Scorchio!!

So this is how the weather has been for the last week and it looks like there's at least another week of it on the way......

Great for holidaymakers, not so good for those of us wishing to actually do stuff with our horses :-/

So the other day we brought the girls back to the house so they could escape the heat in the barn. Elentari's first experience of being on a road went rather well, she spooked at the first car that went past, then decided as Sky hadn't reacted, these things weren't really worth worrying about :-)

Those white lines on the floor were definitely suspicious though.....

Then today, having brought Gandalf home too, she did her first ride and lead. Unfortunately, he has decided he doesn't like her much, and tries to bite her if she gets too near his head (I guess he's had enough after all these years of Sky and Kinna biting his neck) so she was a bit hesitant to follow along at first and kept trying to get back to Sky. Maybe I'll have to do a R&L with just the two girls, that could be, um, interesting!! But for a first time out, she wasn't half bad.....

She even went under the railway bridge......

....and jumped the ditch :-)

We had to go early to beat the heat, got out at about 7am, would have been earlier but we had to wait for the SNO to decide which shoes to wear. Apparently pink flowery sandals are just the thing on a bicycle....

Talking of footwear, Ali and I found some shoes to go with the black studded dress, how about these?

Half price too :-)

In other news this week we have been to see Kinna again and she's looking a whole lot better. In fact, she's showing signs of wanting to break out of the "invalid" paddock and rejoin the others. She was happy to have a headcollar on this time so she must be less sore.  Her skin is all falling off though, it's really weird, the stuff coming off is as stiff as a board and there's new skin growing underneath it.

The vet called with Squaw's blood test results whilst I was there, her liver has been affected by something which is why she's so photosensitive (couldn't get a needle anywhere near Kinns to take blood, but it's got to be the same, the symptoms are identical). Vet reckons it was millepertuis (new bit of vocab for me) - St John's Wort. But why would they eat that with all the grass in that huge field? Or is it just the pollen as there is so much more of it around this year due to the wet weather and it's flowering later than usual?