Andrew the fencer is turning up tomorrow morning to get the horse walkway sorted, so today was final preparation for that. I’ve towed the horse trailer round the corner and up to stand outside the horse barn, towed the caravan across the yard to front the garden wall (it took some chocking on that slope, too – bricks behind both wheels, handbrake on and legs down at the corners, especially the downhill end!) and pushed the small trailer back into the North Paddock, then shut the gate on it (in case George Rambles). The smell of hot clutch is lingering embarrassingly around the car – reversing braked trailers at slow speed does seem to lead to excessive clutch use and I hate it.
After that Michelle (my daughter, home for a brief respite from dissertation stress) and I tore down the strange piece of woodwork that used to hold up the back wall of a dog run, I gather, and tossed it over the fence into the North Paddock too. I haven’t managed to shift the piece of wood it was attached to which is screwed firmly into the corner of the shed wall, but I daresay if I ask nicely Andrew will contrive to scrape it off somehow. I just need to dismantle the goose fence in the morning, which will only take a couple of minutes, and shift the electric fence in the field so he has room to work on that side of the gateway without curious George ‘helping’, which again will only take a few minutes, and then we’re entirely ready with tons of room for manouvering tractors around.
I still haven’t really figured out what to do about the geese.
I need to run Michelle back to Aberdeen train station first thing, but I’ll be back before Andrew arrives and then I can be around and about all day thereafter.
The car has been slightly worrying me for a couple of days by producing a clunking noise on rough ground and right hand turns, so I stopped in at the garage this afternoon. It was a broken anti-roll bar linkage, so they’ve cut the broken piece off (so it doesn’t turn and rip up the wheel) and booked me in for a replacement on Monday. In the meantime, they’ve assured me the car is entirely roadworthy, so no need to steal Mum’s car! At least it wasn’t the suspension….
I took some pix of the progress on the tree monster this morning, then spent twenty minutes scraping up all the woodshavings and bagging them. Once dry they’ll make excellent tinder for the fire! This morning the scene produced a lot of snorts from all the horses – Dancer has a surprisingly deep, resonant snort, considering how little she is!
While I was there with phone in hand, I captured George practising ‘bashful’ again.
Why he has this response to any camera I have no idea! Two minutes before this he was guzzling his breakfast and a minute later he tried to steal Abe’s bucket off Abe’s door, but in between we had this butter-wouldn’t-melt moment. I have to say it’s quite fascinating watching George stretch across and just manage to hook the corner of Abe’s bucket with his top lip, then wiggle said lip to start the bucket moving towards himself until he can get his teeth onto it! I wish I’d had the phone on video but I forgot and rescued the bucket instead.
Cairnorchies Chronicles 