House decorating, yet more hooves

Over the weekend we found homes for some of our art.

The dragon:


The unrealistically clean Dixie:


A birdhouse:


Etc.

Then today, the photos of me and Dixie from that photoshoot back in March arrived. Wait, that sounds wrong - we actually ordered them over the weekend, and they arrived very promptly - not that we've been waiting since March.


It's printed museum wrapped on canvas, so framing is optional.


We got the "I can ride!" picture printed too, as a paper print.


I finally came up with a plan for framing my fish ... uh... appliques? Quilted cutout things? I've never seen anything like them and I'm not sure how to describe them - the person I got them from said they were from some village in Central America.


I stretched the white background fabric on foamcore board, then tacked the fish piece on top - that way it stays 3D, and the edges are still visible.


Anyway, I've had them for almost 10 years, and I'm glad I'm finally doing something other than pushpinning them to the wall.


Here's Banders, as a visual palate cleanser. He is snoozing in one of those crinkly collapsible cat Slinky tunnels.



Monday I went out to see my horse. I wanted to ride my horse, but it was not to be. It was raining, and she'd been rolling.


She was quite serious about grinding the mud in to her right side.


"What are you looking at?"


Alas, I had to switch to my backup plan of staring at her feet.

Here's the front left - the thick false sole has pretty much shed out, but somehow over the weekend she sliced off the tip of her frog, too. She wasn't tender at all!




And here's the front right, which hadn't exfoliated ANY of the sole.




Somehow, with my amazingly dull knives and my quite sharp nippers, I managed to unjam the bars a bit.





With any kind of luck, the sole will be cleaner tomorrow...

As you can no doubt guess from the last two pictures, by then Dixie was having none of this stupid photograph-her-feet game. We had a big fight in the wash rack, then I did some ground work for about 45 minutes - getting her to lead nicely on the inside and the outside of circles. Once I finally got a nice inside turn at the walk, we called it quits. I let her graze, and took her over to stare at the Farm Animals. Between Dixie's pasture and the rest of the ranch, there's a paddock with two short, hairy, horned goats, and a paddock with a creepy looking alpaca and the world's most obese steer. Dixie's led past them pretty well for several weeks, but I hadn't let her really gawk at them before. She seemed to enjoy snorting at them.

Weekend Update

(Doesn't that title just bring you back to the days of your youth when SNL was funny? Or at least when you were young and THOUGHT SNL was funny?)

In no particular order:

1. Dixie is on strike from beet pulp.  I am refusing to negotiate with terrorists.  Well, ok, I'm negotiating to the extent that she gets a much higher % of hay pellets and a much lower % of beet pulp... for now.  :ominous glare at horse:
2. G has rented a fabulous house for us in Daly City.  It's huger than we need, it costs a bazillion dollars, but most importantly:  pets ok.  Yahoo!  Move in on the 19th.
3. I have someone coming to look at renting this house on Tuesday.  Fingers crossed!
4. My unspeakably fabulous purple and blue fringed half chaps have arrived.  No, you may not see pictures now.  You must wait for ride pics.
5. I have been doing yard work pretty much nonstop since Friday and I filled up 21 bags.  Dead tumbleweeds, dead weeds, live baby sagebrush.  Now the yard looks like a barren rockpile instead of a weedy rockpile.  Improvement?  
6. I haven't ridden my beast since last Saturday.  Que sera, sera.  I think she'll be ok.  Hoping to get out for a pleasure cruise with the Cersei-dog tomorrow afternoon.  
7. I am oddly zen about Washoe.  It appears that I am focusing all my worrying on moving instead.  Hopefully this means we'll have a delightfully fun 10-hour ride.  
8. The Former Dr. Seuss room is entirely full of packed boxes, except for enough room to open the door.  The garage is de-junked.  The cat room needs sweeping and scrubbing, and the blue room is now the Other Room of Boxes, but the rest of the house is clean and airy.

That is all.

Don't-it-yourself

Sometimes, even I, home repair juryrigger extraordinaire, call a professional.

