Summer’s Birthday and other comings and goings.

Summer is two months old today…
She has shed a great deal of her foal coat and is becoming more and more a liver chestnut with signs of having a flaxen mane and tail like her sire- Rusty.


Today was as beautiful as the day Summer was born, with the sky clear and temperature mild, even a bit cool overnight. This weekend we are in the upper 50's at night and low 80's during the day. Feels great.


To celebrate Summer’s birthday we had a round of root beer floats… Mmmmmm that was good.







After our root beer floats we went out to pasture to play for a while. I did get a good video of Summer and Aunt Misty coming when called and will put that on YouTube next time I get to Custer Law Office, for now there is a short clip at the end of this blog posting.





To save allot of hot air -bragging rights- I will just stick a few pictures in here of our baby…

Strolling with Auntie Misty

Hey that's my hat...

We started today with a cup of horseshoe stand-up coffee and having to put on our housecoats, it was cool this morning. Looking out our bedroom window, we watched Derby and Nugget napping in the early morning sun.

Heads or tails? Your call.

The Dynamic Palomino Duo
are about as closely bonded as any two horse can be.When on the trail most people can not tell them apart.
We are always being asked... Which is who?

To start our day of birthday celebrating we had a nice hot bowl of yellow grits for breakfast, fed and watered the penned horses, and headed for town to pickup the Double Deuce. School begins Tuesday morning in Milton-Freewater.
After we got back from town Kittee saddled up Derby and continued to work with him on his jumping training. I realize that this picture doesn't show much of a jump, but prior to bringing out the camera, he did make a couple of really nice jumps over the rails.

Derby really has more tricks in his bag than we know what to do with. Appears this guys has done allot in his pre-McKuster Ranch Life.

Yesterday was a day of rest and a chance for Kittee to re-connect with the ranch. She was out grooming the mares in the riverside pasture, and then brought Rosey up to the barn for a bath and a bit of pre-show handling.
Rosey’s horse shows will start in a couple of weeks, with the Walla Walla County Fair and then the Eddie MacMurdo Horse Show. This will be the first time since June that she has left the ranch to show her lovely Arabian bay figure. The rest of Saturday we just laid low, as I am still taking care of/healing my broken ribs, punctured lung, and busted sternum.

I knew that was gonna hurt...

I did get in three acupuncture treatments that last week for my battered/bruised muscle pain and that really did help. A couple of those treatments were with electro-needles, which is a deep micro-massage in the injured muscle tissue. That works wonders and I am beginning to get around much better now.

Since it has been a couple of weeks since making a posting to this blog, I will go back a ways and try to catch up on the comings and goings of Kittee and Dale.
The week of the 10th through 15th Kittee made a trip to Arkansas to visit with her dad -"Pop" and stepmom -Gerd.



































































We talked by phone most everyday and on Friday they were to go to Fred’s Fish House.

