E D Baker's Blog

I’ve been told that I shouldn’t be so formal in my blog entries, and should let you know more about what my life is like, so I decided to tell you about my day so far – which has been pretty typical.
Last night (this morning?) I wrote until 1:30 before turning off my light - I was falling asleep with my pen in my hand again. Most of my sheets already have ink stains on them.
At 7:00 AM the men came to replace part of our horse fence - which they were supposed to do in October. (They came last week and fenced in our new riding ring, then didn’t come back until today which is Thursday. I was told that most of them had taken off the first few days this week to go hunting. I guess that means that hunting season started again.)
I went outside to talk to them about the new door for the ga-barn. (That’s what we call the building that used to be the garage and had converted into a small barn. It has three stalls and an enormous collection of cob webs in the rafters which are too high for any of us to reach.)
Next, I went down to the bigger barn to help feed the horses. At least two of them have to pee as soon as you walk in the door. I guess it’s their way of saying hello. They then show you exactly where their feed is supposed to go – in the feed pan. Humans are too dense to remember such important information from one day to the next.
I go up to the house and empty the dishwasher, feed the dogs and let them out again while trying to prevent Harry from taking his toy squirrel outside. Harry is pretty good about putting it down next to the door when you remind him, but sometimes we both forget and his squirrel ends up in the garden. He found his favorite outdoor toy buried in some leaves in the garden the other day. Piggie looks like he’d been run over by a tractor and fed to hungry lions – always a sign that a toy is Harry’s favorite.
It is time to go take the horses out of the barn. Not all of them are in the barn – just enough to make more work. We put the filly in the paddock attached to the barn, then put two of the colts out. They start nipping at each other, which is how they announce that they want to play. This is fine as long as you are not still in the field when the colts decide to kick up their heels and run around like lunatics. As this happens every day, it is wise to get out of the field as quickly as possible.
We return to the barn to take out the mares. The filly is trying to take off her blanket with her teeth. The mares are happy to go out, but you have to make sure you take them out in a certain order, otherwise the first one in the field will make it hard for the others to get through the gate – which also means you might get kicked if they are in a particularly difficult mood. This can happen every time it is windy, or raining, or you are putting them out later, or earlier than they are used to, or the man next door is making weird sounds, or an ultra-light plane or hot air balloon is passing overhead, or a mare didn’t get much sleep because she decided that she didn’t like her neighbor and had to kick the wall between them all night just to let everyone know.
When all the horses are out, I return to the house to make breakfast while my daughter starts cleaning stalls – always an exciting job. Some horses are surprisingly neat in their stalls, while others are complete slobs. Unfortunately, on our farm the neat horses are the exceptions. Most of our horses like to stir everything up in their stalls as if they were spoons in big pots of manure soup, which means that there is very little of the stall that isn’t really disgusting.
We eat breakfast, then I go outside to see what the men are doing and to make sure that they know where my shrubs are so they don’t run over them with their machines. This is important because the weeds have grown up so much around my little shrubs that you can hardly see them. They are indigo shrubs, which are kind of spindly and not at all what I’d expected. I got them from the Soil Conservation people a few years ago. I was hoping the shrubs would make a nice hedgerow, but they haven’t done much so far, although a few have gotten tall enough that you can actually see them.
It is now after 10:00 and I have to get to work. My computer is calling me, as are the pages I wrote last night. Going to work means putting on my slippers, walking down the hall to my study, turning on my computer and removing the pile of kittens from my chair. (We have two now, but even two kittens can make a pile when they are curled up together.) Because I have lots to do today, I’ll have to tell you about a typical afternoon in another blog.