Horses!

After a very busy month putting all sorts of infrastructure in place in anticipation of Whisky and Mystery arriving, they're here! More than a year earlier than we had planned, Lea and Sara trailered the horses to their new home. Whisky is Carol's horse, and Mystery is on loan to us from Dreamscape Ranch to keep Whisky company (horses are herd animals after all!). Mystery is retired from being a riding horse due to a medical issue so he is the perfect buddy for our Whisky. We had been completing the fencing work right up until minutes before their arrival. We managed to get the area we call the winter paddock all fenced and energized with the solar controller.

Whisky and his blue eyes are interested in what I'm doing.

The other 3/4 of the fence project can be completed over the next few weeks. We have around a dozen gates to be put in as well, so we will be busy at this for a while yet.
Apart from the weather challenges - first the rain and now all the snow - the HotCote fence wire went in quite easily. All the tensioners, post bracing, grounding and wire hookups takes much longer than the actual fencing.

 We chose the HotCote fencing after much Googling and surfing and couldn't be happier. The proof is in the pudding, they say, and it was very satisfying to hear that friends who have seen our installation are now considering a similar fence system for their ranch!
I mentioned the weather a few sentences back and I should elaborate on that topic a little. We went from a cool wet spring this year to a wonderful long, dry summer that extended right through to the middle of October. Since then we have seen very little sun with dreary weather being the norm for the last month. The rain turned to snow as the temps fell and for the last couple of weeks it has snowed almost every day. We now have 6 inches of the white stuff on the ground making any kind of outdoor work a little more difficult. I should mention how wonderful our Bobcat 3400 ATV has been. It doesn't seem to matter whether it's hot and dry, cool and raining, or cold and snowing out little buggy starts, goes and does everything we ask it to. It has been awesome and we really recommend that anybody looking for something similar give the Bobcat a look. Carol is now using it to haul feed, water and hay to our horses. I then throw all my fencing tools in the back and go to work on the wire. When that's done, I load up the chainsaw and go looking for firewood which is loaded in the back and then automatically dumped when I return.
Carol has been working hard on cleaning up and organizing the basement/barn/garage and has been making wonderful progress. It is a wonderful space for all those uses and has also been serving as our mud room to keep from tracking everything into the main part of the house.