This Time of Year

This time of year, Juanita and I are pretty much tied to the lodge.  At least one of us has to be here at all times to check in guests, answer the phone and generally do "lodge stuff".  We can only leave one at a time to do errands and such.  And I can get the innkeeper version of cabin fever after just a week or two.  Out!   Let me out!

So this morning Juanita took a call from the oldest daughter:

"Hello? Oh, hi dear!  What are  you up to today?  Oh, you took time off work to install in your kitchen cabinets?  That sounds like a lot of work for one person. How's Skeeter, your horse?  Oh, That's nice.  Okay dear, we'll talk later"

"Bill, she may need some help putting up the kitchen cabinets they just bought so..."


I'm pretty sure she said something else, but I couldn't hear 'cause the front door slamming shut behind me cut her off.

ROAD TRIP!

Kitchen Before

Base

By the time I got to the farm house she and her husband are renting, she already had the base cabinets screwed together.  She told me she was glad to see me as she had just gotten her last long screw STUCK halfway into one of the cabinets.  I got it out, and had brought some more screws, so in no time at all, we had the base together and leveled.  Soon the wall cabinets were hung and ready for painting.  I am not a big fan of painting, and she seems to like it, so we decided to go play with her mustang "Skeeter" and she could paint later.

She done good

Skeeter is coming right along in her training.  Today we visited the chickens, walked down the farm road a quarter mile or so, inspected a large tractor tire.  We also looked at the large irrigation pipe feeding the corn field.

You can't see them, but they are there...

And there we saw toads.

Millions of inch long toads.

Here they are, Bill

Skeeter the horse didn't seem to care about the toads, but it kind of creeped me out.  It was just a day or so ago I was talking to one of our guests at breakfast about the plagues that have hit Colorado in the last few years.

Huge fires.
Floods.
A plague of insects (Okay, they were pine bark beetles rather than locusts, but they still did a huge amount of damage.)

I said it seems almost Biblical.  All we were missing were frogs raining from the sky.

Toads.  Millions of them.

On the bright side, they may be taking care of the plague of mosquitoes that have been gnawing on Skeeter the horse.

We soon walked back into the corral and did  just a bit of trailer training.  Man, that is one long horse.  She can reach the front of the trailer and eat the hay out of the bunker while keeping her back feet firmly planted on the ground outside the door.

Then she got hosed off, and went for a nice roll in the mud.  It's a horse/hippo/pig thing.

It made for a fun day with the oldest daughter and her horse.

Except for the toads.

Bill