That Time of the Year

My least favorite time of the year has officially arrived. We actually put sheets on a few horses a couple of evenings ago. They only had them on for 24 hours but still – sigh – we’ve officially pulled out the horse clothing. As always I was not quite ready for this to happen. I was not ready in the figurative sense simply because, as everyone knows, I don’t relish dragging around dirty horse blankets and I REALLY don’t like cold weather.

I also was literally not ready. We had done the first step of blanket season preparation. We had all the blankets piled in the appropriate locations, ready to be sorted and made somewhat easy to find. However I had not yet gotten to the actual sorting part so we had to resort to sifting through the piles to find the sheets we needed.

Sadly I’m still not 100% organized with the blankets yet and still have some piles to sort and more labeling to do. Every year I go through and relabel the blankets with a sharpie as the names fade from being exposed to the rain and the dirt, and then fade more after the blanket is washed. As I worked my way through some piles today sorting, labeling and trying to find a good way to organize them all, I wondered how many hours of my life I have spent marking names on horse blankets. Then I wondered how many hours I’ve spent dragging piles of blankets to and from the pastures. Then I decided I didn’t really want to know the answer to these questions!

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Merlin and O’Reilly