It’s officially summer in Virginia. It was even “Mississippi Hot” last weekend. What is “Mississippi Hot” you might ask? That’s when you step outside and immediately sweat. You could be in jeans and a sweater, a summer dress, or your birthday suit and just by standing there you break into a sweat in less than 30 seconds. Usually when people in Virginia whine about the heat I shoot a dagger of a look at them and say, “It’s worse where I’m from”, but last weekend it was about the same. Just plum hot ‘n humid.
Silas is still on stall rest and after days of mentioning to my husband that it would be nice to fix Silas’s fan to keep him cool, I finally put my foot down. It was probably the least convenient timing of the entire weekend, but it was going to be a heat index of 101 the next day and my horse was not going to have a heat stroke in his stall if I could do something about it. So at about 7pm without having any dinner we made the 35 minute trek out to the barn with dog in tow. I was making phone calls for my business while Joey grinded his teeth next to me. He wasn’t exactly thrilled to be spending his Sunday night at the barn. We arrived and I started pulling out tools for Joey – eye-hooks and baling twine. He was just plain mad. “This is what I have to work with?!” and I said, “Well that’s what you use at a barn.” He declared that string would work much better and I informed him that at the barn we don’t have string. We have baling twine. For those of you who don’t know, you can do almost anything with baling twine – it’s even more useful than duct tape because duct tape loses it’s stickiness and falls off. We fix gates, hang buckets, zip boots, tie horses up, fix blankets, attach parts of the riding equipment, hang fans, and on and on and on…with baling twine. Just go to a barn and look around – even a fancy barn – you’ll find it in the oddest places.
He also refused to use the eye-hooks. Apparently they wouldn’t go in the wall. He used nails instead. I wasn’t particularly happy about nails in my horse’s stall, but we compromised. As long as Silas couldn’t reach the nails we were ok. Joey doesn’t like paying vet bills any more than I like having a hurt horse so all nails were hammered in as high as possible in the wall.
After an hour or so of cursing, rolled eyes, avoiding conversation, etc the fan was hung where my horse could have actual air flow in his stall and Joey was covered in a year’s worth of dust that had collected on the fan and transferred to him. We made it home and had dinner around 10pm in front of the tv. Not much was said, but when it came down to it Joey was pretty darn awesome for going to the barn on a Sunday night to fix Silas’s fan. As testament to that the next day when the heat index was over 100, Silas was the only horse not sweating in his stall. Thank you Joey – from me AND Silas!
Lesson of the day: Always keep some bailing twine around in case of emergencies.
Soli deo gloria,
~Sarah
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