Okay, so I hurt my back again. Or still, I don’t know. I’m not aware that I did anything to deserve it, it just started hurting again when I got up yesterday. And I sat out most of the afternoon and was feeling some better.
This morning, still there but not so bad. Then came shit-shoveling.
I figure, this won’t be so bad. I’ll just take it easy, right? Shit-shoveling isn’t very hard as long as you don’t mind the smell of a reeking ammonia swamp. Of course I didn’t plan for Uncle Murphy to attend.
He was at H’s right hand when she met me on arrival. “Joel, could you do me a little extra favor?” My heart sank.
Felice is one of the new mares. She’s a sweetheart under most circumstances, I love her to pieces, and ironically she can be the bane of my existence. She got some sort of fungus infection on her front leg, between the fetlock and the knee. Nobody knows exactly what caused this but it isn’t responding to treatment very well and H is getting concerned. She’s also one of the very worst for creating that reeking swamp I mentioned. She pulls out her hay all over the place, pisses all over it, and tramples it into the resulting mud. She does this over and over, and normally I only clean up the worst of it because the rest is really hammered into the ground.
So for my sins there are layers and layers of the stuff, and it has achieved the consistency of a particularly fine grade of concrete. H wanted it all removed. Then, since she put Felice in with Comet while this was going on, I was also to remove all the bedding from his shelter.
Okay. I always do the hardest thing first, so I went into Felice’s old enclosure. Belle is in there now. Belle’s a sweetheart, too. Very affectionate. Very mild. Stupid as the hair on Little Bear’s tail, and utterly unresponsive to simple commands like “Move The Hell Over.” So I spent most of that part of the job chipping away at the rotting ground cover around and under Belle, darting in when she randomly chose to move. I can normally do Felice’s enclosure in one wagon-load. This one took three, and I fought for every forkful. My back was really singing now.
It was getting hot. I was watching Felice in the other enclosure: She was not in a good mood. Did I mention H put her in with Comet? Yeah, Felice hates Comet. I mean she really shouldn’t be allowed in contact with him, because he just finished healing from the last time. I was surprised at the decision. She stomped him good last time, and clearly had it in mind to do it again. Comet’s still a colt, he’s about sixteen months old now. He’s feisty and in-your-face and Felice hates that. Her ears were back and she was tossing her head and grinding her teeth and giving this short, barking whinny and you don’t have to speak horse language fluently to know “leave me alone or I’ll kick you over that fence” when you hear it. It wasn’t a subtle hint, and Comet was ignoring it. Yeah, I really wanted to be between those two.
But in I dutifully went. And loaded the wagon with old bedding, and hauled it to the pile, and again, and again. Normally on Monday, three loads is a lot. Today it was seven and it took almost three hours to get them.
Curiously, right at the moment it almost seems as though the exercise helped my back more than it hurt it. But still. I hate that Murphy guy.
