Loic: Silly horse and a pond

My mom went away this weekend and asked me if I would like to take care of Jeff on Sunday. "Sure thing" I said. I have ridden him the past few Sundays and have really been enjoying the trail rides (I also like the time away from my kids, husband and dogs - love you guys!).

So, yesterday I went to the barn and was cleaning the stall before I met my friend for a trail ride. I brought Jeff in from the outside holding paddock, where he goes when we clean his stall because he is a giant pig, and lo and behold his right eye was really messed.up. I called the vet and said: "you need to come to the barn, Jeff has messed up his eye" (that is the technical term). What did he do in the holding paddock? Well, for starters he torn off most of his upper eye lid and a lot of the lower one too. I am not squeamish until it comes to eye things. The vet asked me to see if the inside of the eye was cut and I believe I said something like "I don't know, I am not going to look at it again and it is really, really *messed.up*" (there goes that technical speak again).

Thank god she came out right away and sedated the bejesus out of the horse and then froze his face and then took almost an hour to stitch his eye back together. The good news in all of this is that he did not damage his actual eye ball. Yay Jeff! He is on antibiotics for 10 days, had a tetanus shot and is getting pain killers twice daily. The best part is the eye drops. I have given eye drops to kids, adults, all types of dogs and now horses. And you know what? Giving horses eye drops is by far the hardest! With the help of my mom we managed to get them into his eye tonight.

The other good thing? He has an awesome mask to wear. I borrowed it from a friend of a friend of a friend and picked it up at the racetrack last night. It is great and will keep him from rubbing out his stitches while his eye heals. Without further ado I present the one eyed space horse:

Ha ha ha ha ha!!!!

In other news, Loic's dream came true last weekend when Erin called and asked us up to help spread gravel in Dave's pond. Loic adores Dave's pond and up until this day had not been allowed in it. We spend a good hour in the pond and Erin and I finished off two waterfall features with stone - we did quite a lovely job!! Who knows, maybe we need to give up our respective careers in Marketing and Biology to start landscaping water features?! Rob did a good job as our hired hand and moved gravel where we asked him to while Loic ran up and down the creek portion of the pond, throwing gravel around. We have been talking about the pond since :)