Got My Hay
It was trying to rain, but I had time so I went over for hay today.
With the good help of the young hayman, I got 18 bales nicely on the little trailer and he followed me home to help me unload. We ended up having quite a nice chat about horses and farming.
His family owns an 800 acre former dairy farm in upper New York State. When his grandfather died, they gave up the dairy business. As it turns out, dairy farmers are hardpressed to make any money at all as the price of milk has hardly gone up while all the costs associated with producing it--feed, fuel, help--have gone up tremendously. He now has a fairly good hay business going, and is raising replacement dairy cattle. He buys or takes on young heifers, gives them the time and space to grow up healthy, breeds them, hopefully gets more heifers, sells the cows and raises the young ones again. Business is pretty good, he says.
He has a 22 year old Quarter horse he partially rescued from a not great home, and is happy to say that Tex is thriving on the farm, with a new lease on life and lots of energy. He rides occasionally and says Tex is so quiet, anyone can have fun with him.
So, it was nice to know he is a fellow horseman. His hay is nice and tried the first cutting this time to see if The Boys would eat that. It is less expensive and readily available. If they don't like it, I can easily get the second cutting which is softer. Either way, it's a good deal and I sure can't beat the shipping distance.
My shoulder was pretty sore today for some reason, so I decided not to ride again. Tucker is trained well enough now that layoffs are not a big deal. Toby is just fine, and Chance isn't far enough along for it to matter much.
I will get on tomorrow and my clinic with Patrice Edwards is on Tuesday, so I do need to get some rides in. I will just have to see how my shoulder feels, though. The last thing I want to do is aggravate it so that it takes even longer to heal.
Worked with fellow English teachers on revising our final exams. What a great bunch of people to work with. Everyone of us is a self-starter and just takes charge of some aspect of the job to complete it. We will need one more session, but somehow, in one day, we managed to get a handle on writing four new two hour long exams. All in all, I think we only took one section from the old exams to reuse for another grade level.
It was a good day...one more in a long list of "I got something done today," days.
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Sounds like the English department got it done! I have a feeling that shoulder will be nagging you a while longer, it'll get right in it's own time...
ReplyDeletei guess your shoulders hurt because you've been carrying hay bales when you shouldn't really ... the things we put ourselves through for our horses.
ReplyDeletei googled patrice edwards when you first mentioned her on ee and couldn't find anything ... where's she based?
There doesn't seem to be much at all about Patrice on the web. I will have to ask her about her British location and contact. Someone on the EE board does ride with her though, so if you can post a query there you should get an answer.
ReplyDeleteI would think you, she and Molly would get along famously if she is local enough for you.