Not Much to Report.

As per the title, I don't have a lot to report this month. Which is great really. :-)

I do have a new computer. Buying a computer is really an INSANE thing to do at this point of brokeness but I got it at an auction. Turners were auctioning off $1 million dollars worth of 'damaged' stock from the Christchurch quake. There were some SERIOUS bargains to be had. I picked up my new 'puter for $600. It was completely undamaged and came fully ready to go with monitor, keyboard, mouse and speakers. It is FAB!!!!

Spyke is going well. We had another dressage comp in the weekend. He didn't go as well I had hoped but that was pilot error. He was still very, very good. It was a lovely hot day and I was grateful to have my tests in the morning. We then retired under the trees and drank champagne and ate yummy food.
Spyke got about mid field in both tests which is pretty good really!!! It was BIG classes.

In a couple of weeks we have our first jumping comp of the season.

The dogs are both great. I have been selling baking at work to try and raise money for Brina's op and that went really well at first but I think the novelty has worn off now. :-)

That's about everything really. I do have other news but am unable to make it public yet so I will have to post again in a few days.

Busy, Busy, Busy

Life is into full 'summer' swing again. I can't believe it's nearly a month since I posted.....sorry. :-) It has been a very busy month so I'll break it down a bit.

Dogs.
The dogs are both well. Brina has had a few 'episodes' this month. Mainly because she is a greedy little so and so. She has eaten my martingale..... again..... that would be the one that I bought to replace the last one she ate. I thought that I had hidden it REALLY well but apparently not. Sheesh!! That leather item of course was 'returned' when she tried to eat her dinner.  She also managed to work a bit of a hole in her Brinabal Lector mask and made the most of it. She brought up a bit of a revolting mixture of things, the least objectional being the cow poop. :-/ Sammie is well and is ticking along, she is just no trouble that girl. :-) (Long may she stay that way!!!)

Brina also managed to somehow break her tail. I came home one day to find it all bent and hanging, heaven knows how she did it. I made a splint of a used toilet roll and a bandage that Spyke had won at a dressage comp so she had a lovely bright pink tail. I took the splint off today after two weeks and the tail seems to be completely mended. :-)

Weekend Away
Excitingly I actually managed to have a weekend away in Peel Forest, down south of Christchurch. I went there with a few of the girls from the Chch office. It was a GREAT weekend. We drove down on the Saturday and when we got there at about 2pm we broke out the peanuts and the drinks and spent the next eight hours drinking, laughing, chatting and eating. It was FABULOUS. On the Sunday we went for a walk in the forest and then stopped for a picnic in Ashburton on the way home. Lovely, LOVELY weekend.

Spyke
Spyke has had a busy time. We competed in the WRC dressage at level 2. We did two tests. The first test didn't go so well. Spyke did some of his throwing head resistance so I tried to really concentrate on not getting tense and he came back to me really well, which is a first. In the past, once he started resisting we were pretty much toast so I was really pleased with him. We did manage to come second to last though. :-/

Resisting

Looking fabulous (him, not me :-)



In the second test he was GREAT!!! He was soft, kind and tried really hard. I was chuffed with him and we managed to get fourth. :-) I was really, really pleased with that result as there were some VERY nice horses that we were up against.

I have been jumping him too and he has been brilliant. He is really keen to jump and seems to be really enjoying it. Today we had a show hunter clinic with Sue Whiddet, a national judge. She remembered Spyke from the showmanship challenge last year (where I had a bit of a jumping melt down), I figured her remembering us was not a a good thing but in actual fact she remembered his lovely dressage so I was pretty blinkin' chuffed. Spyke usually saves his most 'special' behaviour for clinics so I was a bit worried about today. It wasn't helped by me having the wrong start time in my head. I thought it started at 10:30 but it was actually 10. Fortunately Kristina noticed that I had the wrong time and set me right.

