Three Pines Farm

This week has been pretty hectic; finally got my 'department' moved into the new building at work and I'm LOVIN' IT!!!  Then we had Thanksgiving and Nathan's birthday; it was just the two of us and that was okay, since I had a migraine and he has a sinus infection.  Not to mention I forgot to thaw out the turkey until Thanksgiving morning.  But an hour under cold running water and then into the roaster with a gallon of applejuice, set on 220 degrees for an hour, and it was all thawed and ready to turn up the heat.

Also happening Thursday was the re-homing of our ducks and geese.  I couldn't bear watching them dissappear one by one to feed the coyotes, and since I've been having trouble finding a hunter, I decided to list them online and found a new home for them within a few short days with a very kind lady named Shannon from Gosport.  I've never heard of Gosport but she sent me pictures of some of her birds and they all appeared fat & happy, and she answered all my prerequisite questions with good answers.  I'm confident they went to a great home.  But it's so quiet in the barnyard now, and the pond is so still and bare.  In a few years, after we build the pea's their own coop, we'll build another to house some ducks and try again when we've got more impenetrable battlements.

I also received notice this evening that I had helped to broker a sale; a few weeks ago in my search of online ad sites for Boo, I came across a young TW filly and conversed with her owner a little.  She wasn't quite what I was looking for but was a great deal.  Anyway, the seller said he needed to sell her right away and if he couldn't, well, he used the 's' word so I had to get involved.  I'm a firm believer in the power of marketing; if you have something to sell, you'll sell it faster and for a better price if you market it well.  That means good pictures, good ads with proper spelling, punctuation, grammar, and capitalization; and saturation (put it on a lot of sites).  That's why I started this site, actually; when I was selling Lucky, I found it tiring to keep writing all the same info on all the ad sites, so I put it all here and then put a 'teaser' in the ads with a link here.  It worked great!  So I took this seller's info and shaped it up a little, along with pics; and in just about a week, we have a buyer.  That's so wonderful!  She was a great little girl and the buyer is a lucky person to have found her. 

Also, I got a reply from Lucky's new owners; I had sent them an email a week or so ago inquiring as to how they were getting along.  His new owner says they're getting along famously and she just loves him to bits.  That's what I had hoped for; he was a great horse and needed someone to love him, he just didn't get used enough here and it wasn't fair to him.  But again, marketing found him a great home!

So that's been our week here on the farm.  Still got half of this long weekend to go, and I'm already dying to get back to work, lol!  Nathan has orders that he is NOT hunting tomorrow until the house is cleaned and half the laundry is done.  We'll see if that law stands, lol! 

This weekend we finally had a warm day!  Ok, it was maybe 50, but it was the warmest we'd had in a couple weeks.  The boys celebrated by having a group snooze and since I love seeing them like that, I went out to love on them a little.  Nathan was butchering his deer but when he came out for a break I asked him to grab the camera for a few shots.  I hear quite often that there simply aren't any pictures of me and while I can say I don't know why you'd want to see that, it's usually because I'm behind the camera.  Nathan did a pretty good job, though; I did a little cropping since he seems to lean the camera quite often.  Anyway, here are the boys and myself in the sun.  Callie even joined in, as you will see:

Those of you that know Tard will know that sometimes, even the effort of laying with his legs tucked under and his chin resting on the ground is just too much.  He occasionally has to take a rest from taking a rest, and sprawl out.  I guess if you're going to be lazy, might as well go all the way!  :)   I love this guy.  Never fails to make me smile.

Last night I e-mailed the wonderful woman that purchased our little Tanner to see if she knew how he was doing, and when she replied, she included some photos!  Justin will be glad to hear his little buddy is doing very well; I recieved permission to post the photos, so here they are:

Here's Tanner with his new parents and his new buddy.  Looks like he's gotten his winter woolies in!  And a very pretty friend he's got, there; I don't know if I've ever seen a paint marked quite like that.  He/She is cute!

And here's Tanner with another friend!  Look how cute they are together!  He must be happy, looks like he's getting a little bit of a belly on him... :).  Actually, I think he was just switching his weight in mid-step.  He looks good!

It looks like he's in good hands and that makes me so happy.  I know Justin misses having a friend (so much so that I'm looking into getting another colt, see post further down the page), but I'm pleased that such good people found our little "Po-pone".  Looking forward to future updates! 

Several years ago, I bought and raised an orphan colt.  He was a registerable TW, so we registered him when he came of age.  Due to circumstances beyond my control I had to sell him just after he turned 2; I was young and naive and it turns out the guy I sold him to is a notorious horse trader.  I feel so horrible about it; I've seen many times in the years since that 'horsepeople' can indeed be cruel enough to lie.  Won't let that happen again.  Well, in the four years since, I've not been able to find out anything on him.  But recently I found someone with a TWHBEA membership and they were able to find out that no one had re-registered him.  Terribly depressing, because either the bastard sold him without the papers and now his people don't know who he is, or he went to auction and god only knows where he is, or he went to slaughter (although I doubt it; the horse the guy traded to me weighed easily double Boo's weight, so that trade wouldn't have made sense if slaughter was the goal).  I miss my Boo and would love to find him; later I will post more details about him here and if you think you might have him, I would be more than willing to pay for the blood test to know for sure.  Then you can have your papers and I can know where my Boo is.  More on this later.

