Macho was Wanda’s first horse that she trained from a wild 3 year old stud. Of course he’s special here. He is now the top lesson horse for the natural horsemanship classes. A calm and nice gelding, with a beautiful buckskin coat, he will let kids do anything on him. You can ride him on the road side, on any trails, he will do what you want. Macho Man also has good papers, with famous race horse Dash For Cash as his grandfather. So, not counting the sentimental value in, he is one of the best horses we have.

Macho may work for just about anyone, but Wanda is the one he runs for.

Keno is our 2 year old Palomino stud horse. We bought him to show him for a few years, and once he’s retired he’ll be a great breeding sire! Apart from his excellent papers he has great temperament and has never shown any signs of aggression to humans. Naomi has  He is now in a pasture with the weaned foals and a mini donkey we bought to keep him company. This handsome horse will sire beautiful babies some day.

We have other good horses, but unless we someday need to live someplace that isn’t horse friendly, those horses will live here till old age.

Sadly, like last year, the lake is drying up faster than we thought. When we first came, the water at least stretched to the edge of the forest. Then it shrunk in this blistering heat, every day it got lower and lower, till you could go on a little island in the middle of the lake. You could go around the whole lake without getting wet. There were dead frogs, fish and even turtles. It was quite sad watching it go down like that. But then that huge storm came and over night we couldn’t see the little mud island anymore. it rained more after that and now it’s even in the forest.

But once again it’s evaporating in the 100 degree weather. Hopefully rain will come soon so that our beloved lake will fill over the muddy, dried up ring around the lake. But not so high that we can’t find our boat!

It was the normal feeding time. The grain scoop was rattled, and the feeder went into the paddock where Thor was being held. Into the bucket, back out of the paddock. Naturally, the horse dug right in, barely chewing. It was a couple minutes till anyone realized what was wrong. It wasn’t too normal seeing a horse foaming at the lips and hacking loudly. Chewed up pieces of the feed were flying everywhere. We had to make an emergency call to the vet for our brilliant new horse.

The vet said that it isn’t too uncommon when a horse chokes. She explained that he couldn’t eat the pellets, so we had to put him on sweet feed. And so we did. At least now when we buy a horse we always know to ask if the horses choke! Hopefully we won’t have another situation like this.

All the really high Capoeira instructors come all the way from Brazil. To pay for the flights and the whole event, there’s always some fundraiser going around. This year the party came to our house. It was pretty fun. Everyone bought drinks and chips and there was even a D.J. He played lots of classical music. The main course was pork. Rudi was slaughtered just the other day, and everyone commented on how sweet he was.

There were pony rides, games, and face painting. Sabrina painted everyone, and I must say the cupcake on my face looked pretty good. At the end of the day we raised about $200. It could have been more, but a lot of people couldn’t make it, what with holidays and all.

And dinner today was leftover Rudi from yesterday, and if we hadn’t cooked most of it yesterday, he would’ve lasted us a couple of weeks.

Why are we slaughtering Rudi today? Because tomorrow we are hosting a big fundraiser event for our Capoeira class. (Capoeira is a Brazilian martial art.) There’ll be lots of people coming, and while they are bringing sides, drinks, desserts, etc, we will be cooking the main course. Which, as you can guess, will be pork! Since the meat takes 24 hours to cook we have to shoot him today and start roasting him so that he’s ready for tomorrow.

Rudi was the very first pig we had, so there might be quite a drama when he’s shot. William, the man we just hired as manager, has a gun and has shot many food animals before. Now the only problem tomorrow will be whether anyone eats him or not.

Those 5 are getting along well on their pasture together. Poco, Elan and Selena are quite relieved. It must’ve been exhausting running after them all day! Twitch and his buddies are well mannered and social. We used them for our foal care course a couple of months ago, and it looks like they haven’t lost it all. They are going to make great horses one day.

Now that the foals have been weaned, the mamas are fit for working again. Of course, they won’t be worked too hard, after months of doing barely anything. But Poco’s already been ridden, she was still pretty good, and soon we’ll start with the others. The newest foal, Kitty, who is about 6 months old, hasn’t been handled too much, so we’ll also be working on her every day.

Since this was our first time with goats, we were still getting into it. Now we can learn from our mistakes. Will, the man that was hired here as manager, will help us with building more goat fences and whatever else they need. We will organize everything properly, starting with selling one or 2 of the goats.

Next year, once the goat kids are at breeding age, we’ll have all our goats bred. We might buy a buck, or rent him. Lots of things we didn’t know of last year we’ll know this year. Meaning we’ll have to think of a solution to growing more greenery in their little pen! Hay just isn’t as satisfying to them.

Now the problem with stock tanks is algae. So much algae! It would be pretty disgusting drinking from green water, especially for horses, who are picky about the amount of gunk in the water. Since all this algae forms all day, the stock tanks would have to be cleaned at least 3 times a week. And cleaning one of those 150 gallon buckets takes about 2 hours each.  But hooray, the problem has been solved! Goldfish. Those things will keep the slime off the walls and they’ll keep the stuff that makes the slime away.

We’ll try it out with the goldfish, sometime this or next week. Some people say it works, some say it’s a failure. I guess we’ll just wait and see. If the fish aren’t upside down within a couple weeks, and the horses haven’t choked on them, we’ll keep on doing it.

We have had 4 cats in the past, but the 2 toms died. It’s always them. Our remaining 2 she-cats tend to stick inside, only going out every now and then. So they are pretty useless on the ranch, just lying around. One of them is spayed, but our young tabby girl Stripes is not. So naturally, that means kittens! At first we didn’t even know about the wild tabby tom hiding in our forest, till we caught him on the balcony one night. We can never manage to touch him or trap him so there’s no getting rid of him.

So now Stripes is hidden in a dark, reclusive part of the master bedroom closet, with 6 healthy, 2 week old kittens. 4 of them are completely gray, one looks like his mother, with gray tabby markings, and white legs and chest. The smallest is white with gray patches and a gray tail. They’ll all be fixed as soon as they’re older, along with Momma cat.

As soon as the kits are old enough they’ll be put outside. Of course we won’t be keeping all of them. We’ll probably keep 2 of them and give the rest of them away. The only trouble is choosing which gender. If we keep some of the 4 boys then they would probably all disappear one after the other. And most of the female cats we have had were never very good hunters. I guess we’ll just see.