Already Behind

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

So, new year and I'm already way behind.  I discovered yesterday that Gmail is hoarding messages again (well, Gmail or TaosNet or the CenturyLink backbone, who knows? the effect is the same). I have no idea how far back this goes this time, and had no time yesterday to dig around, so if you sent me a message that required a response and didn't get one, let me know or just send the damn thing again, plz. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to what gets through and what gets held.

Nothing much that was on my actual to-do list accomplished yesterday; we spent half the day trimming/soaking/draining/painting/booting the two girls. Cree's founder has been in full swing again for a while, so Wings has completely taken over her trimming, because the standard farrier approach does not and will never work for her (which should be obvious, but apparently is not), and it's cheaper if he does it himself than bringing the specialist over the mountain from LV. She's had abscesses in her forefeet, a result of the the wrong type of trim job on a foundered horse. So he took off several more thin layers of sole yesterday (enough to let blood flow in a couple of areas), we soaked her in apple cider vinegar (far more effective than the Epsom salts that are the conventional wisdom in this area), then painted her hooves with tea-tree oil and booted her hooves. She's walking better already. (This episode was also much easier than the last one, a few days before Christmas, in blizzard conditions; you haven't lived until you've put a horse fully inside Wings's studio for trimming. Yes, the air was blue, and not with the snow, but we got it done.)

Unfortunately, we had to do Shade, too.  Shade is Cree's daughter, and now approaching middle age (she'll be 13 in May), and so we have to watch her closely to try to ward off early manifestations of either founder of Cushing's (which Cree now has, too). Someday I'll write about all of these in detail so people know what the hell it is I'm talking about. At any rate, Shade seems to be developing a tiny bit of a cresty neck (not good), and she's been a little lame on a forefoot (also not good), so we soaked, painted, and booted her, too.  She's never been booted before, and it makes her stumbly, and so she balks and refuses to move. We'll likely take them off today so her feet can breathe; it was largely protection to allow the vinegar and oil to soak in and do their jobs overnight. Cree, on the other hand, is an old hoof at this, and she's cool with it.

Add to that the fact that my current autoimmune crash has apparently decided to supplement itself with a bug, and I'm way behind. I say "current," because although I always have a post-holiday crash after the season's frenetic pace, filling orders, all the logistics of packing and shipping and so forth, coordinating with Wings on who needs what, and taking over more of the physical labor so he can cadge needed time in the studio, all in much colder weather . . . yeah, and all that's coming right on schedule, but this year, it's not really a new or distinct crash. Since my mid-August concussion, I've never really pulled out of the AI crash that ensued shortly thereafter. It's been a very difficult few months physically and otherwise, and it's pretty clear to me that this is going to be my new normal. 

Anyway, all of this is by way of saying that I'm way, way behind on everything, including my "day job" of promoting Wings's work and that of the other artists in our gallery. Today's post at The NDN Silver Blog will likely be late today, too. I'm dragging physically and mentally, and while this is not at all new to me, neither is how best to deal with it, which means that I have been and will continue to be cutting way, way back on my level of engagement. The prospect of anything else, especially that which involves giving energy or attention to certain types of behaviors by others . . . ain't nobody got time for that here. So expect to see me only when you see me; it's going to take all I've got just to do my, you know, job. Jobs. All of them.