Our front room has a built-in woodstove. It's a long skinny room (20'x10') with one of those 70s flagstone fireplace walls on the short end. That'd be kinda horrible (fireplaces are really inefficient ways to heat anything), but it's got a stove insert in it! When we bought the house we decided it was some obscure heatolator, and due to air quality stuff it was sold as-is, so we didn't really know much about it.

I suffered through a truly horrible winter with $4/gallon propane (like $15/day in winter) and the tiny woodstove in the den, then last fall I got the front stove cleaned and inspected. My chimney dude said it appeared to be in good shape, but it was totally homemade. But the fan came on when you plugged it in and flipped the switch, so that's what I ran this winter. And dude, it might be homemade and woefully inefficient compared to modern stoves, but it seriously put out some heat!

Back in January or February the thermostat quit working. A male person who resides here part time fiddled with it, and after he'd fiddled with it, it didn't work anymore. We googled but couldn't figure out what model it was, much less what we could comparably replace it with, so I just turned the blower on manually when I lit a fire and turned it off in the morning. No big deal.

Then I went to Rides of March and came home victorious and sat on the couch all day Sunday. I built a roaring fire that night and slept toasty warm on Sunday night, except that I had this really weird (even for me) dream about a zombie washing machine detaching itself from the wall and coming to kill me. I woke up a little and thought, in that half-asleep way, that it wasn't a zombie washing machine, it was the dryer, with rocks in it. Then I woke up more and realized (a) there were no rocks in the dryer and (b) the dryer wasn't running at 3 am. I staggered up and investigated the very real very loud noise and determined that one of the ball bearings had gone out in the stove fan and it was killing itself. The fire was almost out, so I flipped the switch and went back to sleep.

When I got up I sort of wondered if I'd dreamed the whole thing, but when I turned the fan on it made a very sad sound and turned half a rotation and died completely. Well, hell.

I unscrewed the grill, just to see if I could get the fan out of the firebox somehow, and the fan fell down inside the box and I threw up my hands in despair. I'd just gotten a new tank of propane, and it wasn't very cold, so I kind of ignored the problem. For a whole week. But eventually I started feeling really guilty when I turned the thermostat up to 70, and really cold when I left it at 65, so I broke down and called for help.

I've used Morin since we moved to Reno, and he's just a great guy. He's a full-time firefighter / part-time chimney sweep. He laughed at my stoves the first time he came out, but he did it in a "laugh with me, we'll get through this" way, not a "you idiot!" way. He told me how to get the most out of what I've got, and promised that if it can be fixed, he can fix it. So when I called and said "I don't know if you remember me, but I live in Lemmon Valley and I've got that homemade ancient Heatolator..." he knew right who I was.

He's fixed me up better than new. (Which, admittedly, isn't a high standard...) He pulled out the old fan:


and mounted a modern new blower fan on the outside:


(See the switch? that's the switch to turn the fan off and on. Totally homemade, dude.)

There was a fan on the other side of the box, too, but it didn't work when we bought the place. We didn't know why, and we didn't really investigate. While Morin was out here, he did investigate, and this is what he found. Looks kinda like a fan...


A sad fan. With totally melted blades.


Looks like long ago it seized up, and after it quit working the heat of the fires melted the plastic bits. Classy.

He mounted the new blower on the first opening and bolted some metal over the second opening to close it off. The new blower is slightly quieter than the old fan and pushes even more warm air out, so I'm just thrilled.

I asked about the thermostat - it's a 40 year old dealie from an oil furnace. We're just not touching it. Flip the fan on when you build a fire, flip it off when it goes out. Good enough.


IN OTHER NEWS

I have gone red again


and I got a new shirt


That's all I got!

Den: done

Today the area rug and last floor register arrived, so it's officially completed.

It had the world's nastiest blue carpet:


Now it has cinnamon-colored wood:


I covered the step-down between the two rooms with an oak plank, routered to fit.


