Wednesday, June 11, 2008

First hot weather of the season

This weekend summer hit with a vengeance. Friday was nice; in fact, I remember debating whether to add a sweatshirt to the long sleeved shirt I wore to the barn. Then on Saturday the heat and humidity arrived. It was kind of nice, since spring was so cool, to actually feel summer heat. But as that heat continued into Tuesday with temps in the high 80s and low 90s and horrible humidity, humans and equines both seemed to get a little sick of it. We're just not used to it here in northern VT.

On Sunday, the people who brought in the horses told us that Dude was at the gate after about an hour of turnout time. He is terrible with the heat, I guess due to his bulk. He gets really sweaty. We had hooked up fans to their stall doors, so those ran all weekend, which definitely helped them while they were in their stalls. Pretty much all the horses at our barn have their own fans (just another thing my South Dakota part time rancher grandfather would've snorted about).

Same story weather-wise on Monday. The girl doing turn-in ended up hosing Dude and about four of his afternoon compatriots because they were so sweaty. On Tuesday, barn workers decided to do shortened turnout so that all the horses got back into the barn by early afternoon. That turned out to be a good thing because some rip-roaring storms came through later in the day, complete with hail, high winds and driving rain. It was a mess last night during the storms, but all that crazy weather action did break the humidity and high temps.

We woke up this morning to temps in the high 50s. I can just picture all the horses rejoicing and doing a happy tear-around the fields at turn-out time today.

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