Down on the Farm

We arrived home on Saturday the 18th of April after a windy drive across southern Alberta. The previous post has the details of our last day on the road and some pictures of the kids and grandkids that were here to meet us. I am not sure how often I will post to the blog while we are here but am thinking that once a week is all that you will be able to stand. We have a lot of things to get done around the old homestead this spring and summer but the highlights will probably be enough to keep you sleeping well at night. Brenda of course started cleaning almost the minute the bus stopped rolling and here two days later she has stopped for a breather. I help carry stuff from the rig into the house and tried to do some of my own stuff in between the freight trips. Yep, for those unbelievers I have stuff to do myself. The fact that most of mine looks like a lot more fun than the stuff Brenda does is really just an optical illusion or maybe a matter of perception. Sunday the kids had us down to their trailer for breakfast so there goes my diet again, I had just finished my healthy bowl of Cheerios when the girls got up here and told us that there was bacon, eggs and pancakes being served down by the barn. So what the heck two breakfasts never hurt anyone, did they? And we are starting a Weight Watchers diet tomorrow so I better stock up…..LOL. After breakfast Matt and I fixed the rototiller so that he can continue tilling his new garden and then the girls reminded me that I had promised to let them brush the horses and maybe do some riding. Now the brushing is not a problem this time of year as anyone who has horses knows, you can brush steady for a month and never really get it all done. There was a winters worth of tartles in some of the manes that took me a long time to get combed out, and then the girls thought they should spend some time “training” the horses. This pretty much amounted to them trying to drag the horses around while the horses resisted and ate the green grass in the yard. Oh well it kept them amused for awhile so I had time to work on some of those tartles. Once the “training” was done I thought they should set up on them bareback for a while so that they get used to the sensation of moving on those animals without the benefit of a saddle to hang on to. As they haven’t been ridden since last September I was pretty much hands on with this riding exercise but everyone had a good time and the kids seemed to enjoy themselves. Once that was done we turned the horses back out into the pasture. Around supper time the kids and grandkids got themselves packed up and headed back to the city and we were all alone here at the farm.
Monday we hauled some more stuff in from the motorhome and then Brenda decided that enough was enough and she “needed” to get into Walmart in Airdrie. I stayed home and once again brought my remuda into the yard to do a little work. More tartles to remove and once again some brushing. I even managed to get Hank and Rosie saddled and did some spins around the yard. After a winter of standing around being pasture ornaments they were a little surprised that I had the affront to ask them to go off away from their friends and spend a little one on one time with me. Hank as usual has a little attitude and can be stubborn when it comes time to leave the herd, but after a little “horse whispering” we came to an agreement on who was going to call the shots on this team. He is a fun horse to ride, without a mean bone in his body, but can be a little stubborn at times. We’ll work on that the next few days. Rosie was her usual calm and quiet self once we agreed that we weren’t going to spend the afternoon standing beside her friends. Nothing here that I didn’t expect after not working them for 6-7 months. A couple of weeks from now the world will be a more orderly place and they will be back to their cooperative selfs.
Of course it is not all horses and kids here, we don’t get our mail forwarded so there was a pile of that to open and go through. No matter how well you think you have it organized there is always something unexpected that pops up and needs to be attended to right away. Well really, it is probably overdue a couple of months. What with the mail and getting the phones back up to speed I had some faxing and phoning to do this morning. Geez I hate those voicemail thingy’s, push 1 for help, push 2 for better help, push 0 for really fast help……., reminds me of one of our airlines here in Canada, WestJet, they have a little different corporate culture than many and think all things don’t have to be serious to get things done correctly. There phone message tells you they will be right with you but if you really need something to do push 3 for customer service, they won’t be there any quicker but you will have something to do while you wait. They also tell jokes on the airplanes while they are doing the safety briefings. No one said safety can’t be fun and I think people actually pay better attention to them if they do it with a light hearted manner.
Tuesday was a day for working in the yard, after my morning walk I headed into town and bought a load of fertilizer. Rumour has it that it will snow here tomorrow so I thought I’d get some fertilizer down to get the lawn greened up a little earlier. Must have walked at least another 2 miles back and forth across that expanse of grass. Makes me wonder why I didn’t make the paddocks bigger and the lawn smaller. Managed to get some time to run the generator in the camper and make sure everything there was ready for a trip to the mountains next month. Now what about those taxes, oh well they are not due for 7 or 8 days.
Wednesday Brenda headed up to Rocky Mountain House to see our daughter Lacey and Brenda’s brother Brent. She has a lot of running around to do there so I opted to stay “down on the farm”. Tomorrow she and Brent are coming back down here and we need to do some furniture shopping on Friday. Oh yah, the rumours are true, there is snow out there. About 2 inches so far but that is not surprising for this time of year. It will disappear fast and the moisture will help the grass get a kick start. My son Matt and my granddaughter Madison were out today after school as he needed to start the heater in his trailer to fend off this last hurrah of Old Man Winter. Heather I sure hope you missed this and caught that plane to Maui just as the first flakes were falling.