Tobie gets a Jeep ride, and everything breaks at once

D&L had a doctor appointment in the big town about 50 miles away, which meant Tobie and I got to go visit their boys and feed them lunch.

Feeding the boys is simple enough but only part of the process, even after indulging their individual neurotic preferences for presentation. I was fifteen minutes late, in Coal’s opinion, and found his food trough 20 feet from its proper place. Got there just in time for a horse’s version of a tongue-lashing, but he forgave me – or at least ignored me – once he was nose-down in alfalfa pellets.

Then clean up what was left of breakfast and dump it in the tractor bucket for disposal…

…and weigh out supper. I often joke to myself that Coal and Doc come by their Rainman-like behavior honestly given how, um, detail-oriented their human parents are.

Hay and pellets are carefully weighed and the allotted amounts change at irregular intervals depending on whether they want the horses to lose or put on weight.

We came home, had lunch and a walkie, and then I (tried to) vacuum the Lair. A 10-minute chore went on for almost an hour and a half, because…

…a front leg fell right off my reading chair when I moved it, and that took time to repair. And then…

The electric motor that runs the rug-beater on my secondhand vacuum cleaner decided it didn’t want to work. It’s been intermittent for a while and I’ve been waiting for it to just quit one day. This was the day. At that point, removing all the fragile plastic bits to get to the circuitry and try to fix it couldn’t do any further harm. So I did that, and I think I actually managed to fix it. Dirt and dog hair built up around the micro-switch that turns the motor on and off.