Once we got there I had about 2 minutes to tack up and get on so my 'long warm up' that I had planned didn't happen. Spyke however was PERFECT. He did not put a foot wrong at all. Sue's advice to me was to trust Spyke as he is a 'lovely boy'. :-)

Rainy Day

It is a lovely rainy Sunday morning, which is just bliss. There's no rush to do anything and I can see a slow but productive day coming. At the moment I am sitting on my bed, still in my pyjamas with Brina sleeping next to me and Sammie sleeping on the floor.

The reason that we are 'computering' in the bedroom is because the rest of the house is chaos. The builders have been in to fix the ceilings after Mr Rat caused a mess by chewing through two water pipes. All the furniture from the home theatre is spread throughout the rest of the house and one corner of the lounge is empty. It will probably be chaos for a while too as I am grabbing the opportunity to get the plasterer to skim the master bedroom and the home theatre and I will finally get them repainted.

The animals are all well. Brina is due for her next dilation. She has been brilliant for the last few weeks with very few issue. The vet rang us on Friday to see how she is doing and that night she regurgitated her dinner and the next day she found a bone while walking in the forest. Fortunately she brought that back up pretty quickly. She is a worry. LOL

Sammie is getting a bit stiff in her old age. I had her on some Hubrihound which was really making a difference to her but blinkin' Brina stole the tub off the bench and ate the lot (and then brought it all back up) so I have to save up for some more. Grrrrrr.

Spyke is back in work. Yay!!! We have entered our first dressage (gulp) and have signed up for a show hunter clinic in November. I have popped a couple of jumps with him and he is sane and sensible (although the first jump was somewhat hairy LOL). Yay!!! Yesterday Kristina and I took Spyke and Benhorse up to an arena to play and Spyke was very good, I even cantered him around the arena with my hands on my head, he is a good boy!!! :-) We are probably going to do a terrible test at the dressage in a couple of weeks though as he is still quite stiff and doesn't really lengthen at all yet. I have nowhere to practice lengthening either so I think we will mess that up, oh well, it is only two movements......

Spring

We are well into spring now although we only just now getting some nice weather. We have had 5 nice days in a row which has been LOVELY!!!!

Brina has been great. She has a couple of minor issues but with being on complete lock down we have avoided any real problems. She is still getting soaked, mashed food and is slowly putting on weight.

Spyke is now back in work, 2 months later than usual and has been pretty good so far. He has felt a bit bucky at the canter which made me realise that I haven’t actually lunged him at all this season. He likes to have a good buck on the lunge and was obviously ‘feeling the need’. So I gave a bit of a lunge on Tuesday and sure enough, there was a great deal of bucking. Hopefully that is now out of his system.

We had our first forest ride on Saturday. Kristina and I took Spyke and Oscar for a bit of a womble. The boys were very, very good although BOTH managed to lose a shoe, I suspect they lost them when Oscar stood on Spyke’s back foot.

I have sent in the entries for our first dressage comp of the season. We are doing two novice (gulp) tests at the Riding Club. I am not sure that we will be ready in three weeks but we shall give it a shot!!!!

Brina Decides the Stricture Needs Fixed NOW!!!!

Yet another interesting couple of weeks has passed. I experimented a bit with a muzzle for Brina so that she would be able to roam up at the paddock while I was doing the horses. The theory behind the muzzle was that she wouldn't be able to pick up anything that could get stuck in the stricture. In the beginning she still managed to get a bit of horse poop and horse food. I got hold of a old horse nose-net and cable tied that into the bottom of the muzzle so that she wouldn't be able to pick things up but would still be able to drink. It appeared to work really, really well. The day that I tried it I would have spent about an hour up at the paddock while she got hold of no horse poop or food. I was THRILLED!!! However, I left her alone for less than 5 minutes as I put Spykle back in the paddock and came back to find her with her muzzle still on but she was chewing on a blinking cow horn!!!! I have no idea how she managed it!!! I ripped the muzzle off and stuck my hand in her mouth to get all the bits out. I didn't know if I had got them but I can say that madam was VERY pleased with herself.

