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No, I’m not getting more horses, but I am getting the two, a mare/foal pair, from South Dakota sometime next week. Which means another project.

And it also means I’m taking a crash course in “All the Things I Used to Know About Horses but Feel Like I Can’t Quite Remember All of Them.”

Last night, I got an email from a Fleet of Angels transporter who said, and I quote, “These are some of the wildest horses I’ve ever seen.” Consequently, I did not sleep well. My brain kept jumping from adoption and hauling issues to arrival to pasture to shed to feeding . . . you get the picture.

At 6:00 a.m., I got a text from another hauler offering to bring mine down here next week. Nothing like an early text to make you jump out of bed—sadly, I’d really just fallen asleep. But at least now I can rest easy on that topic and know that I have about a week to finish getting ready.

Finish, you ask? Why, yes. There’s a lot to do:

My husband is making arrangements for hay delivery and picking up the last few pieces of lumber for the run-in shed—which we’ll be building tomorrow, the walls at least. Then we’ll haul it to the pasture for assembly. On Friday, we’ll pick up the sheet metal on order for the siding and attach that and the roof over the weekend.

Side note: Apparently the cat IS good for something. He just ran up on the front porch with a tiny mouse—or something—in his mouth. No, he is NOT coming inside with that!

I still have a few horsey items to pick up, like feed buckets and a second water trough. I have halters and ropes on order. But we do have to double-check the pastures for holes and any old wood or metal laying around. Wish I’d gotten to that yesterday when the temps were close to 60, but my husband had the Mule tied up with an outside water pump repair and I was working on the fence and putting up a few things for winter.

Guess I’ll have to put on my classy black looks-like-I’m-robbing-a-bank face mask and go outside after all. Which reminds me, I need to order more long underwear . . .

And that brings me to this morning’s conversation of “we need to bring more wood inside for the furnace.”

See, told you my brain is all over the place!

We’re winding down for the winter—thank goodness! While I’ve managed to keep up with my PT and stretches, my range time is way down the last few weeks.

The fence is now livestock-proof, although I’ll feel better when I finish putting the third screw in all the boards; I’m about a third of the way done with that. The gates are up and the latches/chains installed. And yesterday, we had a horsey visitor!

Just for a half hour or so; the neighbors stopped in for a few. The poor thing hadn’t been ridden in over a year, I think, but she sure liked the new grass coming up! She did NOT like the saddle . . . Maybe I’ll have a new client.

We also have the greenhouse up and anchored. I brought my hanging baskets over there, along with the herbs, and I planted some cilantro and oregano. I’ll be bringing in my late pepper plants too, and have some other seeds to start for the winter.

So far, and we’ll see after tomorrow if we get the expected 30 mph winds, it’s a great little greenhouse! Coated steel posts, heavy plastic, and easy to assemble—we kept thinking we were doing something wrong, ‘cause stuff NEVER works out this fast!

The temperature monitoring is going to be the real challenge, though. It’s gotten as high as 115 degrees in there, but nearly as low as the outside temp early in the morning before the sun hits it. I’d been opening the window for an hour in the early afternoon, but I’m going to re-think that. I’ll keep experimenting, and yes, I have a spreadsheet!

What’s left in the project department? Well, the holidays are coming, and we’ll like convince a kid or three to come visit, so now I’m looking at the house again. The plan was to build a sofa table and a coffee table, and those will come in handy in the next month or so . . . and I just realized we never stained the bed steps (for the dog) after my husband built them, um, a few years ago!

And we’re still trail-breaking. The goal is to go around the property, and have a few lead-ins from the house and barn areas. The East Trail is done, to the north, and we’re working on connecting it with the North Trail. But yesterday we went west; we hadn’t done much exploring there except the perimeter, and man, that is some rough land! Very pretty, though: