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.