And here's the trim around the fireplace (minus the plastic, after the glue dried)


The dog is exceptionally pleased to have her couch back.


It's pretty bitchin.


I can't believe I've been doing this nonstop since New Years.

Tomorrow my friends start coming into town for the AERC Convention this weekend! YAY!

Hmmm

I managed to chill out and do nothing until after noon, but then I got antsy and put up a little trim. This side of the doorway was never trimmed out. Why yes, yes it did bug me, every single day.



If you're wondering, the blue bits of tape are numbered, so I can match the old quarter round up to the correct walls without thinking too hard about it.

I'm not 100% sure what to do here.


It's a finished sheetrock doorway. Maybe I should've hacksaw'd out the sheetrock corner pieces and run the flooring under the sheetrock? Well, I didn't, so now I need to trim over it. The threshold is just thin metal so no big deal there. I guess I'll lay some quarter round in there and see how it looks, and if I don't like it I'll try baseboard and just ease the angle where it meets the other side of the doorway.

This is what I'm really puzzling over. Any advice would be appreciated!


You can see from the old glue that there used to be that crappy vinyl cove molding up against the cabinets. Before we bought the house, they'd ripped that down (but didn't sand off all the glue, just painted over it) and put quarter round down against the carpet. I think I'd like baseboard on the end of both cabinets - but I really don't want to run baseboard under the toe kicks of ALL the cabinets. Is it going to look funny if I cut the baseboard flush with the toe kick? Or maybe cut it back at a 45?

There's one spot, under the oven, where the toe kick is like 1" off the floor with some ragged shims sticking out, and I am planning on putting a 1x4 under there with the quarter round tacked to the bottom of it. Hopefully unless you lay down and really stare at it, you'll never know it's not the bottom of the cabinet.

Friday Floorday

Engineered hardwood in the kitchen. Glued the seams in the food prep area (dishwasher back to window). I won't point out the two fuckups if you don't either!

Took me three long days. Next week I'll do the den. Happy Friday, yall!

NEDA Valentines: I love it, she's not feeling it

Sunday we went out to Silver Springs for the fourth time since Halloween and rode. The day was lovely - high near 55, no clouds, no massive wind. I got to ride with my friend R, which was a treat. We've been meaning to ride together all winter and it just hasn't happened enough. But something didn't feel quite right.

Here's the Strava:


And here's the New Years ride for comparison.


I was talking it out on IM with a friend Sunday night, and I just discovered that yall can't see the Performance info that I can see! If you're logged in to your own Strava account, you can see it, but not if you're a non-user - and I certainly don't expect yall to join just to see a graph :) I emailed Strava and politely complained, and I really hope they'll consider adding that option, even if it's just for pro users. But for now - here's what I see.

Click to embiggen. New Years:

The blue line is our MPH. New Years was pretty much perfect. Dixie started out rocking hard, we came into the hold hot and sweaty and stayed there for 20 minutes (where the blue line bottoms out in the middle), then she went out on the second loop feeling pretty good. She wasn't nearly as fresh as the first loop, but she still picked up a trot (or something) and held it a decent amount of time, then recovered fast at a walk and went back to work again.

Valentines:

Valentines was just worse. The first loop went well at first, but then she got pokey a couple miles from camp. When we really slowed down right before the hold was when I got off and (gasp!) jogged, and she didn't even want to trot behind me. She wasn't very hot, she didn't have that tired eye, I gave the usual amount of electrolytes and she ate the usual nibble of food at the hold. Since she wasn't tired, we headed back out pretty promptly, and she continued to be BLAH.

See how the second loop gets really sawtoothed? My friend's horse would slowly outpace us, and I'd urge her up to a trot. She'd trot out strong then start slowing down and eventually drop to a walk. Again, the last little bit at the end was my pitiful jogging. I ended up unclipping the lead and jogging off without her, and she just kinda half-ass followed me.

