New toy

Let's see. Today is Sunday, right? I've kind of lost track of the days. Got home from work in time to work with Cody in the twilight. He seems bored, by himself all day, so I got him one of those Jolly Ball toys. He seemed interested in it, was sniffing at it and pushing it with his nose. Didn't really care for me bouncing it towards his feet though, lol. I also broke down and bought him a pair of blue SMB3 boots. I got a good deal and he looks good in blue.


Have your horses started shedding? I don't know if it's because of the blanket or what, but check out the hair just falling off of him.


I decided I wanted to try and get him to trot in hand. He's not so sure about that just yet. Going from a walk to a trot gets me a halt and a look like, what are you doing?!? So we modified things slightly to where I was trotting with him as he went around in a circle, which I think puzzled him a bit too, as he just went faster at first. We need a bigger enclosed space so we have some straight room to move. Hopefully we'll have that to some degree when I am able to get his paddock extension built.

One thing that just, well, falls into the category of ick, are ticks. As I've brushed him and run my hands over him, I have found them and carefully removed them. And then tonight I brushed his mane over to the wrong side to brush it down to the roots good, and I found a few more of the rotten things all hunkered in the roots of his mane. I've never really run into an issue with ticks before, didn't even really think we had them in western Washington (neither did my mom) but when I started searching online, guess we do have them. I want to give him a bath and scrub him clean and for those rotten little bugs to find themselves someone's dinner, instead of having Cody for dinner. You know how when you find a bug or something, and then keep feeling like something is crawling on you? I've felt twitchy like that all evening now. I wonder if a few chickens would hang around, more than one place I read suggested free range chickens or guinea fowl to snack on them.

I know how I've been stressing about him growing and how old he is and all that, but I was looking at pictures of 2 and 3 year old mustangs on the BLM internet adoption site, and I noticed that if you measure fetlock to elbow and compare to elbow to withers on the 3 year olds, they pretty much match, and on the 2 year olds, elbow to fetlock is longer. So I'm going to go with him being 2 sometime this year until the vet tells me different.