She lives! And thrives!

Today looked like my Big Chance to visit Dixie. Look at this stupid forecast!



I put on my Frozen Southerner outfit, with minor changes, and headed out. I wore a different pair of wool socks today, and I tried the very thin black wool/spandex glove liners. Both were failures. I have one pair of expensive Smartwool socks, five pairs of cheap and ugly - but extremely effective and comfortable! - Costco wool socks, and three pairs of very pretty and soft wool/silk blend Costco socks. Do not fall for the wool/silk blend socks at Costco. Yes, they come in rose and blue and heather grey, and ooh they feel soft, but they aren't all that warm and they don't have very good elastic properties. Also don't buy those super-thin glove liners I linked in the comments to yesterday's post. Also not very warm.

I managed to keep my momentum up and got up the mountain to where Dixie lives without any problem. S's neighborhood is all 15+ acre lots, and she lives at the back of the development, so it's a very low traffic road. Good for riding, bad for snow removal. I slid gracefully into S's driveway and was delighted to see that Dixie had watched me drive up and was ambling closer to the fence. I fed her some Frosted Mini Wheats (because I left the apples in the truck and they froze solid - D'OH!) and scratched her face for a while.



There you go. Four inches of snow, two run-in shelters, and no blankets. Horses really are tough!

I should measure her and buy her a blanket, I suppose. The only situation I really worry about is a cold hard rain, which is extremely rare in the hills where she lives, but there's no harm in having a waterproof light blanket on hand. Surely she's smarter than a turkey and will go in a shed if it starts raining... but I don't want to count on that.

I took a fuzzy-yak picture for my mom, but it's not very impressive. Her head looks like a goat's head, and her legs look like an airbrushed unicorn on a license plate, but you just can't tell how thick the hair on her body is here.


Here's a slightly different angle of a view I post a lot, looking down the hill into Reno. Look at that frozen fog inversion layer crap!


I thought to take a picture of Tempus's Weird Foot too, for Lythia. I was telling her that Tempus had an injury to his coronet band as a 2 year old, and his hoof wall has grown out weird there ever since. It doesn't bother him at all; just looks kinda funny.



I had to put the chains on to get back out of S's driveway and down the hill. Here's the theoretically-plowed road:


I might try to get back out tomorrow - depends on how much snow we get tonight/tomorrow am.