I am lucky enough to work from home. No, I don’t work in my pajamas and I don’t lay around and watch Oprah and eat bon-bons! I’m at my desk, checking emails, working, answering the phone, etc from 8-noon and 1-5 every work day. But the big break is that I don’t have to spend time and gas money driving in and going home each day, plus I have my noon hour at the house. Usually I do some chores at noon – now that it’s summer, I usually check water, put fly-spray on the horses, and turn the “diet pen” horses out for a couple hours of grazing.
Last night it rained a fair bit, over 3/4 of an inch. At noon there was still quite a lot of standing water and mud, and that always seems to bring out the flies, even if they are not usually too bad. I had asked hubby to mow the weeds out of the “diet pen” grazing area yesterday, which meant that today I had to re-string the hot tape that splits the area. Took care of that, turned on the fence charger and let the diet horses out. I remembered they were low on water, so I put the end of the hose in one tank, ran up to the house to turn on the tap. I’d carried the fly sprayer with me to the house (that’s where the refill jug was), so I filled that while the hose ran. Went back to check on the water filling, one tank was full so I filled the other and watched the turned out horses. Bird was happy, out looking for grasses or goodies that sprang up from the rain. Murphy and Foxy were in the other part of the pen. The flies were bugging Murphy, but both he and Foxy have decided that fly spray is evil, so I only spray them when I have a halter on them, then they resign themselves and stand still. Murphy is kind of like Foxy’s exercise coach -he makes her move around when she would rather stand in one spot and eat a hole to China. So she keeps moving and eats a little more moderately under his “coaching” and stays at a healthier weight.
Oops! the tanks are full, so I run back up to the house and turn off the faucet, grab the fly sprayer and head to the pasture. Those horses know what fly spray is about and each vies to be the next one sprayed, sometimes butting back into line to get sprayed again. They are pretty well mannered, no real shoving occurs and there is no kicking. Although they are pretty close to me, I don’t get leaned on or stepped on. Pasture water is pretty easy – we have set up a tub with an automatic float valve, so it refills when they drink. Just to be sure they are drinking, I will dip a few buckets out in the evenings and see if anyone is really thirsty, but so far so good.
Oops! gotta get moving, my noon hour is drawing to an end. I head up to the house with the fly spray – and hear Bird whinnying for me. She has a distinctive voice! She’s left her grass and has come through her muddy pen to the gate to remind me that she also needs fly spray! As soon as I’m in her pen, she arranges herself so I can spray her all over, then she whispers sweet nothings in my ear as I shut the gate and hustle back to work.


I worked her and her gelding buddy together in the round pen for about 15 minutes.
They were fine – as long as the hay was there… then he got a bit amorous and she was willing to play along. The round pen is not really strong enough if there was going to be an argument but it was pretty obvious they would get along fine. So today, I put them (and a lot of hay) in the spare pasture – it’s plenty big if there was going to be any chasing around. They are getting along great. He has “bred” her but nobody is getting hurt and I think the charm will wear off over time. My first gelding had some girlfriends in his pasture but he never acted up while he was being ridden. LB seems to be of a similar personality.