OH how I wish I could have gone to Fred’s Fish House… right after their dinner they sent me some pictures to help relieve the pain of no Fish Houses/ Fish Camps in our Oregon neighborhood.

~~~~~~~

While Kittee was in Arkansas, I had a couple of days in Pendleton at school bus driver’s summer camp with the MidCo Bus Company. Last Saturday our newly formed Walla² Fly Fishers had a Fly Fishing Fair at a nearby Walla Walla winery, which made for a day of fly casting, tying, wine sipping fun in our neighborhood.


I was able to do a little casting even with busted ribs, but most of the time I sat and tyed flies and walked around taking pictures, eating a great lunch, and sipping vino. The Waterbrook Chardonnay did go well with the grilled salmon that was served for lunch.


Other than these activities I just laid low for the week, licking my wounds, petting Summer, and resting before the next school year rolls around.
OH yeah, last week was wheat harvest (seems a bit late this year) around McKuster Ranch, which move some elk and deer out of the wheat fields across the road, and gave us some additional Sunday morning wildlife viewing from the breakfast table.


Usually Summer will run or trot to me when I call... today she was not into having her picture taken. Here is an 8 second video shot of our Summer.


And that’s the way it is around the ranch --- Dale

The heat wave has broken -or- was that my back?

Since Friday July 3rd, many of our daytime high temperatures have been 100º and more. Day after day, after day. The sunshine has been beautiful and all-in-all it has been a most perfect Arabian desert summer for our horse herd and even for our Summer. The only thing about this kind of July-August weather is we have to move early in the mornings or wait until sunset to have any work/ play time outside.

Last evening the weather broke, and for the first time in over a month we had rain. We had cool, wet rain all night long. It feels great. Since the end of June we could have caught all our rain in a tea cup and it would not have washed the dust off a car windshield.
Last evening after the rain started all the mares gathered in a small group, with tails towards the wind and protecting Summer. The Dynamic Palomino Duo didn’t seem to care about the weather as they turned into mud-puppies, solid chocolate covered colored mud-puppies. Forget their palomino registration, they are just brown head-to-toe horses today☺
Today our mid-day high temperature reads about 71º and it feels great, even though I am sure we will be heading for the 100º mark again soon.

This past week working with Summer has been a joy, as she now comes across pasture when called. She is now blending in with all the mare herd except for Shaiela who continues to show herself as being the royal bitch mare. But we have to consider… Shaiela is pregnant, uses her pinned back ears and snake head moves when communicating with everyone but Rosey.

This past week Summer has really started to show the shed of her foal coat. She is going to be a liver chestnut in the body and probably flaxen mane and tail much like her sire – Rusty. Her lower hocks are remaining light, maybe lightening enough to make me wonder if she might have all around socks. It will be interesting to watch this coloration progress in the next couple of months and so on.

Yep, looks like two black eyes on Summer this week☺

Last Saturday Kittee and I started pretty early, cleaning up and tacking the palomino duo. We left the ranch heading up the Ole Cashe Hollow Road Trail around 8:00 a.m. to beat the heat. Weather forecast was calling for 100+ temperatures for the day. We had a great ride for 2½ miles out, when we stopped and let Derby and Nugget have a break and some fresh wheat head munchies. Kittee and I were sitting in our saddles enjoying the day and our ride up the hill, I was proud of Nugget as he did a great job of keeping up with Derby on the up hill trek. Anyway, there we were, everyone relaxing, horses eating, Kittee and I taking a few sips of water when Nugget raised his head, pointed his ears, turned to the right and bolted… 0 to 60 in 8 seconds. I don’t think I even had a rein in my hands when this happened. So as we raced along the hillside I decided to bale out of the saddle, as the hillside would diminish my fall’s distance to the ground at whatever speed we were then traveling.

This is not a good situation to find yourself in.

Anyway, after everything came to a stop, I realized that I was not gonna ride or walk back to the ranch from here. I told Kittee that I was hurt, I could smell blood, then I could taste blood. Soon thereafter I was spitting blood and Kittee trotted Derby and Nugget back to the ranch to get an ambulance for my ride to the ER. At St. Mary’s we found that I had broken two ribs, punctured a lung, and bruised my sternum rather badly, so for the past week I have been laying low and learning to get up and down, and breath lightly without allot of chest/back pain.
OUCH! that hurt, still hurts, but I feel an urge to be back in the saddle in time for our cool, clear autumn weather. Cowboy-Up. Since last Saturday's crash, I am much more mobile today and find breathing much easier... I feel I am healing very well, but have a bunch of wadded muscles in my back from head-to-tail in need of Dr.Vu's needle therapy. I will finish my pain drug intake tonight and plans are to be feeding, watering horses and driving to Pendleton on Monday and Tuesday mornings for annual driver's training. Kittee is going to be visiting with her dad/ stepmom this next week.

And that’s the way it is around the ranch --- Dale