How appropriate is it to have a full moon to herald the end of a challenging year. Fireworks are yet to come and scare all the horses of course… but despite this, it’s a relief to be moving on to what we hope is a ‘normal’ 2010 without redundancies, illnesses, court battles, transport issues, flooding, drought and whatever else that afflicted us in 2009.

Hoping 2010 is just as ‘normal’ for you. Thank you to all for the birthday thoughts and Christmas wishes we don’t do much when there is just the two of us but we did celebrate Xmas with friends and had a good old laugh and of course we ate too much food (who doesn’t).

So here is Deacons Gate Shires last update for 2009

Duchess is confirmed pregnant and the little tyke has a very strong heartbeat, it’ll need it with the accident prone mother it has….. birth estimate is early November 2010. We have discovered Duchess is forever getting herself into scrapes and constantly plagued with injuries. Her latest endeavour was to near dislocate her hip as well as gouge long nasty scratches along her rump… it took us a while to find out what she was doing. As the stable is off limits (the 3 of them rub and scratch themselves on the walls causing all manner of damage) they have taken to standing at the gates, crowding each other and in the mêlée, Duchess (the blond), gets herself squished and caught in the alleyway between the roller door and steel fence structure (who knew a horse that size would have fitted) not once but 4 times judging by the multiple gouges and hip locking these past weeks. With that now sorted she will soon mend, no doubt in time for the next painful experience.

Pearl has 7 weeks to go before the birth of her 5th foal and whilst she is healthy (too fat so she’s on a meagre diet at the moment) the dreaded QLD itch is causing her grief with the maddening itch. I’ve tried all sorts of remedies but nothing seems to work and her lesions are getting worse. We used the Heritage product on Passion with great success but Pearl’s condition is seemingly untouched by the application. We are scrubbing all the horses tomorrow with a medicated shampoo in the hope we can break the itch cycle…. hours of work so fingers crossed it works as Rebel is now also showing a few spots on his ears and mane, we need to stop it.

Rebel is near 15.3hh now and growing steadily with his rump at the moment higher than the rest of him. He’s such a quiet little man and always happy to do as he is told. Mind you he doesn’t capitulate to mama Pearl surprisingly, despite her stomping and ear flattening the only method that works when she has truly had enough is to physically side swipe him with her belly or round house him with her rump. He moves but not far and trots on back to continue ignoring her. Duchess as well struggles with the little imp not moving on when told… she chases him though (not heavily pregnant so she can) and threatens to bite him if he resists…. this does work thankfully so no bite marks for us to attend to.

Dale is on holidays currently enjoying the time without me to give him loads of jobs to do (I am still at work) but the long weekends have given us time for fence fixing, horse washing, down pipe fixing (under Harold’s instruction of course) truck cleaning, maintenance and all that everyday stuff that always seems to happen.

We got rid a lot of the wild chooks (20) some weeks ago and whilst this reduced our rooster noise problems and feed bill it’s eerily quiet now without the scrambling and squabbling.. The ducks and geese haven’t missed a beat… they still explore the dams, combing the fluctuating grass growth for lost and unprotected bugs to devour. The few chickens we do have are getting old now and annoy the horses at feed time scratching about for dropped pellets. Not sure what a horse pellet does to the digestion of a chook… but they’ve managed this long so they can’t be too detrimental for their health.

Our marvellous minis are in top shape currently, the jenny craig paddock regime has done its job well keeping them in terrific form. Raine (now 17) on his new diet has turned around his skin and bone weight loss to weight maintain and has his personality back, of course taking on Greg’s through the fence is as good as the bluff goes. Passion’s QLD itch is seemingly under control and together with Shades, Indi and Greg the lot of them are happy little munchkins.

Happy New Year to you all