So of course by the time I got home I was sure Dixie was probably dying, or starving, or overtrained, or something equally horrible. I wailed to my friends online for most of the night, and by the time I went to bed I tentatively thought she was possibly bored - but I wasn't entirely ruling out tired from overtraining.

Today I've decided Dixie's definitely bored. I slept in til the shocking hour of 7:30 and Miss Thing was raging when I went out to feed - trotting around tossing her head at me and flinging herself on the ground to roll then leaping up to toss her head again. (Do I have the only horse who passive-aggressively rolls, or do other horses do it too??)

After I had some coffee, I backed the truck up near the paddock and started loading scrap metal. Another huge display - lots of cantering around snorting and trotting up to the gate then back to the far corner where she likes to hang out then back up front, over and over again. And when I got home late this afternoon, I decided I was hungrier than she was and I ate dinner first. I'm a terrible horse owner, I know. She behaved herself when I finally went out and fed, but she was just a crackling ball of energy walking beside me on the lead. It's just not the behavior of a horse who's actually tired from doing 20 miles at 7 mph.

So! I'm going to stick with my current training schedule, but try to work in some new stuff. There aren't any more NEDA rides at Silver Springs for a while - the next one is in Washoe Valley, which isn't totally new but isn't old and passé to her either. We're going to a reining clinic on Sunday, and I'm on the lookout for not-too-expensive fun things to do.

You may be wondering how I could've loaded scrap metal in the morning and stayed out til after Dixie's dinnertime - I sold the scrap, bought 19 boxes of engineered hardwood, some crap from Home Depot, a tank of gas, and my usual random junk from Costco, then came home and unloaded it. We have commenced a new phase of destruction at Casa Dixie - I am ripping up the unspeakably gross carpet in the den and kitchen and putting in some (extremely affordable!) cinnamon colored hardwood. I'm so excited! And I only feel utterly overwhelmed about a third of the time! Yippie!

"...everything looks like a nail."

You know that saying: "To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail"? Well, I am a woman with clippers, and everything looks very hairy. I am exercising great restraint though. The dog doesn't even have racing stripes yet.

Let me back up some.

So I guess two weekends ago, I rode with C and S out at Fort Churchill. It was a really nice ride, but Dixie sweated a LOT and I didn't electrolyte her enough. (How do I know? She was too tired to eat when we got back to the trailer. I gave her another couple ounces of applesauce elytes, and 10 minutes later she perked up and started noshing on her hay.) Then we had the windstorms (and the fire down south), then icy rain and a bit of much-needed snow.



I painted like a fiend in the kitchen and waited it out, because inspiration is really hard to come by in January. Then the high pressure moved back in and I took Dixie out for a spin on Wednesday.



My plan was to take her up over the hill, then come back south along the east side of the ridge - nothing very hard at all. She could barely trot up the easy part of the hill and she just bonked out on the steeper bit toward the top. Her breathing and HR never slowed down, no matter how much water I dumped on her. I kinda thought she was sick, probably dying, until I realized I'd taken off my hoodie and was perfectly comfortable in a tank top - it was near 60 and very humid from all the snow melting. DUH, she was hot.

I've been really patient, working around her coat. I don't really mind planning my rides so that she has time to cool off before the sun sets, but at this point she can't even perform in all her hair. And it won't fall out for months yet - there's no way I'll have her legged up for rides in March and April, much less be able to complete them. Time for clippers.

Amazon to the rescue! I paid for overnight shipping and had a stack of boxes waiting for me on Friday.



There's not much I love more than a shiny new power tool. Yeehah! I clipped her neck with the grain, with the 7F, and sort of feathered it out so it doesn't look so "hey I just clipped my horse in January." I got one horrendous clipper line down the left side, but the right side looks pretty good and I can live with the whole thing.





Then - because everything looked like a nail - I clipped her jawline. I think fuzzy ears are cute, and I'm perfectly willing to leave whiskers alone, but I really hate goaty looking heads.



