startup, and earned about $3k writing history essays that funded my summer schooling and showing.
Part of the key to using extra cash for horse expenses is keeping other expenses down, so I’ve done a few things over the years to earn Amazon.com gift cards. I convert those into other things, primarily gifts (around Christmas) and household necessities. 
I used Swagbucks.com for a while, but honestly? Not something I’d necessarily recommend. I used it when I had a desk job with lots of down time built in, so I could spend an hour or two a day doing the searches and hunting down high value tasks. The way it works is that you use their search engine, or perform certain tasks (surveys, sign up for 30 day offers, etc.) and you earn Swagbucks. Earn enough Swagbucks and you can trade them in for all sorts of things. I always swapped them for Amazon.com gift cards in $5 denominations. Over the course of 18 months, I earned ~$200 in gift cards. I used that to purchase a ton of supplies when I first moved in with my fiance. It was a LOT of work, though, and sometimes I screwed up with the special offers and had to pay for some services.
One of the most lucrative things I’ve done has been consumer testing. I did it a fair bit as a teenager, and have picked it up again lately. Lots of consumer research companies are always looking for people to test, and you can earn good money for offering your opinion on various products. Sometimes you have to fit a specific profile, and sometimes they’ll just take anyone to taste test, watch commercials, or brainstorm. I’ve tested packaging, hot chocolate, candy bar arrangements, kitchen layouts, you name it. Recently, I’ve established a relationship with a local company that offers occasional opportunities, and it’s been really helpful. If you live close to a major city, you probably have this option, and for an hour or two of time you can make $50+. I made $150 once for a 2 hour interview/testing when I was a teenager and all I had to do was talk about what might be exciting names and descriptions for potato chips.
Lately, I’ve gotten into Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. You get paid small amounts for performing small tasks: typing in things from scanned receipts, identifying photographs, taking some short surveys. It’s total no-brain work and honestly the return isn’t great: you’d make far more getting a second job if that’s what you have time for. But I don’t have the time. So Mechanical Turk is something I can do on a laptop while we’re watching TV at night. Half an hour or so of doing it in the background earns me a few dollars. If I plug away while we’re watching and engage just a tiny portion of my brain, I earn a decent amount. The money goes right into Amazon.com, and if I keep at it – half an hour here, half an hour there – it really adds up. I can order staples like toilet paper, paper towels, etc., and save my cash for other, horse-related expenses.
So, that’s a quick summary of non-traditional ways I’ve used to add a little more cash into my horse budget! I’ve never had the time for a part-time job, since I’ve either been in grad school or had a full-time job that was waaaaaay more than full time. So I don’t have hours and hours to devote to something – and if I do, the best return on an investment is almost always going to be to work at the barn in return for lessons.
What have you done to earn some extra money for horse activities?
winter

Winter Hacks & #horsegirlconfessions

Amanda7 Comments

We’re back into subzero temperatures; I got three! whole! days! of riding in last week when the temperatures came above single digits. It was pretty great.

Then we plunged back into the arctic abyss.

When it gets this cold – and by “this cold” I mean well below zero, double digits below zero, wind chills colder than -30 – there is quite simply no way to keep fresh, unfrozen water in front of a horse at all times unless you have a bucket heater. Bucket heaters and de-icers are strictly verboten at my barn, and I tend to agree with them. They make me incredibly nervous. I saw a barn fire once, and it remains one of the worst memories of my life.

For the most part, the horses adapt pretty well: barn staff keeps a very, very close eye on their consumption, and each horse has a rotating system of buckets so that they get fresh water 2-3x a day. The horses learn to drink their fill when they have water. They get soupy mashes on the regular when it’s going to be painfully cold.

That’s not to say I’m not doing all I can to increase Tristan’s water consumption. Lately, I’ve been staying an extra 30 minute or so, or going out when I’m not riding, and heating up four or five kettles full of boiling water in the tack room with the electric tea kettle. I top his bucket off with those to get the water up to lukewarm; it makes it more likely that he’ll drink deeply and less likely that it will freeze immediately. (And I do mean immediately – by the time you finish doing water in the barn, most of the buckets have skimmed over with ice already.)

On Friday night, I stepped up my game and bought a bucket water heater from Tractor Supply. A friend of mine has one and loves it. They’re designed not to de-ice, but really to heat the water up to boiling if left long enough.

So, the new system is to pull Tristan’s bucket from his stall and put the bucket heater in it for about 10-15 minutes. I stand next to the bucket and check it constantly while I’m doing so.

As you can see, it does end up melting the ice. It takes a while, but it gets the water nice and warm. I don’t think I’d feel safe really getting to boiling – for a lot of reasons! – but once the water is warm it’ll take that much longer to freeze.
The other night, I was going through this system and it was bitterly, painfully cold. I’d forgotten barn clothes, and I was wearing thin pants. I wanted the water to heat up quickly. I dipped one finger, then another, and now both my hands were cold and wet even inside my gloves AND my pockets. I was impatient, and all I could think was that there had to be a way to test the warmth of the water without making me colder.
So I decided to lean over and stick my tongue in. I know. Gross. But it worked! My tongue was already wet, so whatever, and it got warm again immediately, and since I already knew how to test the temperature of liquids with my tongue I had a good barometer.
Another few minutes, and I brought the bucket back to Tristan. One of his quirks is that he will almost always take a sip of a bucket that is on the ground or held for him, so I put it on the ground inside his stall, and he promptly drank half of it. Score one for lukewarm water!
I half-filled another bucket, heated it up again, and topped his bucket off before I left.
I’m declaring the new bucket heater a success! The only drawback: even knowing it has an auto-shutoff, even carefully unplugging and triple-checking it, I still have a twist of anxiety in my gut about it. Ah well.
Have you ever resorted to slightly strange and obsessive ends to make things more comfortable for your horse in extreme temperatures?

blog roundup

Weekly Blog Roundup

Amanda3 Comments

Here are a few interesting blog posts from the horse blogging world.

I’ve really enjoyed reading the Day in the Life blog hop posts from Tracy at Fly on Over. All of them were great, but here are two I thought highlighted some really interesting lines of work!

A Day in the Life from Racing to Ride
Racing! I love all the behind the scenes stuff.

A Day in the Life from Wait for the Jump
I love Saiph’s posts about her work as an emergency vet tech. I got exhausted just reading this!

My Favorite Overseas Tack & Equipment Sites from The $900 Facebook Pony
Some of you are so much more adventurous than I about what you buy and where you buy it!

Boston 2024: Franklin Park as the Equestrian Venue from The Maggie Memoirs
Hands-down one of my favorite blog posts of the last six months. Excellent analysis, thorough reporting, and I actually learned things I didn’t know about the equestrian scene in and around Boston!

Wes, One Year Barefoot from The Jumping Percheron
I am a sucker for barefoot transformation posts, and this is a particularly good one, with lots of photos and thoughtful details.

Conformation Analysis from DIY Horse Ownership
I’ve also loved the conformation analysis blog hop that’s been going around – and here it is applied to a mule! A MULE, you guys! COOL.

Winter Wear from The Longest Format
❤ gear. The only thing that makes winter bearable.

What’s Your Opinion? Horse Racing Anonymous Survey from Racing to Ride
Go, offer your opinion! I’m curious to see what will come out of this. I have some deeply ambivalent feelings toward horse racing as it’s currently structured.