Ack

I haven't posted in a week, I know. It's been a little bit more difficult trying to adapt to my new class schedule, practices, AND get out to the barn and see my boy and girl. I've a few sleepless nights, and I've already had to pull an all-nighter. This semester is the most difficult in my major, and I'm starting to realize that. I'm ordinarily an excellent student. Dean's or President's list all semesters, organized, blah blah blah...but this is still going to be a long fall.

I don't have too much time now, I have a post going about the second part of my massage course, which will get me my official certification as an Equine Massage Therapist (yay!) but I haven't had time to finish it. And I have a butt-ton of pictures on my camera, but sadly I lost the cord that plugs into my computer, and for whatever reason my laptop doesn't recognize the memory card, so I have to get to a computer lab to download them.

As a side note, today was another one of those "Every Horse On the Planet Is Acting Mad Weird" days...Ernie and Stella were turned out around 7 this morning, as I had to catch a bus to Johnson State College for a scrimmage at 8:30. They stayed out until 6:30ish. Normally not an issue. However, both of them were acting very, VERY odd. Stella ate most of her grain, then proceeded to lay down and roll in her stall, which is unlike her. She kept circling like she wanted to continue to roll, went outside, rolled in the dirt (again, not like my princess mare, who hates mud and dirt...she just doesn't roll) and kept circling and circling and sniffing the ground. I thought maybe she was colicking again, so I took her temp, which was 100.1 (normal for her) and listened for gut sounds. Her belly sounded like a symphony, and her gum color was good. I wondered if maybe the bugs got to her so that she might be itchy. I didn't have any Banamine on hand, so we walked around the track a couple times, and I groomed her well; she seemed to settle after that, and accepting hand grazing just fine, but didn't want to touch her hay, again very unlike her.

Ernie I've come to expect weirdness from. It's actually a normality now. However even he was acting bizarre. He was pretty listless, and when I brought him out to groom him, he was REALLY reactive to having me touch certain areas, especially on his left side on the top portion of his neck. He would stretch his neck out with his head tilted at a funny angle and almost threaten to rear on a couple of occasions. Then my friend Eryn noticed how he was squinting with his right eye, refusing to open it fully. I don't know if he got into something, or if the flies were so bad that he got bit up, but he was not a happy camper. I rubbed the spots he reacted to with witch hazel to try and help with the apparent irritation, and sprayed his eye a couple times with a holistic spray that helps treat infections. Apparently a lot of the horses up at the main barn have been getting eye infections, and no one is sure what it's from. I left a fly mask on him tonight to keep him from getting crap in his eye and rubbing it, and they're going to stay in tomorrow. It's supposed to be 90 degrees, and the flies get way worse here when the heat cranks up. There are few to no flies in the barn, though, so they're going to hang out for the day.

Sometimes I wonder if they plan this stuff. Like, "Oh, mom seems kinda stressed lately, why don't we BOTH act like goobers/come up with mysterious ailments/worry her to death with changes in behavior?" Oh, ponies...