Love+Liebster

I got an award! I got it from Wolfie over at What was I thinking.....? Thank you so much Wolfie. I am trying to do this right so be patient folks, I'm new to this!

Liebster means “dearest” in German, and the award is intended to help up-and-coming blogs get the attention they deserve. Here are the rules:

1. Copy and paste the award on your blog.
2. Link back to the blogger who gave you the award.
3. Pick your five favorite blogs with less than 200 followers, and leave a comment on their blog to let them know they have received the award.
4. Hope that the five blogs chosen will keep spreading the love and pass it on to five more blogs.

And my nominations are:

BK Publishing - keeping up with everything that's happening on Supernova, a lovely local mag for curious kids.

Creating Utopia in WV, One Project at a Time - this blog appeals to my love of horses, and rescuing horses. Always lovely to see passionate people doing good work.

Another Brisket Creation - loving the yummy pics and recipes on this blog.

Horse Centric - only found this today, and resolved to keep up with Breathe and her wonderfully entertaining tales of Smokey.

Martin's Illustration - I cannot help regularly trolling this blog to gawk at the beautiful illustrations. Love+art.

Keep reading, you won't regret it.

Creeping doubt...

Every now and again I am seized by suffocating, overwhelming terror. I’d be absolutely fine all day and then just have moments of panic. It isn’t because I need medication, it’s because I take care of 28 horses.

Creeping doubts accumulate and seep through my mind unabated. Things I stubbornly refuse to let myself dwell on suddenly leap up to haunt me. Fears about the failing economy, African Horse Sickness, the cost of keeping old TBs. But then, as always the balm of thought: These aren’t riding horses, they are pasture ornaments here to have a happy retirement. I am organised and most of all I have been doing this since three years ago. The thing is, there are too many homeless horses in the world. I cannot afford to keep more. It is hard work taking care of us. I sincerely don’t hoard horses, I try to take care of no-hopers until they need to be PTS due to failing health.

Of course, these things are sparked by new developments. An old boarding client of mine has come up homeless. It is literally a question of take him on or he gets PTS. I love him, I’m terrified of him dying before his time without a gentle and relaxed retirement. His owner has tried for months to rehome him, no one wants him – even for free. He is a sensitive soul, his heart is easily broken. He likes treats and a wander about on lead. He should not be ridden. He is quiet and gentle. Yes, I am a bleeding heart. I know that arguments about whether or not we should just let these horses die in peace (PTS) or rescue them are heated and numerous.

It’s hard in Africa, I have heard stories of owners and breeders losing up to 20+ horses to horse sickness in a single season. We have tick-borne diseases, horse sickness, West Nile virus – you name it. Making the decision whether or not to pour resources into poor communities and help them properly tack, dip, care for their working animals or rescuing like I do is a very hard ask. It would be cheaper and easier to pour money into cart horses and help there. But I don’t think that form of help is sustainable, as opposed to literally and meaningfully reaching in a changing the lives of animals who’d otherwise be PTS or live neglected. Maybe I am misguided?

There is an upside to Africa too, our weather is rarely severe (apart from the heat) and as long as you have shade and shelter horses can live out all year long. That cuts costs tremendously. We still rug in winter – even though some local horse owners think we are mad. We also stable some horses who are older, who are more delicate. Loads of the ponies who have come to us are hardy, they stay fat on grass and need little extra feeding. Our vet is kind and lets us pay her off, our farrier helps us at a massively discounted rate. Our grooms take good, loving care of the animals in their charge. These are the people we all owe so much to. These are the people who make it all happen. Go team, all the way!

Our glow-ponies at green grass

 I think sometimes I just want to know I am doing the right thing.

What, dear intertrons, am I going to do about our homeless bloke? 

Here he is, sorry for the rotten cellphone picture:

Having a visit on the lead, I'm watching from the porch

Love+horse stories

As a child my dad bought me the most beautiful illustrated Black Beauty from a tiny, but magical, German children’s book store. It is the didactic tale of a horse’s journey through life. He bought the book on one condition; he gets to read it as soon as I am finished. My dad had read the book before and loved it. I loved it too, I laughed and cried and traced my hand over all the beautiful illustrations over and over again.

