Mango Gets Her Work On

Since Mango is officially the most expensive horse at the house right now (yay colic bills), that means she needs to actually get into some work and get sold ASAP.  At least that's my thinking and goals here.  I love when priorities change :/

So we've been lunging before and after the trip in side reins to get her more relaxed while accepting the aids (basically a less dramatic version of Katy's issues) and she's been doing well.  She's a cute fancy little thing that weighs 900 lbs at 13.2h.  That shouldn't happen, but no one told Mango that.

Here's her after her workout in all her winter Hereford coat glory wondering why she can't just lay out in the pasture:

Vacation!

Its been about five years since the Hubs and I went on vacation.  He's been whining about it for a while but the fact is, we're not great travelers.  When we went on vacation Jan 2010, we basically got bored on the cruise.  The thought that taking a 3 year old human child on a boat with no ability to escape had terrified us, but in reality it was fine.  We had hellacious seas though and spent 5 of our 7 days at sea rather than on land so that sucked.  I think I still have Date Night, Ice Age 3, and A Team memorized from all the times it rotated through our tv.

Also, having a farm makes it hard to leave.  You  have to A- find someone crazy enough to take on these tasks and B- responsible enough to actually carry through with them and make good decisions.  I also tend to do sooo much OCD prevention and checking on the animals that I know someone else won't be able to be that crazy so I have to figure out how to let it go but warn them enough of things to look for.

Yay cray people.

So I had my first work trip ever to California and originally it was a 3 day trip where we just checked out some bone processing I'd been looking forward to checking out.  My boss though does Marine Mammal Vet things and we were joking about running from LA to Monterrey to see the aquarium because... MARINE THINGS!  Next thing I know our 3 day trip is a 10 day trip that encompasses us starting north in Sausalito and DRIVING the coast to LA over the week with several stops along the way.  I badgered, begged, and borrowed to get back stage to some of these places and we were pumped.

Except my husband.

He was whiney... I couldn't figure out why and since he's the moody one in this partnership, I let him sort it out and he finally came up with words for his feelings:  "I want to go..."

So in OCTOBER we dragged out money for plane tickets and decided to drag the kiddo too since a research trip will add to his knowledge and everyone else we know is busy and we like our kid.  Weird, I know.

So basically we're prepping for that trip and it involves things like a full truck bed of feed:

Since this is about the horses, I'll spare the COPIOUS amounts of pictures I took of redwoods, elephant seals, octopi, space shuttles, and other epic things and share one of the final ones of my boys playing football on a beach in LA while we wait for our late flight time.