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Leaving Blogworld unannounced for a couple of weeks is really very good for your self-esteem. I can highly recommend it. All your beloved Blogfriends tell you how much they miss you. It’s good to know that you mean something to them. Whatever it is.
(Just between you and me, that’s why I disappear now and again. I need a confidence-boost from time to time. But don’t tell anyone. They might just stop caring.)

(Actually, that’s a lie. What I told you yesterday is the truth. Honest!)

So, what’s been happening while I was neither here nor there. I mean, I was here but not hére. And from my point of view I’m never there. Not even always here. Are you still following? Good for you! I’ve lost the plot totally. Where was I? Oh yes, I wasn’t here, nor there, but here. And what happened here? Not much.

Main event: Evie had a colic. God knows why. She’s alright now, but I can’t for the life of me think of a reason why she suddenly was constipated. We are always careful about what we feed the horses (their intestines are very sensitive to variations in their diet). As soon as I noticed something was wrong I gave her a dose of Colosan (sadly not known in other parts of the world as a medicine for horses with a tummy ache), which usually does the trick within 10 minutes or so but this time it didn’t work. So the vet came and gave her an injection to ease the pain and get her system working again. Vet even tried to do an internal examination, but poor Evie was highly surprised someone tried to push an arm into her… erm… arse. She didn’t agree with such impertinent behaviour and made that very clear to vet and me. She didn’t kick, but jumped around a lot and tried to stand on her hind legs, which you can imagine isn’t funny if you have your arm somewhere up there. (Well, it is funny to watch if you are an innocent bystander perhaps.) So vet abandoned the idea and said: “I’ll just give her the injection then…”, and that worked. Non-horsey-people probably don’t understand why you’re doing a happy dance when you see a pile of your horse’s poo.

We also did some obstacle training when I wasn’t in Blogworld. Horses sometimes consider the most normal things to be horribly scary, so it’s important to show them that not everything is as frightening as it may seem. An umbrella for instance makes Naloma snort like a pig. She does that when she doesn’t trust something. I know. It’s weird. She’s weird. I’ve done ‘umbrella-training’ before and it took Willem about 2 minutes to destroy the umbrella I dropped in the paddock. He isn’t scared of anything. He picked it up, shook it, dropped it and stood on it. Dead umbrella. Naloma however… totally different story. Her first reaction is WHAAAAAAAA SNORT. Her second reaction is SNORT and keeping a safe distance from the weird object. I did some work with her and eventually she dared to touch the umbrella, but she still wasn’t convinced the thing didn’t want to attack her.

So I thought I’d introduce an umbrella to Evie. She had much the same reaction as Willem, but the umbrella survived this time.

Then we introduced a sheet of plastic and tried to make them walk over it.
Willem didn’t care. He didn’t even raise an eyebrow. So no problem there.

Evie thought it was an exciting thing, but she’s very curious so she couldn’t keep her distance for long. She walked over it in no time and when we let her do her own thing….

…she tried to eat it. Not a good idea. We saved the plastic (and Evie) and…

…then we introduced the plastic to Naloma. She snorted a lot…

…but about half a bucket of treats later…

…she accidentally put one foot on it, which she regretted soon afterwards…

Don’t you just love her?

Eventually she walked over the plastic a couple of times, after I took over from hubs, but there is no photographic proof, because I’m silly and rather not have my photo taken. 

So my lovelies… that’s about it for today. I’m off to rake up the leaves. I love Autumn for its light and beautiful colours, but all those dropping leaves… Can do without that!