I went at her bridle path next and got the off side neatened up, but the clippers up by her left ear sent poor Dixie into a panic. I think some asshole ear-twitched her when she was young, because she's always been jumpy about having the left side of her poll/ear messed with. I had a pocket full of cookies and I "spent" them all working on touching her left ear area, with my hand and with the back of the clippers, without her freaking out. We'll get there one day. For now, well, she doesn't look worse than she did with the scissors bridle path.

I'll ride today and see how she does. If I need to, I can (gleefully!) go take more off, but I know there's a sweet spot where she's not so overheated but she doesn't need blanketing. And when we move to CA, I'm just going to keep her neck/chest/belly clipped all summer, I think.

When I came in the house, I discovered one of the cats had puked on the electric lap blanket on the couch. The puker is, 99% of the time, The Fluffy One, cause he gets enormous fluffy-hairballs that upset his delicate tummy. If I'd sprung for the cordless clippers, I'd have chased him down and shaved his belly and back legs. So far he's escaped that fate by not hanging out in the bathroom near an outlet.

And I got one part of the kitchen done well enough to share. Back in December, I unclogged the clogged up right side of the kitchen sink, and while I was messing around under there I replaced the cabinet floor. It was pressboard, and it had gotten wet (from drain water from the clogged up drain, sometime before we bought it) and it was pretty warped and curled. I ripped it out and laid in two pieces of thin plywood chipboard I had on hand.



I didn't nail them down or anything - the next poor soul who has to work under there will thank me for that. When I painted under there this week, I primed the chipboard, then put some (surprisingly pretty!) contac paper on top. I think it looks completely respectable now.



(Bonus head of The Fluffy Puker investigating)

I wonder if the dog is hot? I could give her a really sharp trace clip...

Hoof update: too much of a good thing...

We've had exactly an inch of snow (not even rain! snow!) since early November. It's dry. It's tragically dry. I've been riding a lot and sort of picking a hoof up, looking at it, and calling it good. I mean, they look like this (sorry about the dirty; couldn't find my pick):


Walls are freshly trimmed BELOW sole level! I sharpened my knife* til it cuts wood like butter and it just skipped off of the sole.

Now here's the side view, same hoof:


Definitely long. At least a quarter inch long. Hard to tell with all her glorious feathers, but I think the quarters are pushed up a bit, too.

Heel view. Pretty balanced, at least.


Here's the front view. You can see how sharply I rolled the toes back. My only plan of attack is a) hope it really does rain and snow starting tomorrow and b) keep the walls shorter than the "sole" and ride on the pavement at a walk/running walk.



The back right is the only hoof that's even thinking about shedding that horrible crap.


I just can't get any purchase with any kind of tool to pry it out though.


The whole set is here if you're interested in looking at all the views I got.

Don't even think about telling me to stand her in a bucket. She lets me trim her hooves quite patiently these days, but she is in no way going to stand in a bucket. One person (hi S!) suggested any kind of grease might help, so I think I will slather her feet in lard tomorrow. And I've really got my fingers crossed for a good soaking rain to soften her hooves and let the sand do its work. If not... I guess I'll have to get the hose out and water her hooves on a warm day.


*I read Christoph's post right before one of my daily trips to Home Depot, so I actually remembered to buy a chainsaw sharpening file. Mine is 7/32" / 5.5 mm, and I'd recommend the next size down from that. It gets in the tip of the knife, but juuust barely. I whizzed it along the beveled side of the blade several times, til I stopped feeling rough burrs and nicks. Then I deburred the flat (convex curve) side of the blade on my ceramic knife sharpening stone. If you don't have one of those, use the little unglazed ring on the bottom of a coffee mug, or a thick flat piece of leather (like a strop). Whatever you use to deburr the outside of the knife, hold the knife almost parallel to the surface and give it a swipe or two, it doesn't take much.

I have a ton of other stuff to blog - I had a great ride with C at Fort Churchill, except Dixie stumbled pretty hard on the way back to the trailer (and that's what made me LOOK at her feet). I've painted cabinets all the way down one of the long sides of the kitchen, and my color choices are working great, and I haven't broken down in tears about the wrecked state of my kitchen yet. I painted the heinous built-in fluorescent light in the kitchen and you know what? It looks WAY BETTER for $8.

