Fund-raiser performance - Lisa on Fantasia.

Competition with an aching knee.

I promised a few words about Lisa's performance. So — it was a fund-raiser, alas, in times of covid it could not be held the usual way, with guests, refreshments, et cetera. Everything was virtual, with live streaming from the location. An advantage for our granny to watch it in Europe. A disadvantage: because of cold, the hall was closed, thus deprived of any daylight, and taking pictures and videos ended up in a disaster. The only person who was able to elicit at least marginally good pictures, was Tom Sutherland, a professional photographer.
Lisa performed with her individual program, and at the end they also did a team gig, where they alternated on horses in doubles and triplets, across multiple skill classes and ages.

The whole affair was run by volunteers, who could not be many, because covid. Somehow we all chipped in, and so it happened, for example, that I suddenly held the halter of Dozer — a Dutch warm-blood and a really LARGE horse, and a thoroughbred, thus rather lively. And I don't know him at all. It came as a surprise that they simply handed him to me, but I soon understood. Besides that he tried to roll, he did not do anything. He just marched with me through an alley between boxes to the arena, there he marveled at the sight of a very handsome horse in a mirror (I think he knew it was a mirror when I appeared next to that big horse there) — and that was pretty much it. There was no spooking, no nervousness, no jumping, or hesitation when entering a dark space.

I had already wondered about the matter-of-factness with which little girls here, run around large horses, the serenity with which anybody at hand will hold a horse, and how it's not a big deal when the girls don't quickly follow up taking off a rein with putting a halter on. Nicole's horses are completely at ease and relaxed, they don't run away, don't fret, don't bite, don't kick — they behaved completely civilized. After the show I witnessed onloading of four horses. Non-horse people will probably not track my fascination, but if any of you readers have ever seen, what a rodeo it can be, when loading a horse on a trailer, then you understand why I am completely bewildered at seeing, how one horse walked up into the trailer, Nicole closed a partition, second horse walked up, clack the separator, third horse, separator, fourth horse, whole trailer door gets closed, off it goes.
No ramps, no resisting horses, everything like a factory line. Just like Neddie and his colleagues before — apparently, once you find yourself in a cowboy country, where people grow up alongside horses, everything works out with utter normalcy.

Blind mare Chance.

Twilight and triplets in the sun of the first day.

Now that Lisa showed interest in more taking care of her vaulting horse-partner Fantasia, I stopped being worried about leaving her with a strange huge horse. These days we drive to the stables 30 minutes earlier, and Lisa takes out her mare and gets her ready — and I borrow Chance. She is thirty-two, is completely blind, and so we walk around the pasture (I don't ride; with my weight, I could not do that to the poor mare), I pet her a little, brush her down, and we both feel great together. Blind horses tend to be easily spooked and mistrustful, yet Chance steps quite proudly and does not seem to be afraid of anything.

Unfortunately, around that time was the moment when Lisa's knee started to hurt. Knees are frequently subject to ugly injuries in vaulting, and thus when pain did not recede, we visited a doctor. He said it was probably patellar tendonitis — in layman's terms — she grew up too fast, and ligaments don't keep up with it and hurt. The good news is that it's not an injury. The bad news is, it's a chronic problem, which has no solution. I feel really sorry for Lisa — she invested lots of time (and our money) in vaulting, then was ill for several months in her first season, got stuck in a team with small girls and inexperienced coach in her second season. Covid came in her third season — and now she developed a medical condition, which prevents her to fully engage in practices.

Here I shall jump a bit to April, when the first real, AVA recognized, competition took place. We did not know until the last moment, whether Lisa would be able to compete. She mastered her barrel number and ended up first (out of twelve), she rode her compulsories already not knowing, whether she would finish it, and ended up fourth. After icing her knee and swallowing ibuprofens, she made it through her free-style just to be done with it, and rated ninth. Which is naturally quite de-motivating, so we don't know what to do next. It does not look well for competing on, yet Lisa has found a good team in this club, and their horses are superb. We shall see.

A warm pallet is a favorite spot.