She seemed completely fine so we headed home and I had my fingers firmly crossed. I gave her, her dinner but within a few minutes she had regurged it but only food came out so, if a cow horn had been blocking, she had not managed to get it out. :-(

The next morning I gave her a tiny bit of breakfast but that too came up. Back to VSG we went. The vet and I came to same conclusion that Brina clearly had a stricture and that it really had to be dealt with so back into hospital she went. They had to do some x-rays to make sure that there was no sign of pneumonia before they could do the procedure. All was clear so they 'did' her that afternoon.

It all went really well. The vet was pleased to find that her stricture was 0.9cm so they stretched it to 1.2cm. What they found lurking in her oesophagus was bark!!!! From the garden!!!! The best bit was they showed me a video of the procedure, it was really, really cool!!!! And it is very reassuring to actually SEE how well she has healed. She has two more dilations in the future, one will take her out to 2cm and then she will get another to take her out to almost normal.

Since the procedure Brina has been on lockdown, I am not taking ANY risks with her. She is on mashed food instead of liquidised and is looking really well. She has lost a lot of weight but is slowly putting it back on.

On the horsey front I have finally ridden Spyke!! YAY!!!! It is so wet though that I HAD to road ride. I am a very nervous road rider so to go for my first ride of the season along the road was a challenge for me. Of course, Spyke didn't put a foot wrong, bless him. I have only managed to one ride though as the weather is still very wet. But DaylightSavings starts in less than two weeks so hopefully, we will get going properly then.

In the weekend we celebrated my Dad's 70th birthday. It was really, really nice!!!! Maree and Andrew came up from HB and Iain and Stu were there. We went out on the Waipa Delta. Poor Dad though, we made sure we had helium balloons and banners and things and I think Dad was hoping for anonymous. He he. The meal on Delta was a hot rock meal which was really good fun and the lamb that I had was delicious and very tender. Happy 70th Dad. Love you. :-)

I have some pikkies but my camera won't talk to this computer so I will have to work on getting them on here.

Brina is Celtic for 'Defender' but I think it means 'Fighter'

The month since my last post has been a complete roller coaster of highs and lows. I hardly know where to begin. Brina made it through the surgery. The first three days post surgery are crucial and I was told that if she made it through those then we could start to hope for a good outcome. That girl is a fighter and she improved every day that she was in hospital. I was able to visit her twice a day and I am sure that made a difference. She made it very, very clear that she was happy that I was there.

After 5 days she was allowed to go home for a few days. She wasn’t allowed anything by mouth and had to be fed and medicated through a stomach tube. I was able to take some leave to look after her but was also able to keep working from home (which was great as it gave me something else to think about). Brina seemed amazing well at this time and was very pleased to be home. On the Friday after her operation she had to go back into the hospital for 24 hours while they tested her oesophagus to see if it would hold. This was a very, very difficult 24 hours for me and I was a bit of a wreck.

On that Friday night I had to go into town with Kristina to meet a ‘friend of her neighbour’s’ who wanted to buy Spyke. I thought it was kinda odd but I NEEDED to sell Spyke so in we went. It turned out that the ‘friend’ was a group of friends who ‘bought’ Spyke for me to ride. I was somewhat completely overwhelmed and cried and cried and cried in a very busy pub on a Friday night. Their generosity was AMAZING and I am soo grateful.



The other amazing thing was a group of people, most of whom I have never met, that frequent a horse forum that I have been a member of for approximately 10 years, got together and donated money towards Brina’s vet bill. AMAZING!!!!!! I have been completely stunned and overwhelmed by people’s generosity and support.



Anyway, back to Brina. Her oesophagus held!!!!! She was able to eat and drink!!! So she was able to come home. The next few weeks were both fabulous and difficult. I had some trouble with getting the consistency of the food right which resulted in her regurging a few times. A couple of these occasions were just awful to watch as she struggled to get something out of her throat. There were two occasions where it took her nearly half an hour to get the offending article out and she was extremely distressed. Both of those meant a trip in to the vet for painkillers. She also had terrible diarrhoea for a few days that made life very difficult.

