Horse fly

  Still recovering here from Thanksgiving.  DW and I split the cooking again and, as always, we had waaaay too much food.  We each made a pie from scratch; hers was pecan and mine was sweet potato.  It was hard to pick a favorite since they both came out great!  She is finally over her plague so we had extra to be thankful for, especially since nobody else caught it.

  I spent today out riding our draft-cross Bonnie.  It's been raining so much here lately that I haven't got to work with her that much.  Bonnie is for all intents and purposes still green due to her young age and lack of work for the last couple of years.  If I don't get her out for a ride or at least get her into the round pen she turns into a real handful.  Today was the second day in a row that we were able to go trail riding.  She was very well behaved and I guess I got lulled into a false sense of complacency with her.  Toward the end of the ride we were trotting along the back fence of an adjoining horse farm.  There were two horses standing ahead of us and as we approached them, they spooked.  Bonnie spooked in the opposite direction so fast that I didn't even really know what happened.  All I remember was looking down at all the pretty green grass going by underneath me and then I was on the ground.  Thankfully, I think my parachute training kicked in from Naval aircrew school and I made a nice rolling landing and got up without a scratch.  Bonnie trotted off and I found her eating grass next to the fence by the stable.  She looked up at me with that innocent draft horse look like she was asking "where you been?".  I rounded her up and rode her back over to the spot so she could see that there was nothing scary over there.  No harm no foul...it really was my fault anyway.  This is the first time I've ever been thrown from a horse so lesson learned.

Here's a picture of *E* meeting Bonnie for the first time.  Enjoy!