Anna Sewell taught me a very important lesson: circumstances change. When you breed a horse you need to be very careful about where it goes. Ideally we should be responsible for our animals forever and we should take good care of them while we are at it.

The film, though a little Disney, was certainly also good. I cried watching the film years and years later. Admittedly though, my favourite horse film of all time has to be Phar Lap, the inspirational tale of an Australian race horse. Second to this is the Black Stallion franchise and National Velvet. As a 14-year-old I saw The Horse Whisperer and enjoyed it too – though when I watched the film again later as an adult I had mixed feelings about it. The book, which I also read as a youngster, was far more serious and far better than the film.

A lovely film (however loosely-based on reality) is Hidalgo, which I consider a must-see for all horse lovers.

Recently I saw two films that let me down. I had high hopes for the film-adaption of the story of the great American racehorse, and unlikely winner, Secretariat. I own horses with Secretariat in their lines as early as four generations back, and while this is not a singularly impressive boast seeing as many horses have famous achievers in their lines – it does make this horse’s story one that is a little closer to my heart. Simply because I can relate to this horse. I own some of his great great progeny. What disappointed me about this film was that it was very Disney and not at all horsey. I wish they’d recruit only horse-lovers and owners to make films about horses. You didn’t get the shavings-and-muck feel about the film that you got from Black Beauty, for example. The central drama of the film was really not about the horse at all, and more about the people. Unlike Phar Lap, where you really had a feel of the horse and the animal was the central character of the film.

Another, slightly less disappointing film I saw lately was War Horse where Spielberg really tried to create a story about a horse and his people without anthropomorphising too much. What let me down about this film was that whoever put the preview together should win an Oscar. The preview was magnificent, the film however was decidedly less so.

I like the didactic school of horse films, I like the lesson ‘take very good care of him’ above the boast ‘he is amazing’.

But enough of fiction, here is a slice of reality. This is my Sweet Woman (or Special, as we call her). Her five-across pedigree (which shows her pedigree five generations back on her dam and sire’s side) shows that Secretariat is fourth on her sire’s side. I didn’t buy her because I was desperate for another horse. I bought her because she was damaged goods who wouldn’t race well and was selling for a song (indeed for as little as just under $600). For this price I was unsure about the quality of home that she would get and worried about the fact that she lingered in the market for months. I bought her to give her a lovely quiet country life, with little riding and plenty of love and care. She has capped hocks – cosmetically awful, practically only synovial fluid built up around the hocks caused by injury to the area that wasn’t treated properly (in my opinion).  Though nothing serious no proper competitor or avid rider would have bought her. This added to my concerns about the quality home she would get. 

Now: Special with her groom, John, and her best mate Captain Crunchy on the farm

Then: Being loaded for her long journey home (before the farm) - capped hocks obvious

Love+punctuation

Love love love

I can’t abide arm-chair parenting. I really dislike this culture of television and gadgets designed to numb the minds of kids. When my nephew first met a horse he was terrified – all city living, all class but no (agri)culture. I grew up in the company of horses, I walked barefoot and stepped in glass, thorns, bees. It taught me how to look where I was going. There wasn’t such a ‘television culture’ back when I was a kid, so I read books and played outside. It taught me how to spell. When my cousin visits over the holidays with her kids, we’ve two channels showing cartoons all day and you’re knee-deep in kids in any room in the house. When I was a girl, we’d be admonished for lounging about, with a short, stern ‘go play outside’. Our skins were sun-hardened and our soles were battle-ready. We grew like poppies to love the sun.

I've two beautiful nephews who work hard to keep me in touch with all the kid-ness I can take. No small helpings, you understand. To them, my name is ‘when are we going to go swim?’ and they call me by that name whenever they see me. They’ve called me by that name even when I am in an evening gown, power suit or pyjamas. They are all energy and raw nerves.