...but no rain!

We didn't actually get any trick-or-treaters, but we had a grand time, regardless.  While out back, I noticed the spider shown below on a tree, and the neighbor kids came to investigate.  After squishing it, we commenced to throwing the downed walnuts at the ones still in the tree and had an absolute blast.  The festivities lasted until well after dark, at which time we went in and went to bed, since we're old.  :)

I'm gonna say this is a Black Widow.  Doesn't really matter, since as far as I'm concerned, ALL spiders are dangerous, lethal, and out to kill me.  I found this one at the base of one of our pecan trees, and after taking it's picture, I poked it with a stick until it exploded.  Only good spider is a squished one.

These were this year's jack-o-lanterns.  Although I didn't turn the light on for trick-or-treaters (since we were out back having a great time with the neighbors), these 3 still showed their Halloween spirit.

 

Nate allowed me to go to Dinky's Friday night, and we brought home some good looking chicks :)

We've got a few Auracanas, a couple Silkies, some Rhode Island Reds, and some Black Australorps.  We got a few adults too, five hens of indeterminate heritage and two banty hens/one rooster of an Old English Game type.  He looks just like my Red, and the two hens look just like my Pinky but sound like Gladys.  The bigger hens look pretty old, but that's okay.  They're safe and sound in the coop, and the babies are tucked away in the brooder where nothing should be able to get to them.  Here's some of the chicks: 

And the two that always remind me of those weird twins in The Matrix; these were two of the four chicks we kept from this spring's crop of banties.  The one in the front is Cricket and the other is Clover; Cricket is fast becoming a pet and comes when she hears her name.

We've still got John and Becky's trailer, so this weekend we decided to take the boys to the State Forest.  We've never been out there because even though we're so close, there aren't any trails from here to there, and the road is entirely to hilly and narrow with people driving way too fast on it; there's no way I'd put my boys in that kind of danger, riding down that road.  Saturday night we took Baby by hisself and it just about blew his mind; he had no idea that many horses existed!  Hollered his fool head off.  We walked the length of the horseman's campground and back, and while we were traipsing about, some TW's came by and passed us at their fast walk.  Baby thought he would try to keep up, lol.  He was a good boy for his first time out.

Sunday afternoon, we loaded up Tard and Shi, and went again.  Tard decided he wanted OUT of the trailer and pulled one of the elastic ties in half, but we got both of them saddled and down the trail with no further incidents.  I'd like to know what idiot decided it would be a good idea to line the fire lane trails with fist-sized sharp rocks; if you're going to put down gravel on a horse trail, why put something down that no horse could walk on???  The littler trails were still good, and we rode to the river and back.  Shi acted like he didn't have a clue how to follow a trail until we doubled back, lol.  When we got back to the trailer, we walked up the street a ways and chatted with our farrier and his clan.  Tard did his tongue-thing and was an instant hit :) he loves being the center of attention.  We returned home to find Justin in the exact same position as when we left; contentedly munching on his pile of hay.  He doesn't mind being alone, evidently.  I wish we had a trailer so we could do this more often, but I'm going to have to get Shi some boots; he's very tender-footed.

It didn't start out so bad; Donna came over Saturday after Nathan got home from work, and the three of us went to work butchering chickens.  We got 9 done before dark.  These were pretty big birds!  They could have used a couple weeks to build up just a little more meat, but they're good sized nonetheless.  Anyway, SOMEONE WHO SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS left the bucket of chicken guts sitting in the backyard instead of dumping it, and sometime during the night, it lured the coyotes in.  I'm not 100% sure it wouldn't have happened if the guts weren't there, so I can't really blame him, but still....  Anyway, the 'yotes came in through the horse barn and killed every last one of the 'pet' chickens that were housed there.  All the tame ones; Roy, the feather-footed friendly rooster; Alicia, the tiny little hen; Gladys, the noisy mama; Boy George, the top-hat hen; and about 4 others.  All gone.  The bastards even dragged a couple of them into the backyard not 30 feet from the house, and ate them there.  We had the windows open; I don't know how we didn't hear this happening, or why the dogs didn't alert us.  I'm heartily upset over losing my little chickies.  We finished butchering 6 more big roosters that morning, which leaves us with 1 big rooster, 2 banty roosters, and about 5 banty hens (along with Roger and Peababy).  I'm going to have to stop down the street and see if I can buy a couple hens, so there's enough to keep each other warm this winter.  I'll post pics of my little lost ones later.