oh, the places they go!

Russel and his wife Karen called and came out this morning to cut wood. They are such nice people!  I showed them several options including a huge tree that is down right next to the road. 
There is a lot of grass trying desperately to go to seed in my garden. Grass is supposed to start in Nov-Dec, grow only a little until early March and go to seed in late April or May. Instead there is grass 2 feet tall now, in January. A lot of grass has already been pulled out of the garden and added to the compost.  All that nice high-nitrogen grass has brought the compost up to a toasty 130F.  At that temperature there are millions of little microscopic organisms happily chomping away at the pile, aided and abetted by fungi. 
I went down to Winter Quarters today, got Firefly and gave her a good grooming.  We had a short ride in the arena to review leg and weight aids. Afterward, back in Winter Quarters, I stopped to chat with Glenn who was there to exercise two horses. Such a nice person! Firefly had a little lesson in standing around waiting for me to finish talking. She is getting ever so much more patient.  Before I let her loose I gave her a dose of worm medicine, it is past time to do so. The wormer was apple flavored which helped a little (horses often object quite forcefully to having nasty paste squirted into their mouth). Firefly barely put up any resistance.  All the other horses on the place are getting their doses as well.  Throughout everything Firefly was really good.  She even stood quietly next to the fence as I crawled on her. (For non-horse riders: horses are smart. If they decide they don't want to be ridden they will step away from the fence or mounting block until trained to stand  by it quietly. Horses that are ridden with kindness and sensitivity learn that they don't need to dislike being ridden - it might be nice or even fun!)
Tomorrow the plan is to take the tractor down and groom the arena. Also spray the edges again.  Once that is done it will be time to hook up the post hole digger and see if it will dig some holes for me.  Some places may be fine, others may have too much rock for the auger to work.  
Finger seems to be healing nicely so far. In this case the no-antibiotics approach appears to have worked well.  The nurse at the hospital cleaned the wound with a stream of saline solution, about 3 cups of it. The stitches were top dressed with a dab of Neosporin and a bandaid.  So much better than automatically giving a week's worth of oral antibiotics to absolutely everyone.