As cliché as it sounds, so much of the future depends on the way we raise these kids. Be aware, cook your own food. Eat well, love animals.

These are the impressions I try to make on them. At six and four they aren’t impressed by the fact that I know that those pale daisies are in fact osteopermum, and they haven’t taken heed of my lectures on a horse’s digestive system (though they will suffer for it later on, when they receive the same lessons, revised with extra chapters on nutrition). What does impress them, however, is the rapport I have with domestic animals, the fact that I can walk on my hands in the swimming pool and my mad skills at baking delicious cakes. Actually my second name is ‘is it ready yet?’. If this is all I ever teach them (eat well, play outside, love animals) I’d consider it a great success.

Must love dogs

Love+appreciation

Years ago when I was a nipper in primary school (back when we walked three miles to school barefoot, lived in a box in a dam, etc) our school was based on a farm. Well, I say farm, but it was next to the farm – overlooking a national road to the front, and a chemical plant to the side. Anyway, so I have these vivid recollections of our lovely music teacher musically cooing the words: ‘be glad you’re not going to school in the city, it’s a concrete jungle’. At the time I thought, ‘ah okay but you see between the chemical plant and the national road, we’ve our fill of city sights’.

Well, we passed the old schoolhouse on Sunday on our way to lunch and I saw businesses all the way around it. You can’t even see the entrance from the national road any more. Much of what was the old playground is now parking for office drones. I bet if you drive up to the chemical plant and look down, you’ll not see a single child running around and feel that pang of sweet irony in your soul: beautiful, happy kids, while to the side of them hazardous pollutants are being savagely pumped into the atmosphere. Ah, the good old days! They just don’t make things quite that soviet anymore do they?

The moral of the story is that we should appreciate what we have when we have it. Because it doesn’t matter how much our reality is obscured by a chemical plant at the time – it really can get worse.

Love+trunk blog

Trunk blog: noun. A previously published article that I feel I have to share. I keep a few of these tucked away (trunked) and rip them out whenever the mood strikes.

Feeling literary?

I have often considered writing a novel, something that will at least get some attention from some people – a rather ambitious idea, and if you are anything like me, also a rather rubbish idea. Why?

Well frankly, it is possibly one of the most difficult things to do. In fact, a novel is a difficult beast to tame without getting famous for your efforts. And besides that obvious set-back, I have a sneaking suspicion that most people at some stage consider trying their hand at writing. Everyone has a story to tell and, it would seem, a desire to tell it.

What that means is that anyone considering the task of writing a novel is in the difficult position of competing with every novel that has been written, is being written and is likely to be written in the future. And it is pretty hard to be significant in literature, when it has already been claimed by the greatest minds on earth.

That is the playing field, now for the game. A novel is an extended, generally fictional, prose narrative. This implies that a novel is the creation of an organism in itself. It is a world, with geographical specifications, in which characters (people, animals, aliens, deities, robots, spirits, various forms of machinery and sometimes talking household goods) exist (unless it is post modern, in which case it could comprise a series of articles from Homeless Talk and still win a Booker award). These characters should be in some manner unique, to enable the reader to tell them apart. The novel should have a sequence of events, or plot conveyed coherently through the vehicle of narrative, thereby creating the story (once again, barring post modernism).

Once all of this is achieved, the novel should be in some way appealing to some people. Close friends and family members are usually willing to buy the work of fiction, and speak highly of it. Literary critics will also invest in a copy and will speak of it, but with varying degrees of benefit to the author.

With all of the above in mind, I have in the past (several times) set myself to the task of writing a novel. Several fundamental problems always crop up, much like a recurring nightmare: my inner narrator (in a hazardously annoying voice) would use words such as teetering, precipice, moribund, wanderlust and other examples of deeply contrived expressions that we expect in magazine short stories.

At some point during this saga, it will occur to me that I am trying to do what everyone tries to do at some point…and what has been done remarkably by other, mostly smarter, people.

