June 14, 2008

Counselor, New Mexico
Today, Pat wanted to trim JD's hooves. She uses an electric trimmer which sometimes scares the horses. So I give them reiki to calm them down, while she works on them. It does seem to help. We've done this before a few days ago with a donkey, Toby, and it helped him, too.

Yesterday, I forgot to talk about the awesome reiki experience that I had. There is a horse here named Cisco. He is a beautiful mustang that Pat has had about a year. She has been working him slowly, because he put his last two trainers in the hospital. She hasn't ridden him yet, and has only put her weight on his back a couple times. She wanted me to bond with him, so that I can lead him around with her on his back. So, I went out to the corral, stood on the outside and started giving him reiki. He was about twenty feet away. In just a few minutes, he walks right up to me! At first he just starts nosing me, and then he wanted me to put my hands on his face. We stood there together for about twenty minutes with his eyes almost closing, he was so relaxed. There is a little more to the story, but it is woo-woo, so I won't share it here. If you're interested . . . drop me a line. It's pretty cool.

One of the other things I do here is to work in the greenhouse. Mainly just watering a huge number of plants, but today Pat planted some new lettuce, and we got a bed ready to plant carrots. We were supposed to go back in later to re-water the ground where we were going to plant them, but we both forgot. We'll probably finish and plant them tomorrow.

I made lunch again today with Pat's instructions. It came out okay. I was trying to encourage her to eat the big meal at noon, because dinner has been after eight o'clock, and it's just too late. So she was okay with it, but it looks like I will be the chief cook if we do it this way. I have to get my recipes . . . rather Don's recipes . . . organized and get some new ingredients. I never thought I would end up being the cook!

I learned how to use the quirky washing machine today. That's how Pat described it . . . quirky. You have to manually move it from one cycle to the next. And then the quirky dryer . . . well, not exactly quirky, more like "the old fashioned way." Yes, the New Mexico sun is the dryer around here, but it works perfectly well!

Late this afternoon I was working on my own stuff when I heard a horse whinny outside. I looked out the window and saw Chaco, the beautiful pinto stallion running around outside loose. I walked out the front to make sure Pat was okay. I saw her and she looked fine. I said, "Are you okay?" She said, "Yes, but I let the horses loose, so be careful that you don't get killed!" At that moment, four or five horses come around the corner and start galloping toward me! I stepped back to let them go by. They were having a grand time running loose in the big yard, chasing each other, climbing a little ways up the hill behind the house, grazing here and there, and mainly acting like horses! They love being free like that. When it came time for dinner, they all went back into the corral by themselves. It was pretty cool.