Thinking about getting another horse.

 There are a couple of completely different ads that have me intrigued.   One for a 'spicy but seasoned' 15 year old small bay gelding.   That is close to what I thought I should get, old enough that I won't worry about how to rehome a prime of life horse if my health fails but young enough that it should have 5-7 years of being able to do the shorter endurance rides.  

The other one is a 5 year old Arabian.   Actually I just read through his ad and he has zero rides.   So I'd have to pay someone to put at least 6 weeks on him,  I can deal with a spicy horse or a green horse, but they have to be good with my somewhat clunky mounting and I would not trust a horse that had only had ground work to handle that. 

 I also found an ad for feed bunks on FB that might? work for keeping horses out of big bale hay net.  It is a falling apart feedbunk, so I would just take the top off and put the frame that holds it up over the hay to minimize horses putting feet in the hay net.  But I've no ambition to contact either seller and maybe check them out.  

 I was pretty productive yesterday.   I did two loads of laundry, ran the robot vacuum on both floors and cleaned out the BATs mangers,  I need to sweep out the crud on the bottom, yesterday I just scooped out big chunks of wet crud yesterday; then I need to put back the buckets I want to have for trips.  And I should clean out the tack compartment today.   

Thank God my 'home' life is not rough right now

 Work has been such a bear the last couple of weeks,  if I was having to deal with breakdowns or sick critters etc at home right now too I'd probably be in a fetal position.    But work will sort itself out.  They can't afford to fire me for the #W*& downlink site that lied about being ready to collect data for us, cuz the group is already stretched very thin and they'd have to actually do some research and trial and error for issues instead of just asking me;  and the patches I made to software have not broken processing, knock wood.   I'm just sooo frustrated with that downlink site,  that outfit is pretty reliable, but this is a tropical ocean location, not their Norway/Sweden sites for polar satellites, I should have expected the tropical attitude would be in play, but nooo, I had to trust their email that said they were all set.  And then I didn't make myself clear enough to the sat ops people in Taiwan that I did not want them to do any extra work to turn on links right away.   Oh well, people are not dying in the streets because of this glitch, it is okay.

Mostly like my new house mate

 Well that reads wrong.  I like her, period.   So far I mostly like sharing the house with her too.   That is not 100% because she has a hyper Australian shepherd dog that she just keeps on leash all the time to manage the dog.   But I can throw no stones wrt to dog selection and that goes quadruple for dog management.  She is great feeding the horses for me in the mornings and last weekend when I camped overnight just to do a local fun ride.   I was hauling a young gal that lives near me and the ride was starting early so it was nice to get there and get registered and vetted the night before and only have to tack up in the morning.  I don't love the feeding in the mornings for me only because her dog barks when she puts the dog inside to have hands free to work.  I don't mind a bit of barking but the dog is shrill in the morning knowing that she is missing feeding and my noise tolerance is low when I first get up.  I may ask R if she could try tying the dog while she feeds. 

R got a job at the Animal Sanctuary.   L will probably be happy about that.  I am happy for housemate that her commute should be really easy, the Sanctuary is close to here and the drive is low traffic; and they are offering decent pay and benefits.  

Ugh my work.   One of our download sites was down with a power outage for days and recovered at 3 am local time last night.  I asked on slack this morning should we ask the satellite ops folks to add them to the schedule.   Radio silence from management and our satellite ops person.   So this evening I put on my Being in Total Charge hat and emailed the satellite ops folks myself (no one said we should NOT do this.)  I am not the one who should have made that call but someone needed to make it.  

P.S.   The #)W@)@ download site is NOT sending us downlinks after they SAID they were ready to downlink from the spacecraft and send data.   Argghh I hate it when I do something pro-active and it backfires. 

jingling curb chains

 I may have a housemate starting around Aug 9 or 10.   I have my doubts that my little backyard horse keeping situation will suit her for very long unless she is wanting a long breather from actively training horses but one never knows.   It will be perfect for me if she stays a while as I would be very comfortable doing some camping riding trips with an experienced horse person here while I was gone and I do want to do some horse camping to ride with sis and do fun rides at endurance events this fall.   Maybe she would even evaluate potential horse for me if I decide to take the plunge and buy one.  

Part of me is hoping work funding gets cut and my job goes away within the year to give me a big shove to sell and move to WY or NV.  (two low cost home insurance states, that have scenic horse riding places.) 

