Been there and done that......

Well I forgot to stick the title on the last chapter - it should have been "Weather, tractors and a birthday" ah well, it also should have been posted on Monday but I am getting terrible at tearing myself away and things get left till the next day and the next. In this case it was the actual unloading of the photo from my phone which delayed it - sad but true, it just feels wrong to post without a picture and I wanted a new one.
Wednesday was another busy day - finally got around to trying Holly out with the long reins - very interesting. Judging by her reaction I'd say she's done that a few times before. The only problem we had was where to actually go - the lunge area is a bit small and there's not really a lot of garden available to us what with the tractor etc being stuck there. Also it's on a steep bank down towards the house with a trackway at the top so we wandered around the trackway a bit then ended up going back down into the yard and out onto the private road which is long, level and tarmaced. I'll have to think about how I'm going to do this on my own - the yard gate is narrow and there are cars that use the road so I'd have no way of seeing if any were coming without an assistant. There is another (wider) way onto the road through the back drive but I'd have to move some stuff to clear it first as it's a route we don't usually use with the horses.
In the afternoon we took a trip to a big saddlery shop just outside our area - they have a much wider range than the local shop and a trip there easily becomes expensive ( ! ) In this case we were going for 2 reasons - first was that Gemma had found a credit note from them lurking in the furthest reaches of her purse and secondly she got well and truly stuck in her full chaps the other day and efforts to release her resulted in the long leg zip breaking. This shop does repairs so if we needed another excuse there it was.
In the event it turned out that to clean and repair the waxed chaps would cost more than buying a new pair, unfortunately they don't sell the same sort and she is kind of attached to them ( well she certainly was the other day ! ) so I think she is going to see if she can get her mother to fix them instead and then try her hand at reproofing them with a spray. Finally managed to get the riding gloves that we tried to get for my birthday - I think they must have been buried somewhere at the back of the shop on the 3 previous attempts we made so those, a long lead line, 2 new plastic curry combs and a grooming block sorted the credit note out and I got home with a whole hour to kill before having to fetch the kids from the bus !
I also ended up taking a detour to buy some apples as John wanted to try his hand at making brown sauce - we'd already got all the other ingredients but somehow forgot the apples ( daft really as they're the main thing !) In the end he stayed up for most of the night making the sauce and the smell went through the enire house. Very nice sauce though.
I've also found a home brew shop where I can get the bungs and airlocks we need to make our own wine ( something we haven't done for years) unfortunately they also are just out of our local area ( on the way to the saddlery shop) and turned out to be closed on Wednesdays - isn't that just typical ?