Call me crazy, but...
... I wasn't going to let a little thing like excruciating back pain stop me from finishing the harvest. ;)
Actually, as I mentioned in the last post I'm feeling a lot better than I did yesterday morning. So good, in fact, that I decided to risk heading out to the back field and collecting the rest of the hay before it rained. Now given that that's how I buggered my back in the first place, that may seem like a crazy idea, but it also had to done, and there' s no-one here but me to do it. So, Nash and I headed out to the back field with the Explorer and Trailer, and this time I was very careful not to bend or twist or do anything else that might cause a problem.
I think a large part of the problem last time was that I was trying to be "less lazy" and was parking the trailer between stooks, and carrying the bales over to the trailer. In some cases, this meant lugging a heavy bale 30 or 40-some feet over uneven ground; a sure recipe for trouble. This time, I pulled the trailer right up alongside each bale, even if it was just one bale, to make sure I didn't repeat that error. It took two trips to move all the bales in, but now they're all indoors, stacked, and out of danger of being rained upon. The biggest issue was actually just having to stop and rest a little now and then while I was stacking the bales, lest I wind up giving myself a heart-attack from overdoing it! In the end, we have a large stack of 80 bales of hay, more or less (I lost count a couple of times, so I may be off by a few bales.) That, combined with the hay we're buying from a neighbour, should last about a year so we should be fine from here on in.
The farrier also came today, at last! Unfortunately, although she was very gentle with the horses, and was even able to calm Bonnie down enough to trim her hooves, I won't be hiring her again. She's supposedly a "certified farrier", but she didn't get her training from an official school like Olds College, so methinks she may have taken one of these one-week courses that I've seen advertised. The problem up here is that there aren't any regulations about who can be an "official farrier" and who can't. Even I could advertise myself as being a Certified Farrier because I did take (and pass) the 2.5 day course at Olds. I'll give her credit in that her work with the rasp was better than I've usually managed to do, but other than that I don't think she did a proper job at all. The only tools she had was a hoof-pick, the rasp, and a set of nippers. You can't do a proper job without a good set of hoof-knives, and when I checked PoohBear's and Dirk's hooves afterwards it was obvious that she hadn't taken them down properly at all; there was still crud in the soles, for crying out loud!
PoohBear and Dirk I'm perfectly capable of doing on my own. Bonnie I'll be able to do, but we need to do a lot more handling work with her; getting her used to having her feet picked up and worked with, etc. She didn't even touch Charles, admitting right away that he was way beyond her abilities. That rather annoyed me as well, as the whole point of waiting for her was that I was expecting an experienced, professional farrier who would know how to treat him. As said, she's a nice enough person, and she was gentle with the horses, but I think she's more of "a girl who really likes horses, and likes to work with them, and took a quickie course and thinks she's a farrier." A true farrier is so hard to find out here that I think the people who recommended her were just happy to find anyone who would trim their horses' hooves, and don't know what a proper hoof-job looks like. So I'm out $120, and I'm going to have to re-do all the work myself anyway. :P As for Charles, I've got a pretty good idea as to how to treat him, but it will be a long and slow process. So there's another business opportunity for anyone with the drive and skill-set; Southern Saskatchewan has a desperate shortage of properly trained and skilled farriers, and there's good money to be made at it. I'm not even considering the idea, because I know my back couldn't take it, and I don't have 2+ years to spend in an accredited program and apprenticing.