Twilight watches her kids on every step.

On our goat ranch, we awaited blessed events in March. A vet has confirmed that both goats were pregnant — ultrasound showed Twilight's well formed babies with rib-cages, heads and recognizable legs. Licorice's pregnancy was at the time of the ultrasound in the phase of fuzzy clumps, so we expected the babies may come separated by even a month. Twilight got bigger and bigger, until she merely rolled around, and her not exactly sunny personality worsened into a permanently crotchety goat. I was not surprised by that, for her udder hung almost down to the ground, and she sported a game leg. I'm not sure who was more looking forward to the birth, whether her or us — but clearly we all had had enough of it.

I computed the first possible birth due date for Twilight on March 3, and this time I was not off by three weeks, but just three days — in the evening, Saturday the 6th Twilight started to dig with her hooves and behave pre-birth-like, and before midnight her first baby came to the world — even before we managed to get to the stall ourselves. Second and third followed shortly after midnight. Generally speaking, everything went smoothly, but still we made it to our beds only sometimes around three in the morning. Lisa wanted to call one baby goat, Ozzy, and pointed to the bravest and friskiest of them all. Now that we began using singer's names, Mick Jagger and Freddy Mercury were added to the list. After about an hour we found though that Ozzy was actually a girl! I voted for leaving her with the name Ozzy, but family council finally decided for her to become Bonnie (Tyler — if that does not ring a bell, maybe your remember her It's a Heartache hit). Besides not noticing Ozzy / Bonnie being a girl, I was convinced till the next day and daylight that she had blue eyes after her mother. No, her eyes are light brown, like her father's.

Lisa and Ozzy / Bonnie.

Mick.

The only blue-eyed baby goat is the first-born Freddy. And despite being first, he is the smallest and apparently least favored by his mother. Twilight attached herself strongly to Bonnie, kept licking her and staying close — and Bonnie, thus reassured of her exceptional status and the fact that somebody else will take care of everything for her, had paid back to her caring mother by running away and marching boldly into new strange parts of the run, despite mother's calls and care. She stayed that way till today — Bonnie is a strange goat, who does what she wants, when she wants, and where she wants it.

Freddy became the outcast. Especially in the evening, when his mother apparently had less milk, she would not let her small, skinny, runt baby drink. Being also hungry, the baby got the more insisting, so Twilight would even grab him by ears and toss off, or bucked him. I could not leave it alone and so our fight with the bottle begun. Freddy naturally regarded a bottle as an injury to his personal dignity and an attempt of murder. You would not believe how much strength can a tiny goat baby summon to fight violence in the form of goat formula. Still, in days, when he was being pushed off by his mother too much, force-feeding helped enough to stop him from being desperate, and earning a bite or serious bucking from her. Within about two weeks his intake of milk had normalized, as Freddy learned to drink in tandem with some favored sibling, and drama was over.

The last baby goat, Mick, is largest, strongest, hairiest, and most level. Mick is a kind of teddy-bear, who does not feel an urge to prove himself, and lives at ease. His mother does not push him away, but also does not smother him with care. Because he's biggest, he does not have to push against anyone and fight for his spot in the sun.

Model Freddy.

Blizzard.

Now, since we were obviously not stressed out enough with goat births, we decided to invest all our savings (or rather, what we had left after selling our California house) into yet another property. In a situation where our enlightened comrade president cancels self-reliance on natural resources and gas prices shoot upwards, everything else follows — respectively, money loses value and it makes no sense hoarding it in a bank account. Putting them into real estate is a gamble less risky than anything else. When we include the fact that our children approach adulthood, while we're getting old, implying that at some point we may not be able to take care of a large house on ten acres; perhaps a small house in town, near stores, offices and hospitals may come handy rather soon. And before it comes handy, there's always a good rental market in a town with a military base. For three, four, five years, until a military family moves on somewhere else. And they are people with a steady, decent income, decreasing a risk of unpleasantnesses.