Just a reminder, if you're on Facebook you can follow the thrilling hourly "kitchen looks amazing!" / "oh god i hate painting why did i do this shoot me now" updates if you friend me. Just, like, have a horse in your profile or message me and tell me who you are cause I don't actually accept totally random requests.

Dear god, not again

That's what I thought when the water trickled to a halt as I tried to take a shower. Of course I immediately assumed the well had gone dry and/or the well pump had died, and tried to figure out if we could get a second mortgage before the horse ran out of water, and if not how long it would take to walk back and forth from the neighbors' every day with 5-gallon buckets.

I went and flipped the well pump breaker, just because that's the first thing you always try in troubleshooting. I left it alone and sulked for 10 minutes, then went and looked at the pressure gauge to discover it had shot up to 90 psi. So I thought about it for a bit, then turned on all the taps and drained the pressure down to 35, then cut the taps off and watched the pressure gauge. It refused to budge. I powercycled the pump again and it kicked back on and went up to 75 psi (still too high, but less likely to make me think it was going to explode). That amount of testing convinced me that the problem was with the pressure sensor, the little switch dealie that tells the pump when to pump more water into the pressure tank.

Fortunately those are cheap ($30) and standardized. I went and bought a new one, watched some youtubes, sulked for a while about the unfairness of it all, then got to work. I turned off the power to the pump (and to the water heater for good measure), drained the tank, took the cover off the switch and triple-checked it wasn't still electrified, and took the switch off.

The little T-pipe leading up to the switch and the switch itself were completely clogged with iron and gross black stuff. I dug around in my new white junk drawer and found a pointy stiff piece of wire and chiseled out all the iron deposits from everything I could reach. Then I rinsed everything off, teflon taped the seams, and screwed it back together. It actually worked. I'm gonna wait a couple days and make sure it doesn't break again and then I can return the unused new switch.

Every day, I appreciate the miracle of showers more and more.

What to do!

I'm sure this won't be the last time I ask yall for help.

Today I got a load of trash off of the wellhead. When I fenced the pasture, it was really hot and I just wanted to get the horse home already and I ended up tossing all the trash over on the fenced-off strip of land where the wellhead is. It's conveniently out of sight so I've been blissfully ignoring it for a year and a half, but I guess it's gotta go.



Those are 7' solid 4x12's on top. Why would you spend at least a hundred bucks on that kind of lumber and leave it to dry-rot in your back yard?! People never cease to amaze me.

Anyway, after I got that disposed of, I tackled the run-in. It's three 8x12 stalls. One of them was a pigeon coop or something, and I tried putting the chickens in there but that was a huge pain in the ass so I moved them to the chicken shack, and it's just been unused since then. I ripped off the chicken wire front, tossed all the lumber into a burn pile and a dump pile, cleaned out all the odds and ends, and now I'm stuck.



You can see I've got the goat igloo in one part, and there's a cast-iron tub I cannot move in the middle part, and now the pigeon part is open too. I could rip out the interior walls - they're just 1/2" plywood nailed on some 2x4 strips - but maybe I should leave them? If you were buying a moderately priced small horse acreage, would you rather have three stall-lets to feed the horses - it'd be easy to gate them off - or have one big open 24x12 run-in?

People cram a hell of a lot of horses in these little half-acre and acre paddocks, but they pipe them off into individual horse areas. I'd be comfortable having two to three horses in my half acre undivided paddock.

Also there's the little decorative fence thing out front. It was blue but all the paint's peeled off. Should I paint it a) white b) green c) dark green or d) rip it out?



I am also creeping along painting the kitchen. It's much easier doing one cabinet at a time - not so overwhelming. Got two coats on the inside of the big cabinet. Tomorrow I can sand the fronts of the doors again and get them painted, then move on to the little cabinets above the fridge.