I have been pretty much doing the same things, day in and day out since my return from my late winter trip. Today I varied things a bit, a good thing although again, things got left undone.

This morning, I did my body awareness work because yesterday it did me so much good. Now that I think about it, I did vary this routine by doing some different exercises and my usual exercises in a differing order. I was encouraged to find that I can now do the introductory squat, putting both hands and feet on the floor and sweeping them around. Previously, I had to put my hands on a bucket.

Pioneer Peak from Saddle Up Arena

After, Pete and I went to Karen Hoppe’s place. She had metal fence posts for sale – the catch was that we had to pull them and haul them off her land. Pete used a T-post puller and made quick work of it. I stumbled through the brush and hauled posts, and then tossed them in the back of the truck. No fun.

We are going to use the posts to mark off lanes in the pasture down the road. I am pretty excited about this. The pasture has a good feel to it, and from what I can tell, plenty of grass.

On the way home we ran into our neighbor Keith was who clearing some brush. I asked him if he might take his tractor and till the pasture, to which he readily agreed. We are now, in the next few days, going to ask Andre, another neighbor, if we can use his tiller.

Both Keith and Andre worked on the Playground.

We next put the horses in the trailer and drove to Saddle Up Arena where Pete needed to finish working on the horse scale. The gravel pit estimates were (we think) off, so Pete’s way of rectifying the situation was to get the recycling center scale and modify it with a platform, so that it would serve as a horse scale. He still had to finish nailing in the planking and put a ramp next to the platform.

Our friend Dan showed up, followed by Gregory, who owns Saddle Up Arena. The job was finished he used his tractor to move the ramp, a bridge obstacle, into place. This all took a long time – I spent the time the guys were working on this on grooming Raudi.

I figured since it was 7:30 p.m. when we finished up that we’d head home. But no, Pete wanted to go for a ride. We elected to ride along the Knik River, which was unpeopled and with the sun shining and the mountains at the distance, quite beautiful.

Getting there and back was a bit tricky because we had to ride through a residential neighborhood, which had a lot of residential distractions. The horses had to deal with barking dogs on both sides of Republican Way (this seemed most apt), and human beings working on their place. We had a basset hound puppy follow us. At one point Raudi gave it a look as if to say you get close and I will kick your head in.

So all in all, a good day. It is now 10:34 p.m. and I am headed out to wack some weeds down in the pasture. Lots of daylight now, in this, the land of the midnight sun.

Next: 158. 6/7/18: A Conversation with Hrimfara