We reviewed our financial standing, discovered the ceiling of our means, and begun to look around. With a limited budget we naturally had limited choices. Therefore we got to view a house with apparently cracked foundations, which also had a walled-off bedroom window, thus the room made suggestive impressions of being a lair for some dark orgies. Another house proudly featured a kitchen nook located in a mezzanine — likely shared between inhabitants of the upper and the lower half. Some twenty coat-hangers near the entrance, and dark wood-paneled basement with a maze of bare copper central heating pipes criss-crossing the ceiling invited the thought of a cozy prohibition-era speakeasy. There even was, behind one inconspicuous door, a windowless room half filled by a concrete pedestal — it was most likely a water heater base, but there was this insistent feeling that it also could have been a small morgue, or a sacrificial table, with past brimming with coffins and dead bodies. The house's garage had been also converted into a housing unit at some point earlier.
Another house had a garage cutting into a natural hill-slope, thus one could, from an alley along said slope, step onto the garage's roof, and subsequently enter a bedroom through a window over said roof. We've seen countless dark green carpets and moldy corners; bathrooms requiring one to jump over the toilet bowl to reach the bathtub. There also was a house with a tumor of long-abandoned, glasshouse-covered solar panel on its roof, or one with a view to a busy intersection with a prominent gas station. Most houses sported a basement — one that would frequently be built into a separate housing unit. It's only natural that in a place where people don't boast California income levels, it makes sense to live in one portion of the house, and tenants in another portion help cover your expenses. When we imagined how we attempt to independently rent two parts of the same house, and subsequently deal with disagreements between such tenants, we found ourselves shying away from such prospect. Perhaps we would get more money that way, but also a great deal of hassle. Thus we eliminated all houses that aimed at such arrangement.

Snow bank in front of our basement.

Magnificent men on snow-ploughing machines.

We also skipped houses that visibly required modifications. Neither one of us is a home improvement buff, and contracting everything out would get expensive — not to speak of the fact that there's a construction race on in Cheyenne, and finding a contractor or building materials is practically science-fiction. And we also wanted a house, where we could imagine living ourselves. Regardless whether the kids would move in there, or us old folks — thus we eventually rejected a re-modeled house where Sid walked around hunched like Quasimodo, so low was the ceiling in the basement. Then one Friday evening I found a newly re-modeled house on the internet, located in decent part of the town, without abominations visible from the marketing pictures; I contacted our real-estate agent Tiffany to set up an open house visit. She said the house would be ready on Sunday noon, and we could meet her then to review it.

We showed up at 1200 in front of the house, went through it and saw what there was to see, at 1247 we placed an offer. It got accepted by four in the afternoon — thus breaking our previous recored in buying a house. Tiffany laughed that she really likes to work with us. This way, between staying up all nights and watching a pregnant goat and feeding a rejected baby goat, we also took care of all possible and impossible paperwork, money transfers, inspections, and small repairs on the house.

A week after the baby goats were born, panic messages started arriving from Czech Republic, about a calamity of six to ten feet of snow to fall on us. We gazed at local forecasts, which insisted on up to two feet (apparently some Czech "journalist" reckoned that a foot is the same as a yard, which is almost a meter), but still we bought emergency supplies and waited. It only rained on Saturday; snow came later during the night, though embellished by our local specialty, wind. I told myself in the morning, what an old hand I was, when I set out to the goats carrying a shovel. I dug out the gate — I opened it and hence it stayed open until the snow melted, eventually. Then I dug through the three feet high snow bank in front of the shed, and proceeded to feed and generally take care of the animals. Within the thirty minutes while I was inside, wind had completely covered up the trail I had dug, so from that point on I stopped digging through the snow banks and simply crawled over them. On my knees and elbows. Try walking in shifty powder up to your mid-thigh. Then I discovered that I had a choice on my way back to the house (upwind) — either I proceed blindly (with my eyes closed) and hope I don't miss it, or I keep my eyes open to snowfall at 80 mph. On my following trips to the goat-shed, I had to be a sight to see — wearing ski goggles, I crawled on all four across snow banks..

Half of a county road.

