I asked and you responded.

I assigned you a couple of tasks, pre-holiday weekend, and thank you for participating.  I just wanted to know if I had left any loose ends that you may be wondering about.  I received the following email:

I would like to see pictures of the golf ball babies and any plans of more breeding adventures.  are there roosters? or did I know this and forget.   what are you planting in the garden?  update on cripple horse and dog?

This will have to be a two part answer, due to the fact that I don't have any current pictures to share.  So, here we go.

1.  Pictures of the Golf Ball babies to come.  They really are pretty birds.

2.  I have no plans for breeding, and absolutely no plans for a rooster.  I know my luck, and he would be the meanest rooster in town.  One of the Golf Ball babies was a rooster, and like all the others, he found a new home.  If I have another hen that goes broody, I will probably feel obligated to get her a few chicks to raise.

Let's just keep that between us for now.

3.  The garden is on the slim side this year due to many delays.  I will include pictures when I post pictures of the Golfers.  I am a little happy about this because the grasshoppers are back with a vengeance.  I was hoping they wouldn't be so bad this year, but no luck.  To give you a quick rundown, there are several varieties of tomatoes, peppers, endless herbs, and cucumbers.  I am hoping that the fall garden will be bigger.

4.  The cripple horse is almost at the six month mark.  It takes approximately one year to grow new hoof from top to bottom, and she is still standing.  I let her out of her run for the first time on Monday.  This was the first time that she had been out in an open pasture in six months, and I held my breath.  She was as shocked as I was worried, and only came to the edge and started eating the grass that had been out of her reach only moments before.  It took her a couple of minutes to make her way out, but then she just proceeded to eat.  My next worry was getting her back in.  I did not want to have to chase her around, and I felt certain that she would not come willingly. 

Wrong.

I grabbed a scoop of feed, and she followed me right in.  I let her out again on Tuesday and will continue to do so a little each day.  Her doctor will be out the middle of the month, and we will do another set of x-rays to see if we made any progress.  It is more just for the knowledge, than anything else.  There may be different things we can try with her shoes or what not, but as long as she is doing what she is doing, we won't have to make any hard decisions on her behalf.

5.  The cripple dog is good.  We had to opt out of spending thousands of dollars on surgery for her, and she has done amazingly well.  She has a few built in features that help her.  One is that she is very front end heavy.  The dog can do the equivalent of a pull up.  She literally can lift her back end off the ground with her front end.  I know this because she does it when she wants to get in my chair with me.  She puts her front feet on the edge of the cushion, rocks the chair forward and holds it down, then pulls her back legs up.  All with my weight in the chair.  She puts her foot down, and she puts weight on it.  She does a little weird thing when she is at a full run, but you have to be looking for it to see it.  Other than that, she acts the same.  She is happy.  She runs and plays.  She loves life and she hasn't slowed down a minute.  I think she is very happy that we stopped the truck that day.

As soon as it stops raining, I will takes pictures.