She is now very much on the mend and getting her bounce back. I will have to change our lifestyle as there is no way she can be allowed off leash where there is any possibility of her picking up something that won’t go all the way down. I am pretty sure that she has a stricture L and this will need to be addressed but I will need to save some money before I can afford to fix it but the vet feels there is no big hurry on this if she is managing to eat (everything she gets is liquidised at the moment).



Spyke and Tai have moved house. They have moved up to Kristina’s place as she has offered me some cheaper grazing and I think there is a lot of stuff we will be able to do from there. We will be able to road ride more etc. Once again life will be different.



I’m feeling quite lost at the moment, life has changed suddenly and I’m not sure where it is heading. I feel like I am going in the wrong direction and I am getting trapped into a life that is not what I want or need. I dream of living on a piece of land where I can have my dogs and my horses all together, with fruit trees that blossom in the spring and a vegetable garden but I feel now that can never be. :-(



Overall, I am so grateful to still have my dog, she is an important part of me.

The Worst Month of My Life

This has to officially be the worst month ever. After the dramas of the last couple of weeks things have taken a dramatic turn for the worse (that doesn't sound right but I can't think how else to say it).

My beautiful Brina swallowed a large bone that got stuck in her oesophagus (sp?). She is currently at the vets where she underwent thoracic surgery last night to renove the bone and, it turned out they needed to remove a portion of her oesophagus as it was badly damaged by the bone. Right now allwe can do is hope that the oesophagus mends as if it doesn't I will need to get up there quickly to say goodbye.

The surgery is incredibly expensive and I am blessed with wonderful family who will ensure that we can pay the bill to bring her home but it means that I will need to sell Spyke to try and pay them back.

I cannot put into words how devestated I am by the turn of events in my life or how grateful I am for the amazing support I have had from family, friends and even complete strangers.

Please, please, please get well Brina. I need you in my life.

Gonna Be Homeless

It has been an interesting couple of weeks. Last week in particular was very trying and stressful. One of the major things that came out of last weeks dramas is that I am going to be homeless!!! :-( Fortunately it won't be for about 4 years but the house that I rent from bro is going to compulsorily (?) purchased by the NZTA and they are going to bulldoze it and turn it into an offramp for the motorway. I am really sad about it as I really like living here.

The animals are all fine. I have a picture of  'Sammie's pipe'. I took it while up at the forest today in the pouring rain. The river is up here but it is not as high as it was the day Sammie got swallowed. The water is normally in the bottom quarter of the pipes, on the day Sammie was swallowed the water almost covered the pipes.

Sammie's Bridge

The pipe just behind her is the one that she went through.

Last weekend I hosted a Prenzel Tasting at the house. There weren't many of us there but I feel that it was a 'quality crowd'. We tasted lots of schnapps, oils, ice cream sauces and things and between us all we managed to order HEAPS. The order arrives tomorrow and I am really looking forward to it. As the host I got loads of free stuff too. :-)

The next morning we had a really good frost which meant it was cold enough that my car wouldn't start. So after spending waaaaaaay too much money on the night before I had to get a new battery too. Oops!!!

The Prenzel Lady

Listening to the Prenzel Lady

The horses are well. Spyke is looking a bit lighter than I would like but Tai is looking FAB. I have changed their diet to give Spyke more protein in the hope that will give hime the boost he needs (Tai is THRILLED LOL).

Spyke Looking Light

Tai @ Nearly 29

I started doing a bit of ground work with Spyke on Friday evening. He was a bit shocked!!! I think he thinks that it is a) far too cold to have his cover off, b) way too soon to be starting work. SURELY it is still holiday time. I am planning on gettin him going in a few weeks. Yay!!!!

