How I waste my time and money

Have you ever heard of "rain rot" before? For the 7/8 of you that haven't, it's a fungus - a nasty one at that. Basically it rots a horse's hair right off of its back. To cure the fungus you basically have to skin the horse and remove all the "rotting" hair to let the new hair grown in. It usually affects the entire hindquarters of a horse, and if any of you have ever met Lad, you know that is a pretty considerable area. So yesterday, I went out to the farm and stuffed my fingernails with fungus. As you can imagine, it doesn't feel so good to have rotting hair yanked off of your back, so you have to go very slowly and be as careful as possible while picking the skin off.

Lad was such a good sport. We stood in the shade of the washrack with the first of the fall leaves floating down on us occasionally. He had himself backed into a corner to brace his weight every time he shuddered from my picking and between dousings in Ivory dish soap and humming a few verses of Beatles tunes, that's how I passed a few hours of my afternoon.

I'm always complaining about how stressed for time I am, and I admit, there were a couple moments where I thought, "this is such a tedious process, there's got to be a faster way." But no, there is one way to peel the skin off of the horse you love and that is very....slowly.

There was a great addition to our afternoon though. Heather, five weeks out from her precious little Trey being born, took her inaugural ride with me. Both of us were as loose in the saddle as you might ever want to be, but does that really matter when you're off on a trail ride? We took Lad and Jack down to the Duck River and let them play and paw as we laughed like we always do. It was all the old antics, sling shotting branches back and working together to open and shut gates so neither of us would have to get off.

The apparent "black hole" in my budget doesn't seem so black anymore. I wish he were closer and I wish gas were $2 cheaper. I wish I would sometimes relax and realize that the best way to spend my precious time is picking the fungus off my largest friend's back.