Our house in town is still standing.

On Monday, sun came out again, and turned the landscape into a thing of beauty. But it also was a day when I discovered it was really necessary to manually feed Freddy, while my small bag of goat formula in my emergency birth box started running out. We also felt an urge to check out our new house, how it fared in such a weather. So we began to dig. First the barn door, behind which our Ford dwelled — clearly we were not going to take our minivan for a spin anytime soon, and Subaru has a lower ground clearance than the Ford. Had Sid not tried to simply drive through the snow bank without digging first, I might not have considered a divorce (the fact, we had not divorced, can only be attributed to my outgoing and tolerant nature). After we had subsequently freed the Ford from said snow bank, I managed to notice a neighbor returning from his night shift — he abandoned his car at the entrance to our street, walking the rest of the distance home. He told me that the HOA had arranged for plowing the private roads leading to our neighborhood's houses. I fixated my thoughts to the hope of being possibly able to drive the section to the somewhat-cleared county road in the afternoon, and proceeded to dig out our driveway. I would like to mention that having your house some distance away from the county road has many benefits — until the moment that said three hundred feet of your driveway get blown over by a lot of snow. After an hour and a half of shoveling, I was drenched with sweat, and still only quarter of the way through, a prince on a white horse appeareth neighbor rode in on a tiny red tractor, and ploughed the rest of the way in twenty minutes. I almost threw myself in his arms and kissed him (I held back only because given my age and figure, he might regard it as an assault with a deadly weapon).

And so it came to pass that in the afternoon Sid and I sat in our Ford, heading to town. Until that moment I had the impression that the complications and delays with out digging out of the snow were mostly rooted in the fact that we live practically out of town, in a sparsely populated, uncivilized area. To our surprise we were creeping through "civilization" along a county road, which was ploughed, albeit only half-way. Only one lane had snow removed, serving both directions, and whenever there was opposite traffic, one of the cars had to drive into a snow bank, and we passed each other carefully. Freeway was closed, and the gas station near it was experiencing utter chaos. Big trucks that did not fit onto the large holding lots, were blocking roads and possibly ploughs that might attempt to help. Only a narrow lane led through, forcing one to pray for no big truck to choose that moment to go the other way, as we would have to back up. Almost everything in the town was closed — my silly idea that I just grab a bag of milk for Freddy from one of the feed stores proved quite unrealistic. Not even Wal-mart would stay open, and we found a single operational gas station. Most main routes through town were (one lane) ploughed; everything else stayed untouched. Occasionally one could spot a desperate person with a shovel, but it was clearly futile. Strangely enough, the street leading to our city house was (traditionally, one lane) cleared, and so was the parking lot next to a clinic around a corner, thus we had a place to park momentarily. We ran through the house, checked all windows for blizzard break-ins, made sure the heating was on and thus water wouldn't rupture, cleared some snow from the entryway, and drove back home.

A walk at Vedauwoo would have been better with snow-shoes.

Climbing is still ongoing here, despite all that snow.

It would seem that locals have not been in slightest affected by urges to control the weather. Our friends have stated that since the schools were closed (and stayed so for several days), there was no point in going anywhere. Offices, stores, restaurants — they all stayed closed until the snow had in part melted away and in part had been pushed aside — whilst nobody got upset by this short routine interruption. Eventually I found myself to have been the only fool who drove into town — as our new house needed attention — to dig out snow from basement light-shafts, and to satisfy my urge to not let to house look "uninhabited" and un-maintained.

Meanwhile, naturally, the house we live in, needed digging out of snow as well. Kids were tasked to remove snow from their basement entrance. Their light-shaft have covers that stopped most of it, but then their rooms got completely dark (no light penetrates through three feet of the white stuff). I was quite worried about the downstairs patio door. Unfortunately, this side of the house faces west, thus the wind, and in a blizzard several yards of snow build up — I am not sure how much the glass panes can hold. We may have to address this by planting some wind-breaking trees. They would also block to view into the house from the county road. All that awaits us in the spring — which I estimate to come around in June.