This is Marquessa. She is about 30 years old and is retired on 40 acres. She has a great mom who takes very good care of her.

I had an opportunity to ride with another shoer twice this fall to work on a hospital shoe for a horse named Dazzle. Dazzle lives up to his namesake, having shown up at the veterinarian clinic with silver hoof polish on his feet! I was able to see the new acrylic superfast pads that Vettec puts out.

One of my customers brought a show horse home from the circuit with what turned out to be a broken side-bone. The horse toes out on the front feet and has never had pathological shoeing to correct it. The horse is a young Arabian. I hope it heals OK, because it is difficult to ask an Arabian to be still for six to eight weeks.

Another of my customers went lame three days after I left. Everyone at her barn is trimmed. I know I don't take a lot of sole off trim horses because I don't want them lame. Of course, I heard all this second hand because she called one of my other customers to ask if it was something I did. She didn't realize how small the horse community is. I heard from the person she talked to, the veterinarian she called and the horseshoer who put a hospital shoe on her horse. I am still learning the more complicated shoes, so I was good with someone else going out, but I would have gone to watch and learn if I heard about it in time. The veterinarian said there was a distinct puncture wound. He also told me that he liked my trim work and that I did I nice job on the horse. Whew!

My fifth season is winding down. I have more time at home again and have already started hitting the gym so I don't lose any muscle strength through the winter. I did add several new customers for the barefoot trim and I really like doing that trim. This summer was difficult with it being so wet for so long, so there were some horses that I felt were better with shoes. Maybe next year they can try going barefoot.

What is in a name?

This miniature horses' name is Falaeo. His owner taught him to give kisses. It always amazes me how many names there are for our animals. The first horse I rode in 1966 was a buckskin pony named Sunray. After that came Cocoa, Blondie, Nosey, Freckles, Holly and Pockets. Other horses I met through the years are Whisky, Rocky, M&M, Arthur, Neesha, Cannon, Clavicle, Candle Power, Pamela, Blackie, Dusty, Buddy, Tucker and Bennie. This season I started marketing the barefoot trim and booting. I have a start on customers who are interested in natural hoof care. It is also getting toward the end of the shoeing season. September is when I buy enough supplies to be ready when the work ramps up in the spring. This was a tough year to keep ahead of scheduling. It rained all summer, some horses were rescheduled two and three times. I also saw more abcesses and lame horses this year than in previous years.

This guy is summering on fifteen acres of brome. He is very happy and is enjoying his temporary home.
These ponies are not my customers. The rig and ponies live near my inlaws in Missouri. Very cute, though!

Two Bit has to travel a lot of pastures, gravel roads and back country to trim and shoe horses. This road has two creeks that run across the road. If we have enough rain, I have to go around which adds about seven miles to my odometer. I had to reschedule my horses this morning. It has been thundering and raining for a few hours now. My next appointments start at four in the afternoon. Maybe the weather will blow over by then. The rain seems never ending this year. Horses that normally don't have any problems with their feet are blowing abcesses because their feet are so soft. Horse owners don't understand that they cannot ride the way they usually do when it is this wet. They have to stay off road gravel and rocky trails or put shoes on. Once they injure a foot, get tendonitis or throw their back out of alignment it takes several weeks for the horse to get better. But people want an instant fix and worse, don't realize they caused the problem.This is also the time of year that horseshoers have to fight off exhaustion. Working in the heat and with a full schedule starts to wear on your body. Trying to find holes in the schedule to fit horses in that you have to reschedule because of weather means that you work under more horses than your body can tolerate in a week. You leave the house an hour earlier and come home at dark. This leaves no time to contact your customers who are due, call customers to confirm upcoming scheduled appointments, or return phone calls. It gets frustrating. No matter how hard you work you are always behind.

