It’s a dark and stormy day, just right for tales of mystery and pain. My first mystery was actually painful.
Mystery Time
You know people make fun of Texans for wearing cowboy boots, right? Well, there’s a good reason. A good portion of the things here bite, stick, prick, or otherwise harm you, and feet are prime targets. Here are some prickly things I can see just walking around: prickly sow thistle, milk thistle, and bull thistle. Birds love them. Feet don’t.
Some thorny things should be found in trees, like mesquite branches. So how did this happen?
Yeah, if I’d been wearing my cowboy boots at the tack room, as usual, I would not have felt that thorn in my foot! Thank goodness I didn’t step hard. How did it get there? There are no mesquite tree close by. Mysterious.
My guess is that it was in my square bale of hay. It was sharply cut like a baler did it. Ow! That’s my guess, anyway, because mesquite trees keep trying to grow up in our fields.
A Chilly Mystery
At least the second mystery over by the tack room isn’t prickly. First, for a week or more, we have been finding the fairly heavy doormat in front of the tack room door moved away from the door. We keep moving it back, but it keeps moving away!
Yesterday, I saw something jump out of the corner of my eye. Maybe the little barn cat? Maybe a raccoon? But why? I was pondering this when I went inside this afternoon as I was checking on the horses.
That was when I faced yet another mystery. The tack room, which is normally pretty warm, was really cold. That was weird to me. I looked at the air conditioner unit. It said 70!! What? That is unheard of! Ralph has it set at 76, and the rest of us are NOT authorized to change it.
Ralph said he didn’t go in there today, though he’d come by. Sara wasn’t home. Uh. I had never touched that thing until I put it back to 76 today.
Now this is a real mystery. That chicken can’t open the door, nor can the clever equines. Who did it? Why?
Do we have a mat-moving, temperature meddling guest? No one knows!
I’ll keep you posted, but in the meantime, I’ll happily report that the blue-eyed grass burst into bloom today. More spring beauty awaits.
The Hermits' Rest 