A Lot of Rain & A Little Snow

Yes, those are roses in the snow. The other photo is a native Californian, Sugarbush.

Finally, after days of wrong forecasts, there was some snow here. Not much, but enough to look great. The rain started overnight Sunday, took a break Tuesday during the day, and continued off and on until last night sometime. There was a total of 4 inches in my rain gauge. Because the ground was so dry, most of it soaked in so that there was very little run-off here.

I took the horses into the barn Sunday night. They are always happy to go into the barn but are even more happy to get back out. Each stall has a small pen attached to it and one lucky horse gets the alcove at the end of the aisle way that opens to the arena. Because I have hay in three stalls this year, two horses were in the aisle. Only Autumn Wind is rain phobic; he absolutely will not leave his stall if rain is coming down. He also keeps a perfectly clean stall, holding until there is a break in the rain to go out into his pen. The others will be wet to one degree or another, although none of them were outside during the heaviest pounding rain that we had yesterday.

Moving horses this morning was more interesting because rain had gotten into locks and gate clips and then frozen. My key could not go into the tack room lock but there are two doors into the tack room and one was wind/rain protected this time. I rounded up two of the mares and led them out with Beans trailing along. However, the gate clip was frozen, so while three impatient horses waited, I had to rub the clip until the ice melted enough to let me open it up. Warmed up the clip but chilled down my hands. Then I moved one single horse and then two pairs. I am too lazy to move them all individually and the pairing works well--sort of. Snubbers had to do some on-line bucking and Autumn Wind added some airs above the ground for my entertainment. Autumn is careful to not endanger me at all but Snubbers dwells within her own world and any human around her needs to watch out because she does not. But everyone got moved and then had a good roll in the wet sand.