When life gives you santa hats....

Cut ear holes in them and stick them on your horse.

The same hat from last year. I bet about now shes really wishing she had somehow destroyed the darned thing. She sees me coming with it and ducks away.
See there's just one thing...
Indigo hates her ears manhandled in any way other than light petting or rubbing. When I first got her handling her ears, let alone clipping them for any show was a big battle. Every time I tried to get a hand around an ear to cup it or fold it shut she would rip her head away and shake violently. It's not that she was ever mishandled shes just very possessive over those cute spotty ears of hers. Recently stuck one of those ear bonnets on her and she was completely convinced her ears could not move. She stood there with her ears back making the most upset faces and gnashing her teeth in the cross ties, really not impressed by my fit of hilarity at her expense. She is pretty good about it now, knowing I am not going to harm her precious little ears she lets me handle them however I want.

So when I decided I wanted some sort of Christmas picture with the hat and my brow band that I wrapped in ribbon she was having absolutely none of it. Though she did take a few attempts at eating the garland and lights around her neck, even nickering at me thinking it was food as I slipped it over her head.
But alas, not even carrots could get more than one ear forward.

This is exactly what she thinks of all this.

And this too. Her teeth gnashing with displeasure from standing still this long.


She tried shaking it off...


she succeeded several times before I got smart and tucked it under the crownpiece and brow band.




So in a final ditch effort to get those ears forward I removed one of my gloves and tossed it into the air above me. It caught her attention long enough for this.

So I got a good result and I was starting to freeze really bad having been out there for at least 20 minutes I tossed my second glove...A big gust of wind caught it making it wizz too close for comfort past her head. Hence this face.

Not a split second after the shutter released was she got the hell out of dodge. I was laughing, thinking the glove landed beside me like the first one. Uh oh, where did that glove go? After a few minutes of looking I realized when the bigger gust of wind caught it that it flew into the bushes on the other side of the fence.

After all this I still didn't get a decent shot I was 100% happy with. This one was the winner from the bunch after some editing.



The good news is today I hitched her up to the sleigh and we went for a ride. Compared to last years sleigh ride where she scared the living daylights out of a certain passenger when my aunt hollered, causing Indigo to have a little bit of a tantrum and buck a couple times -bad girl!- when my aunt hollered just out of her eyesight. She was a complete angel only getting a little worried as a snow plow passed us with the blade down making a loud scraping noise pretty close to us.

This is where I can see stone boating her has helped her overall attitude this year. She not only knows how to pull better, she doesn't think that going faster is going to be less work (AKA when the cart starts rolling it's easier to pull, not the same with a stone boat or sleigh). She throws her weight into the collar and walks without worrying if we are going to trot or not because theres some harder work to be done. When it comes time to stand still she knows standing is easier than pulling the sleigh so she stands like a statue, much like she learned with the stone boat when I was loading up rocks onto it. I am starting to like the idea of stone boating horses more and more.

It looks like our snow is here to stick around for a week or more since the temperature is not going above freezing in the future forcast. One of the 400 series highways not terrible far from here has a few hundred cars stranded on it since early yesterday. They have been taking out people by snowmobile and even helicopter declaring it some state of emergency because people do not have food, fuel or medicine. They will have to tow most of the vehicles out because of the drifting.
First it rained on Saturday and snowed late. Then on Sunday it froze and continued to snow giving us about a half a foot or so of powdery white stuff, sometimes more in drifts. The real kicker is the wind. Boy is it windy. The roads are still not great this evening and they have been plowing and salting them for three days now. I mean not that I am complaining because according to most of the non Canadian traveling population I should be riding a polar bear to work and living in an igloo. Though I do complain about the citiots. Sunday evening when the real snow was flying and it was just starting to freeze I was driving home. One car passed in the opposite lane, no problem but the guy behind him was driving right down the center of the road. Sigh. I ended up in the ditch, not a big one but enough that I was spinning my tires and everyone was just passing me. Of course I also had no cell reception there. After getting out, shoveling, reverse, drive, reverse, drive it came unstuck. I have a feeling this is going to be a fuuuuuuun winter if this is our first snow and they are predicting much more.