Going Down and Lookin' Up

I don't know if Michael would say that today was a good day, as he has had another crazy, working his patootie off kind of day.  He did, with the help of our friend Dean (husband of my dear friend Cindy), manage to get the pump lowered down into the well. To do this, he had to come up with all manner of clever, jerry-rigged contraptions and methods, including this suspension tripod, chained together out of lengths of pipe:

This clever contraption allowed two men to do the work of a huge crane.

I wasn't there when Dean and Michael were doing all of this, but Michael tried to explain it all to me later and showed me how the pump is secured within the pipe -- more on-the-fly solutions from the nimble brain of my husband.

The inner workings.

I think he actually worked a bit too hard today, and he didn't bring up any water or food to keep himself going, nor was he wearing a hat -- and it was pretty hot out. Bad boy! He even received a scolding look from one of our resident lizards, who was supervising the goings-on from atop a pile of dug up dirt.

"Inferior creature. You can't be up here with no water and no hat. Who do you think you are --  a lizard?"

I then took a little stroll around the property, for as usual, I couldn't leave without seeing what interesting things might be popping up to surprise me. What did I find today?  A few small white daisies that only seem to grow on one spot:

 And also some interesting patterns in the mud that dried in the bottom of the run-off pit from the digging of the second well:

This thick, cracked mud looked like the scales of some long-extinct relative of my haughty lizard friend.

Other interesting textures and contrasts abounded, some to do with color, some to do with scale, like these two pine cones that appear to have fallen from the same tree:

Immature and mature, perhaps?

I wasn't sure why there would be such different cones on the same tree, but speculated that maybe the smaller one had simply fallen off before it could grow to full size. I'm going to have to find a local plant expert, as I have so many questions about the plants around here!  I would like to know, for example, what this lovely blooming shrub is:

Very pretty wild shrub.

We don't have any of this pink stuff on our property that I have seen thus far -- this one was growing across the road.

I also noted that the piles of imported material for the building pad have grown and multiplied overnight. Jason has been busy -- and working on the weekend!

The pyramids of Giza got nuthin' on us!

I will leave you today with some news that is very good indeed. Lido was looking pretty spry when he came up the hill today, so I got brave enough to push him to do a few trot steps to assess how lame he might still be. To my great joy and relief, he looked fairly sound!  The way you can easily spot many front limb soundness issues in a horse is to observe whether or not their head bobs unevenly when they trot. Typically, when there is a problem, the head will bob down on the sound (good) leg and up on the painful leg. Horses naturally do this to try to lessen the loading forces on the hurt limb. If there was any head bob in Lido today, it was very hard to see: YEAH!!!!!!!!

I managed to video a bit of his little trot, and pulled some stills off it to compare. Look at the photo on the left and note the height of his head as the good leg takes his weight. Then compare that to the one on the right, where the boo-boo leg is fully loaded.

These stills are not the exact same moment in the stride for each side, but even so, you can see that he is pretty darn level at the trot -- ME SO HAPPY! This makes me think that he will not need stall rest after all, and I'm hoping he will continue to heal and improve, and won't even need another vet check. That would be fabulous.

Lido then topped my day off by posing most adorably for a couple of portrait shots:

Is that a cute horse or what?  I am a lucky gal indeed. All of you out there remind me of that the NEXT time I'm freaking out because something is going wrong -- okay?  ; )