The first four years I left my cell phone on all the time and I took it with me everywhere. This year I shut my phone off at 8pm every night and I never fire up the cell phone on Sundays. This is also the first year that I won't work on Sunday. To my knowledge I lost two customers totalling 5 horses this season. One woman called at 10:15 on a Friday night and left voice mail. I called her at 8am the next morning and she said she found someone the night before. Oh well. Another woman called me on a Saturday afternoon on my home phone, not my business line, to shoe her horse that day so she could go on a competitive trail ride the next morning. I already had a full day of horses. By the time I found her message on the home phone it was too late to shoe a horse before dark. Last year I did shoe her horse at a park in the dark during a thunderstorm.

When I rode with Bob for two years as an apprentice, it was like working with a machine. He left the house at 7:30 every morning. He shoes ten to twelve horses a day six days a week at the same steady pace all day long. He rarely stops to eat, almost never stops where there is a bathroom and always drive the shortest distance from barn to barn. He doesn't take breaks, answer the phone or stop working until his list for the day is complete.

For the past three years on my own I have followed much the same path, except not as many horses a day. This year I am not. I discovered that Starbucks is always on the way to a barn. I am not sitting on the side of the road waiting because I got to a barn early. I have actually been exactly on time or five minutes late for appointments. I have more horses a day now. As an old girl, I started staggering my day. I work until noon, then go home for four or five hours and rest. Then I go back out at four or five and work until eight at night. This give my body a chance to rest and has kept me out of the heat in the afternoon.

I was always an early morning person, awake and up by six. Now that I am in the throws of menopause I am not sleeping well at night. I sleep the heaviest from five to seven in the morning. To accommodate, I moved my first appointments this summer from eight to nine in the morning. While this is my busiest year, it is also the most relaxed and comfortable year.

New customer

This little cutie was born two days ago. I think he is adorable!I spent more time rescheduling customers the past two weeks than working. There have been storms every morning. I took one week for light duty only because of the surgery on my foot. It was just getting easy to walk again when I got bucked off my bicycle at Shawnee Lake. Not on the mountain bike trail. Oh no. That would be too easy. I was on the concrete trail where no one should fall. So, that means this week had to be overbooked. One of my customers is on vacation this week. She rode with me two days and was a great help. Except at one place where she forgot we didn't shoe. We only trimmed. She picked up the horse owners bucket of brushes thinking it was my bucket of nails and tools. We both watched her load it in the trunk of my car along with my shoeing box, waiting to see how long it would take her to realize she had the wrong bucket. She didn't figure it out until she saw us laughing!

I have three new stops this week with six new horses. One horse was a set of four shoes. He stood nice and quiet. I found out he and my horse have the same daddy. That explains why he is so quiet. I had two from last night that I walked away from. They were trims. One was new to the woman and he already had her scared of him. She can't catch him and has arranged for a cowboy to come in to rope the horse so they can get it on a trailer and gone. The other horse was a brat. She kept rearing when I would pick up a foot, then she would step into me and tried to push me down. I have three new ones tonight. The rest of the week should go smoothly with known good quiet horses.

When the horseshoer needs a farrier

I have been hobbling around all weekend because I had an ingrown toenail removed from my giant toe. I always thought it was called the big toe, but the nurse said it is officially a giant toe. Who knew? Tom laughed at me all the way to the walk-in clinic. He thought it was funny that the horseshoer needed a farrier. I had an appointment with a podiatrist two weeks from now, but the nail decided to get infected the day before a holiday. So on 4th of July I had minor surgery.

I have horses scheduled in the morning and hope I do OK. I am still pretty sore and can't take any more of the prescribed pain medicine so I can drive and safely work under horses in the morning. That is one of the joys of working for yourself. You don't have sick leave and you don't get paid if you aren't working. You also take a chance if you call your customer to reschedule. Sometimes, they will move to a different farrier. You just can't be sick or take vacation in this job and keep your customers. The strip mall where the clinic was also has a coffee shop that was new to us. They made great coffee and had awesome sandwiches.