This being said, it is not an impossible task, but it remains one that demands a lot of time and dedication. I have resigned myself to the fact that I may never be a novelist; I simply do not have the patience. I do, however, encourage anyone with a desire to write to do so. Whether it works out or not, there is nothing quite like taking some time out to feel literary.

Love+observations

1) There is a facebook group called 'Writer's Guild South Africa'. I wonder, who is this other-worldly writer that comprises a whole guild? Does he/she have a hunting knife strapped to his/her shin? A single writer doth not a whole guild make.

2) Blooka Palooka's leg is better, much better. The recovery was so quick and miraculous I have decided to give her a guild unto herself. Well done tough lass.

3) Last night I watched a b-rate horror movie whilst eating chocolate ice-cream out of a mug with a long spoon.

4) I'm too afraid of short-crust pastry to even try and mix a batch.

5) All my friends are insane.

Observe, you won't regret it.

When it rains...

Ah okay, so now Blue has pulled a ligament. She went lame yesterday – we rested the leg, hosed her down and applied herbal cooling gel in addition to a NSAID and when she didn’t look better by the morning we had our vet out.

A pulled ligament is a worse diagnosis than I expected, but it is also not nearly as bad as it could be. I had some riding lined up for her, but hey, I am blessed with enough horses to ride. Her recovery will be my biggest concern and I like to give horses with this sort of injury a long time off. Tampering with an injured ligament seems like a rotten idea to me. She’ll just have an extended vacation.

Here is a photo reel of Blue Blood (Blue or Blooka Palooka), also a TB. She is turning seven this year, and she has never been raced. She has been with me for about a year and a half.

Isn't she gorgeous?

Love+festive foodie favourites in pictures

Home-baked beer loaf

Festive home-baked Peanut Butter Cookies

Poppies are coming up

Incredibly good champagne

Lovely roasted lamb and potatoes

This is a short highlights reel. Tip for the cookies: if you are using salted peanut butter do not add any additional salt, alternatively use unsalted peanut butter.

Do try the bread if you've half an hour, a beer and some self-raising flour spare. The recipe is simple as anything and it takes only about 30 minutes to cook. Here is a basic recipe:


- 500g of self-raising flour
- a pinch of salt
- 340ml of any good beer (light beers like Peroni or Amstel will do well)
- some chopped or crushed garlic (about a teaspoonful)
- an onion, chopped and fried in a pan
- your choice of herbs

Pre-heat the oven to 180. Mix all the ingredients together into a dough. Stick it in a bread tin and bake for 20-30 minutes. Voila.

Cook food, you won't regret it.

Festive horrors

Our dog (not one previously mentioned on this blog) ran off. We opened up for them to do their ablutions and he disappeared somewhere into the night, on the 1000+ hectares of farm. We searched everywhere, shouted his name, drove around until the sun set. I even contacted a psychic. Emails went flying, telephone calls were made.

He hasn’t come back and it’s been days now. We are in pieces.

The solar energy that we use to power the farm (my foot print is plenty green enough thanksverymuch!) went and gave up the ghost.

Monday morning my gelding went down with a colic. Luckily Kyle was around to help and we were out walking him with the groom, hosing him down because of the heat and motivating him vocally to keep walking on and not to stop. Our groom who worked on the day was a superstar. By the time the vet made it out over the rough, water-logged road an hour and a half had passed and he was bright, perky, grazing and walking of his own volition. The vet thought I was mad, but witnesses (Kyle and the groom) couldn’t believe it.

We burnt to a crisp out in the sun with the man.

I accompanied Kyle back to Johannesburg to complete what I had started in terms of job hunting. In the post-chaos malaise today it took me some time to realise I need to take it a little easier. Have some vitamin C, and a beer.

Gladly I don’t celebrate Christmas, but sadly New Years’ Festivities have always been big ones for me. This year started off bleak, let’s see how we can improve it.

Be careful out there.

{I'll update festive cooking things later, right now I need to 'take it a little easier'}