Thursday, January 5, 2012

Finally!

River got his shoes pulled today! Yes, it's a little late. We kept running into scheduling problems. I'm surprised at how narrow and light they are. Being aluminum, of course they're light, but they seem so flimsy.


His feet aren't too bad. He has an old bruise on one of his hinds, so the farrier didn't take too much foot off to protect him. He also has an old abscess on the opposite front. Geez! He probably needs a chiropractor, so I'll have to remember to call the one I use and set something up.

When I put him out I had to get another horse... while I was doing that, River rolled! It's the first time I've seen him roll and he's so cute!






Awww! Such a good boy!

I'm in the process of building a mounting block. I love the barn, but the only mounting block is a little 2 step thing. There's just no way I can haul my crippled butt up onto 16.1hh River from that. What I'm building is a big, sturdy, heavy-duty thing. You can buy stair thingies from home improvement stores... you know, those zigzag things that you support and attach treads to. I went with the 4 step option... originally I planned to do a 3 step, but it wasn't going to be as tall as I wanted.

I'm making good progress on it. The zigzag things are attached to posts to hold them up, now I just have to add braces and put the treads on. We have a workshop in our basement.. I'm going to have to finish the end pieces, cut the rest of my lumber, and finish assembly in the garage or I might not be able to get it out of the house.

All told, I figure this thing will be about 26" tall with steps 2' wide, the whole thing being about 3' deep. I'm still playing around with the width of the steps... I don't want it to be tooooo unwieldy, but I also don't want it to be wobbly. But from eyeballing it, 2' wide seems like it'll work pretty well. My crash test dummy informed me that *I* will be riding Riv on Sunday, so this mounting block has to be done by then.

Also, is it weird that I really want to paint it fun colors?

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