I've been cleaning my barn. I can’t stand housecleaning but I find great satisfaction cleaning my barn for some reason, and also cleaning my horses. Yesterday, I washed my horse Mark, and then when he dried and was still as wretched-looking as he was before his bath, I gave him a full body clip. Clipping a horse is one of those things, like child-bearing, that seems like a great idea when it first occurs to you. Why should I spend hours currying the winter coat off this horse, when I can just clip him, is what I thought yesterday at noon. So, out came the clippers and I set to work. An hour and a half later, I was covered with horse hair, was wading through great drifts of horse hair, my nasal passages were lined with horse hair, and I had only shorn a small clearing on what I now saw as the vast acreage of my horse Mark. Horse clippers are big heavy things and moving them over a horse’s body again and again starts hurting your arm and then it starts hurting your back. Plus, the clippers get hot and make a loud high-pitched whirring sound that, after two hours, doesn’t go away, even when the clippers are turned off. Plus, horses are stupid. They’d like the thing to be over as quickly as you would but believe that dancing in place is the best way to speed things along. But I did manage to finish his body and left the legs for another day (the day hell freezes over, most likely).
Here’s a before shot:

Here's the after shot:

Do you want to see the whole horse? Well you'll have to wait until tomorrow because the photos I took yesterday don't flatter Mark. He's not exactly an oil painting, as horses go, and, like Barbra Streisand (and me for that matter), really needs to be photographed from certain angles. Seriously, I adore this horse and can't show the pictures I took yesterday. But I will show you this guy, whom I found when I lifted a bucket from a corner of my tackroom.

When the amphibians start moving in, it's time to turn on the dehumidifier. I named him Newt, though I suspect he's actually a salamander and then put him in the bucket and released him next to our pond.