ALLright. Whodunnit doggone it?!?!

I suppose you could say that we had a triple homicide here at the farm this week. I arrived home from work to find a shallow river of water trickling past the Girls' stalls. At first I thought the hose going to the pasture had ruptured, so with an eyeroll worthy of any teenager, I walked through the gate and into the yard to see how bad the damage was. As I rounded the corner of the stalls, however, I noticed that the water was actually coming down the hill from well above the place where the hose lay. Hmmmm, that's odd. With a slight shrug, I made my way up the hill to discover an overflowing water trough and three little bodies floating on their sides atop the water. ACK! MY FISH!! Baffled, I stared slack jawed at the lifeless bodies and struggled to digest the fact that Larry, Moe and Curly were no more. But what the heck happened? Cat? Bird? That didn't make sense at all. Surely if it had been either one, they would have eaten the fish (or at least left some kind of physical evidence behind <-- and who watches too many forensic shows on TV here? Guilty.) Moe was even eating out of my hand, darn it...I liked those fish!!

As I turned to go back down to the house to shut off the water, the hairs on the back of my neck began to prickle. I looked back to see Max standing by the water trough peering at me through the fence with an inscrutable expression on his face. Oh no, surely not. "WHY", I asked him with a baleful stare, "do I feel like you had something to do with this???" At this, Max turned away and stuck his head in the corner, refusing to meet my gaze. It wasn't until the fish had been given a decent burial and I headed back up the hill to try to figure out what was causing the tank to overflow that I got my answer. As I opened the gate, I looked up just in time to see Max lift his foot up and slam it down with great gusto into the water trough sending a huge fountain of water cascading in all directions. In less than three seconds I went from a self satisfied Ohhhhh at finding the answer to this puzzling conundrum to...
ARRRGH!! YOU KILLED MY FISH YOU PINHEAD!!  Ugh. UGH! Putz. Cretin. Dolt. Bockhead. You-you-you-you Heinous heathen horse, you! (hey, nice alliteration Jen ;o) 

I continued muttering under my breath as I stomped my way back up the hill glaring at Max the whole way.
"Well. You'd just better watch yourself young man," I muttered angrily, "lest you wind up in a small white squeeze bottle with an orange twisty cap on it in a Kindergarten classroom 

somewhere." *SNARL*. After several minutes of intense thought and the slow dawning that perhaps I might not be quite as excited about his clever solution to the heat as he was, (and I had the key to the feed room), Max decided to assume a slightly woebegone expression and then offer up an apology. Geeez whatta face. What do you think? Pitiful, isn't he?

As upset as I was about the fish, I just couldn't stay mad. I ended up playing with the horses and the water hose helping them to cool off. It was awfully hot that day (90 - blech!) and as we've not had much rain, the little pond they use to cool off had pretty much dried up. I suppose that's what ultimately led to Max's sudden inspiration. DD snuck into the house and grabbed my camera too...

And just in case you're wondering, the placement of the words on that photograph is absolutely positively 100% on purpose (it would have been nice if DD had taken her photos from *cough* OUR other side, which is slightly less mortifying than this one). Wouldn't you have put them there?? On second thought, I probably should have made them just a teensy bit larger. Yeesh :oP

After the hosing, comes the rolling:

Then the shaking (and WOW look at all that sand!)

And FINALLY [as promised] here is the short video clip of Bella and I practicing with the pedestal. She was most unsure initially, as it was quite a bit different than the much larger and lower version she had learned on (and has not seen for about a year). What cracked me up was her second time; she decided it was pretty awesome up there and used her shoulder to carefully prevent me from getting up there with her *laugh*. It's seems there's only one star of this show (and it definitely isn't me ;o)

Beginning Pedestal (Work?) from Jen on Vimeo.

See you next week and have a wonderful and blessed Resurrection Sunday! [Easter].