And just because I am into taking pics of the weather (when I have my camera on me)

Winter Sunset

A Scary Moment

Last weekend I had what was one of the scariest moments ever. Kristina and I took the dogs for a walk in the forest. We had a lovely walk and were just heading back to the car when Sammie went to have a swim in the stream, which was running really high after the rain. I was going to stop her but thought I was just being over protective and let her swim. She went into the water and started to swim. The current was strong and I went to call her out when her butt started being swept into the pipes that went under the bridge. Before I could even move she had disappeared under the water and into the pipe. there was nothing I could do!!! I ran to the other end of the pipe and prayed that she she would pop out the other end. It seemed like forever but she DID pop out, thank goodness. THEN it looked like she was going to swept down river. I was freaking out a little (lot) but she calmy swam to shore and then came to me and looked at me as if to say "What?"
She was completely fine!! She didn't have any water up her nose, in her ears...or anything? I was fine until I got home and then I had a bit of a meltdown.

Anyhoo, all was well and we are all fine. :-)

Life has not been exciting (other than the nearly drowned Sammie) and I am quite happy for it to stay that way after that experience. The house is nearing a state of cleanliness as I have lots of time for house work. Wheeeee!!

This weekend we went for a walk at the botanic gardens with Gill and Storm and Kristina and Georgia. We took the cart and the girls had a cart each.

Today it is wet, wet, wet so more housework was achieved. Here are some pics:

At the Botanic Gardens

Winter Spyke

Winter Tai

Shortest Day Plus One

Goodness it has been nearly a month since I posted. Oops!!!

Well....it is winter!!! Really, really winter. It is wet and cold and the days are very short. The sun doesn't come up until after I get to work at 7:30 and it has set by 5:08 in the evening (I know this as my drive home in the evening is directly into the setting sun).

Since my last post I had a day out in Tauranga (the weekend after Taupo). I do so love getting out of Auckland, even for just a day. Tauranga was FAB as I was catching up with a friend from my deep dark past. Kerri was my best buddy from intermediate school. She and I were going to run away and live on her uncle's farm when we were 11. :-)

It was such a lovely day, we chatted and had a lovely walk along the beach with her adorable puppy, Walter.

Is he not gaw-juss???!!!!

I also took a couple of other pics.

The girls on Papmoa Beach

Happy Brina

And one of a gap in the clouds on the way home (I know....very sad LOL)

So, apart from a lovely trip to Tauranga and a day out at Fieldays (oooooh if I had money I would be dangerous!!!!) my winter hobby appears to be..........baking!!! Not good for weight loss!!!

So far I have experimented with brioche:

Before going in the oven

After:

The brioche was lovely!! It was really, really light. It felt, when you held it, quite stodgy but it was incredibly light when you ate it. I was dead chuffed. But naturally I couldn't eat a whole loaf by myself so next......

I made Chocolate Bread and Butter Pudding with the left over.

It was AMAZING!!!!! Soooooooo yuimmy!!!!!!! I used Delia Smith's recipe which needs to rest for 48 hours but it is soooooooo worth the wait!!!! Yum yum yum!!!!

Next on my hit list was focaccia

Once again, very light and yummy although there are a couple of minor tweaks I would like to make to how I made it. So will need to try that one again.

All the pics seem to make everything look a bit burnt but they weren't. I figure it is either my camera (taken with the phone so possible) or the blue background so I will work on that for the next thing.

Trouble is.... I'm not sure what is next. I was going to try croissants but, having googled the recipe, that falls into the 'just ridiculously time consuming' basket so that is out. I am fairly confident I will think of something but feel free to comment if there is something you are keen on.

On a sombre note, it was a bit of a rough day at work today as last night as Kathryn, my work colleague in Chch was rushed to hospital with a brain aneurysm. We all worried all day about her and I know, for me, it made me really think about mortality and how life is just too short to waste. I have just heard though that she is now talking and looking a lot better.......thank goodness!!!!

The dogs are well. Brina is developing a 'I have to poop' habit at 4am every morning that I am really not very keen on so tonight they didn't get dinner until 8 in the hope that she will last the night!!! Sammie is really, really well. I put her on Glucosamine and was surprised at how much more free moving she is. I didn't think she was stiff until I saw her all freed up!!!!

The horses are enjoying their holiday. They get warm dinners every night and are standing waiting for me from about 3 o'clock!!!

That's about all from me for tonight. You all stay safe and LIVE!!!!!!