Hubby was on vacation most of last week. Wednesday we spent the day bicycling the levee trail in Lawrence. At 5pm we stopped to regroup so I could trim horses on the way home. The horses are a mother and yearling baby haflingers. They are quiet good horses, except that the baby was taught to bow when you pick up a front foot. That makes it a little bit of a struggle to trim its' front feet. There is also a drop dead gorgeous Holsteiner dressage horse. He is black and all legs. He always trots in from the pasture when his owner calls him. He is magnificent to watch.

I have a new pony on my list that is cute as a bug. He is foundered, but assuming he is taken off grass I think he will come around pretty quickly. I had to move some horses around during the week it was over 100 degrees. Everyone was willing and understood. One afternoon, in the middle of the week, I just couldn't go out again. I had to reschedule a new customer. If I had just waited another two hours before calling him I could have used a thunderstorm as an excuse to cancel instead of sounding like a wimp and cancelling because of the heat! Both of his horses were quiet and stood nicely.

Tom was bicyling on the Landon trail this morning and saw one of my customers riding their horse. He stopped and got off his bicycle because he didn't want the horses to shy. He asked them where they were from and asked if they knew me. One of the horses was my customer. The horse owner said that I was just at the barn last week and that I was telling her how I drop him off at one end of a trail and pick him up at the other end. The Landon trail is only an eight mile round trip ride. Had my giant toe not hurt so much, I would have ridden with him.

I have six new horses scheduled this week that I am looking forward to meeting. I also have to make a stop to check on one customer who's horse probably has a rock bruise on a front foot. I hope not, because he has his horse for sale and if it goes lame he will have to hold onto the horse awhile longer. Truthfully, if I thought I could keep a horse right now I would have bought this one already. It is a good broke quiet horse.

The advertising I did in May is still working. I have two new customers that will be regular trims and occasionally shoe. They handled their horses exceptionally well. Both horses are older, but recently trained to ride. In my little world that means the horses didn't have much patience. The owners were right on top of it, though. One new customer is the cutest white welsh pony. He was a sweetheart to work under. Two horses last week are customers I would love to have on my list. I was filling in for an injured farrier so I probably won't see them again. Too bad as the horses stand quietly and don't have any issues. I may be slightly one sided, but I also like the barn because it has cats that enjoy human contact.

Knock on wood, but my shoes are starting to stay on 8-10 weeks like they were when I first started. This work is so frustrating. The harder you work at some part of it the more frustrated you get. When you get to the point that you want just to hang up your apron, things start to go better. There are feet I put shoes on that I would swear won't stay on a day because of all the issues the foot has. Those are the shoes that stay on eight weeks. The hoof that doesn't seem like it should lose a shoe at all are the ones that come off right away. Go figure. Without fail, every shoer I have met is a perfectionist (Although I am not! Am I?)who can and will spin themselves in circles trying to make a foot or a shoe come out just so.

So what have I been doing differently? First, I realized that I started dropping shoes when I started using city head #5 nails. I started out using combo #5 nails until I got brave enough to go with a bigger nail. I went back to the smaller nail. Then Bob came out to help me with a barrel horse that needed front shoes. He showed me that I was not rasping the toe level. So I started rasping the toe differently. Finally,another shoer showed me a different way to clinch the foot. The good thing is that my shoes are hanging in there now. The bad thing is that I don't know for sure what I was doing wrong or which of the three things I changed was the right thing.

The weather is a pain in the neck this spring. I had to reschedule several appointments because of storms, rain or 100 degree temperatures. Most customers understand and are happy to reschedule. The storms really wreck havoc with my schedule. The horses act stupid just before a storm front. The bugs go on an eating frenzy and chew on the horses so they are contantly stomping their feet and lashing you with their tail. The horses feet are soft from all the moisure and their is mud everywhere. The winds we have this spring make the horses spookey. The outlook this week is for 100 degree temperatues. I know at least on customer will want to reschedule. The rest are morning appointments. If I pace myself and drink a lot of water I will get through it.