Counting the days!!

I am just about 1 week away from my mini vacation and I am counting the days!! I will have 5 days of nothing but my horse and camping and I cannot wait!! I am so eager for some time off!!!!!!!

I have been busy trying to decide what kind of food I want to cook over the fire and looking for new recipes on the Internet. Unfortunately, the most interesting idea I have come up with so far is to add thinly sliced bananas to S'Mores to give them a new twist. I thought that was a neat idea, so I will probably try that. I don't like a lot of complex cooking and it seems lately everyone only wants to post their Dutch oven recipes. I guess you could say I've been having a bit of a fruitless recipe search. I've eaten stuff made out of Dutch ovens, but don't own one myself and prefer straight cooking over a campfire. I guess if I don't find anything new, it won't be a big deal. I have plenty of favorites to pick from. I LOVE cooking over a campfire.....I can almost smell it now!! YUM!!

For the past couple of days the weather here has been hot, Hot, HOT! We had a heat advisory yesterday and another one for this afternoon. I guess that explains why I am still at work "playing" on the computer instead of going out to see my boy Grif. On days like this, I prefer for Grif to just take it easy and hang out under his shade tree with Spot. I feel fortunate that Grif has one of the best pastures at the farm. There are a lot of trees and I would say that almost half his pasture is shade. Grif has a favorite stand of trees in one corner where he likes to hang out and stay cool on the hot summer days. I imagine that is probably what he is doing right now as I write this.

Our "practice" trail rides around the farm have been going very well. Grif can now make it through the wooded section along the driveway by himself with some gentle encouragement from me. He still looks hard at a lot of things (especially if animals move in the bushes) but he is being very good about it.

Last weekend, I took him for a hand-walk down the road to get some exercise for myself and Grif saw his first Amish buggy ever.

They are building an Amish house down the road from where Tammy lives and as we were passing by, a buggy came out of the trees and out onto the road. I saw it before Griffin did and turned him so he would see it (...and not take him by surprise) and he just about had a heart attack. If I had been riding, it would have been very interesting (I'm glad I wasn't).

The Amish people were great and stopped their buggy until Grif had calmed down a little. They asked what kind of horse he was and when I told them he was a Standardbred, I got a bit of a raised eyebrow. The Amish are very familiar with Standardbreds as that is what the majority of the horses they drive are. I wanted to say that my boy is NOT the TYPICAL Standardbred as a lot of them are much more layed back then he is, but I didn't. They said that he was a nice looking horse and I was as pleased as any horse mom would be.

As they drove down the road, I walked Griffin behind the buggy for a bit so he could see that it was going away from him and would not attack him. He did fairly well with this, but I'm hoping for some more exposure to these buggies as the house gets built. I imagine he may have thought that their horse was being chased by this big, black buggy and was convinced he was next. ..OOOoooooooohh NOooooooo... Every time I find something Grif is afraid of, I see it as a challenge to get him used to it, to be o.k. with it...and to gain more confidence.

While we followed the buggy down the road a bit, some of the children in the back parted a flap and watched us. They were very cute with their little straw hats. I waved at them, but they did not wave back....... Perhaps like many people I see along the road, they were wondering why I was walking with my horse and not riding him.

For now, I guess that's it for a quick update. I hope everyone is staying cool (or trying to) and enjoying the summer.