Late Breaking News

For a major dose of Christmas cheer, follow this link to the YouTube video of the Moore County Driving Club Holiday Parade.

2010 Southern Pines Holiday Carriage Parade

The gorgeous pair of white horses with red trim under their harness is my gorgeous Cream Draft team, Lucy and Joy.  They did beautifully in the parade, other than a slight shy at the big railroad tracks.  I am so proud of my girls!

TBone comes along , too, driven by the husband with a reindeer friend.  They, too, performed well.  Nobody got hurt and the horses are fine, despite the really horrible weather.  Thirty-seven degrees and pouring rain--the absolute worst possible conditions to spend the morning outside.  My gloves got wet and my fingers froze into agonizing sticks.  The daughter (in red antlers) ended up doing most of the driving, but that's okay.  She did a great job (of course.)

For the record, washing a draft horse requires at least one and a half hours.  I spent three hours washing horses on Friday, when the outside temperature didn't quite reach forty.  At least the sun shone during the process, unlike Saturday, when I stood with them in the rain for most of an hour before the parade started.

Still, we had a wonderful time.  It's a pretty great start to the Christmas celebration, decorating horses and carriages for a ride through downtown, smiling and waving at the shoppers.  I can hear "Silver Bells" now...

Hhmmm.   Maybe that will be next year's theme!

Warm at last,

Cheryl

Birth of a Barn

I finally realized that the only way to show the barn process was to include the photos in a regular post.  I'm still not really savvy with all this Web stuff.

So...here is my field BEFORE.  Abby and TBone are grazing near the burn pile.  Nice green grass, wide open spaces.

This next photo is from last February--what looks like snow is actually ice thick enough to support a horse without cracking.  That's the same burn pile, more or less, underneath.  The building on the side is our well house at the corner of the field.

Fast forward six months.  The burn pile, along with huge mountains of dirt, has been removed.  Trenches two feet deep were dug and filled with concrete, to support the barn walls.  A 10-inch thick layer of gravel covered the trenches and defined the floor of the barn, then was covered with plastic.  Pipes for plumbing were installed.  The result is... 



Then the concrete trucks arrived.

At the end of that momentous day, we had a wash stall and horse stalls:

And a wide center aisle.  That's the tack room across the aisle, not yet filled in.

Nicely smoothed and ready to walk on. 

This was August, so imagine sweltering heat to go with these pictures.  The stacks of concrete blocks will become walls in my next post.

Making progress,

Cheryl