But I will make myself do the adult thing and get some quotes from other insurance agencies and see if I can't do better on combined home and auto insurance than the current company.   Its insane to have to pay over 10K a year, I haven't had an auto claim in ages,  I don't know if mom put in a hail damage claim to cover part of shingling the roof or replacing windows and  that is probably 20 years ago if she did.   Property prices are high in this area, but most of that is getting the 10 acre property, and easy Weld permitting to put in improvements, the house itself is not worth a huge amount, and I wouldn't pay $$$ over what it is worth to rebuild a similar size house if it was hit by a tornado or burned down, I'd either get a much smaller house, or I'd sell the property and let the new owner deal with scrape and rebuild, but I think stupid Colorado put in a regulation to make insurance companies pay to replace, rather than having a fixed max $ amount of coverage with the onus on the property owner to pay attention and increase coverage as building costs rise.  

Ughh, I don't want to do all these adult things

 FB finally activated my room share ad.   They show it as active since April 10.  I haven't renewed it yet, someone messaged me about it.   Looking for place for himself, wife and 5 month old baby and wanting to know if it would work.   How would I know what is needed for an infant?  I messaged that it probably would work, but no bathtub,  I think it is nice to have a tub for baby baths, but when they are tiny you can probably just use a basinet or whatever.   

American National sent a notice on raising insurance.  50% rate hike from what I thought was too much last year.   So I went looking for average costs and ended up filling out a form to get quotes and pushy agents are trying to call me now.   NO, leave a tex message or email me as I requested.    Progressive immediately put me into their own site, collected a bunch of data and gave me a quote.  It's not much liability but was about 5K,  around what I paid American National last year.    I will have to call Liberty Mutual and see if they can give me a quote.   I'd rather just sell and move, but walking away from the job just to save 4-7K a year on home insurance doesn't make sense.   But I when I retire or the job goes away I need to sell and move.  Average insurance in WY or NV is 1500.  It's over 3K in ND, but they do get some serious hail sometimes there, and ND probably has some rather socialist regulations for insurance too.  I'm sure the commie, or fascist BS is a big part of what is making CO insurance so stupidly expensive.  

Part of me thinks I could just not have home owners insurance at all.  I suppose that is not the wisest choice, but there is no mortgage and if the house was destroyed  I would sell the land and move, or at most put in a modest size modular house.   I feel like I'm being bullied by the liberal wine moms in the state that have voted in all kinds of "build the house back even if the owner didn't adjust their valuation on their policy to cover current building costs,  always err on the side of the bum that is suing because they tripped on the *rich* person's sidewalk etc etc and have made everything so expensive here.  

I am NOT a data engineer

Or whatever the correct term is.   But of course I end up playing that role because I AM kind of OCD, wanting to understand why something failed and prevent a repeat failure and the rest of the team is either stretched way too thin, or makes it their policy to never ever take on any damn task that is not specifically assigned to them by the boss.   I hate that mindset; but the big boss is a great one for keeping the group understaffed; and not really appreciating it when people go above and beyond their spelled out duties, which of course tends to increase the lazy mindset. 

And then we get the other part of the overall group that just installs shit willy nilly instead of going through our software process and team and end up breaking things.   We need to find a way to force them to only install in their own areas instead of messing up our /ops/tools areas.

Frosty the mini horse had a bad colic and had to be euthanized Monday

My farrier is all about "just use a bullet instead of the poison to euthanize" and when Frosty was colicky Monday morning I thought "I will give him a dose of banamine and if that doesn't work I will just put him down myself.   But when the banamine was wearing off and Frosty was wanting to roll again that afternoon I waffled and just called my vet.   Being a mini, he could not do a rectal and confirm that the colon was displaced.    Could have tried tubing in warm water after giving Frosty more drugs but the odds of that working are very low so the call was just put Frosty down while Dr Mike was here instead of trying the Hail Mary and having to have him come back out in a few hours; and Frosty being not comfortable even with some drugs in his system for most of that time period.  

Sunday I did the fun ride at HJ and then drove home.   Tuesday I had hay delivered.  The neighbor that I had hired to haul and stack it in the hay barn with his loader just brought the loader over Monday and dug the grave for me.   He didn't ask for extra money over his hay delivery fee and his wife had done chores for me and was all "oh you don't have to pay me" as well.   I gave him an extra $250 over his hauling quote.   That was probably more than I needed to give him, but it's not free to run a big loader like his; and I wanted to give them some for the time doing chores while I was gone. 

The horses like the new hay pretty well, thankfully.   I normally would have wanted to buy a test bale before committing to a years worth of hay but I was feeling too short on time so I just trusted it would be fine based on good reviews on FB marketplace.  

I don't "want" to do the work but I want to get my weeds sprayed and should mow the horse pasture, all the rye grass is dried out now.