From the category archives:
by Cowgirl on April 25, 2012 · 0 comments
Last weekend we took our cows out west where I grew up. From here, it’s a four hour ride in a car…a six hour ride for a cattle pot and truck and trailer with seven people packed into the crew cab. Saturday was one long hectic day. But it was one of the best weekends I’ve had in a long time, because to me it meant going home.
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by Cowgirl on March 7, 2012 · 2 comments
I have a horse story to share that my oldest sister Kandra has written, telling about her very first horse, Apache. If you’ve read very many of my own horse memories, you’ll remember that my sister is the one who influenced my siblings and I to love horses, and I wanted to know the details of how she came to own her first horse, because it happened when I was just a toddler, and I don’t remember it so well. I have always felt a strong gratefulness to the man who gave her the horse, as his generosity set off a wave of fondness for horses that encompassed my whole world, and changed all of our lives. It is Kandra’s favorite horse memory, and this is how her story goes….
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by Cowgirl on February 20, 2012 · 0 comments
I am a writer, and one of my favorite things to do is to tell a good story. I have often said that getting a horse is like getting a brand new notebook. You open it up, and it’s blank….just waiting to be filled in with adventures, experiences, knowledge, sentiment, good memories, colorful adjectives, and whatever else comes your way. So it is when you get a horse….I went for a ride with Cowboy Dad yesterday. We had talked about trailering out to some trails or something, since we had a whole afternoon and warm sunny weather.
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by Cowgirl on January 9, 2012 · 1 comment
Today was amazing. Well, if you don’t count the fact that it’s the beginning of January and still a little cold for my taste. And if you don’t mention that today was my husband’s first time to get bucked off a horse. It was sunny with no wind, a Sunday afternoon, and he said we’re crazy if we don’t go for a horse ride today. So we did. Here’s how it went:
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by Cowgirl on November 2, 2011 · 10 comments
I am happy to announce a new giveaway here on CowgirlDiary.com! This is a brand new horse book, just released yesterday, November 1, 2011. I got the chance to read it beforehand, and was pleasantly surprised by it. An avid reader of horse-related literature, I expected a rather indulgent account of far-fetched fluff. What I found instead, is that the author lets you into her world and honestly portrays the true realities of horse ownership. I found my own horse experiences mirrored in the thoughts and feelings of the writer, and by the time the last page was turned, I felt that I knew her so well I had found a kindred spirit.
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by Cowgirl on October 25, 2011 · 1 comment
Our weanling stud colt is just a handful. I had forgotten what it’s like having a horse this young, but he is certainly a lot of trouble. The main problem is that he has got too much energy and not enough experience. Watching him careen around the farm full-tilt is entertaining until you see him run into something. Owning this colt is like having a teenager who just got his own drivers license and is anxious to demonstrate his skills. It’s exciting, it’s entertaining, it’s often hilarious…..but it’s also scary.
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by Cowgirl on September 22, 2011 · 0 comments
When we went to pick up the new horses last week, we took my mare Daisy along. Not as a travelling buddy, but because there was a horse sale going on in a town along the same route, and we decided to consign Daisy in it and just see what might happen. We have talked about selling her several times, and buying two more seemed a tad bit excessive, and the trailer was going that way anyhow, so we took her to the sale with a reserve price firmly established in our minds.
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by Cowgirl on September 13, 2011 · 0 comments
News flash! We have new horses! We saw a classified ad, made a phone call, took a road trip in the rain, wrote a check, went back with the horse trailer, and look what we got: a sweet little buckskin mare and her four month old stud colt! This should come as no surprise if you know us well—we have been looking for a buckskin horse for about four years, and have skimmed through countless horse classifieds in search of the perfect one. And in true horse-collector’s fashion, we bought not one, but two!
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by Cowgirl on July 30, 2011 · 0 comments
When I was a kid, my favorite days were the long summer ones when we spent the day horseback. There was always something to do around the ranch…either moving cattle to a different pasture, checking the wells to make sure there was adequate water, or riding colts always prevented boredom from overtaking us. But I can think of some stories when we just had too much time on our hands.
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by Cowgirl on June 11, 2011 · 0 comments
We scheduled our trip west this spring so that we would time it right to go along on the big cattle drive up Pass Creek to summer grazing in the mountains. This morning began as every morning does on my parents’ ranch: (my husband would interject, “Slowly!” here—ha ha!) with a big breakfast, a Bible devotional, and some long drawn out discussion about which person is to ride which horse, and what other horses might be taken along in the trailer for substitute mounts, and what horses have been shod and which haven’t
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by Cowgirl on June 3, 2011 · 0 comments
I was at my folks’ house last weekend, and was looking through some boxes of old photos, and came upon a letter I had written them many years ago when I was a lonely school teacher just out of college, with only horses to keep me from feeling homesick. Reading through it gave me a mix of feelings—happy to remember the fun day on horseback, sad to think that I ended up buying and losing this mare in a horrible accident, and very glad that I had written it all down in a letter so I could treasure the memories more completely.
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by Cowgirl on June 1, 2011 · 1 comment
My mom used to sing this song to us when we were little, and I loved this version by Catherine Raney, from the movie Flicka. I wanted to show you the horse photos that I took last week on my parents’ ranch in Idaho, and thought this song would best accompany them while you browse through them. I never met a horse I didn’t like, but some of these are plain gorgeous.
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by Cowgirl on April 5, 2011 · 0 comments
I have a friend here visiting from Australia for a couple of months, and we went horseback riding yesterday. It’s finally starting to warm up here in the midwest, and with warm breezes beckoning, we put on our riding boots and headed out to the farm.
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by Cowgirl on March 23, 2011 · 2 comments
It’s been awhile since I’ve had the chance to just spend the day following my horse around. But today I was thinking back to when I was a kid, when I would be at the barn all day, not necessarily riding, but just spending time with the horses. There’s a lot to be said for getting solid hours of horse time.
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by Cowgirl on March 19, 2011 · 0 comments
Every body’s got a tale to tell, and if you’ve been as enthusiastic about outdoor activities as I have, chances are you have some scars as reminders of your experiences. I noticed a scar of mine the other day, which made me start thinking about how I got that scar, which made me wonder just how many scars do I have that are horse-related? I have to say, almost all of my scars have a horse story behind them.
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by Cowgirl on March 13, 2011 · 0 comments
I always think about my black colt this time of year. If you read my previous post about saying goodbye to a horse, and my horse poems I wrote about his death, you understand part of the story. But I would like to tell the rest of the story and give more of a background about this horse that was so special to me.
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by Cowgirl on February 9, 2011 · 0 comments
I know what it’s like to want a horse of your own and work to find a way to make it happen. My dreams have always revolved around horses, and whether it was saving my allowance money to buy a saddle or mucking out stalls to secure a spot for my horse to live, I was willing to do whatever it took.
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by Cowgirl on January 5, 2011 · 0 comments
My parents live in a valley in southeastern Idaho framed by two mountain ranges. The view out of the front window of their house is usually breathtaking, with snowcapped mountains even in the late spring and summer months. They raise alfalfa hay, beef cattle, mules, and Quarter Horses, and it’s always a real treat to get to spend some time on their ranch.
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by Cowgirl on December 15, 2010 · 0 comments
These days leading up to Christmas are crazy. I feel like a kid on a merry go round that’s going too fast for comfort…or maybe like the frantic engineer on a train that is on unfamiliar track downhill and the brakes have failed…or more exactly, what I really feel is that all-too-familiar adrenaline that kept me in the saddle all those times my horse Rudy ran away with me.
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by Cowgirl on November 30, 2010 · 0 comments
When I was a kid, we had a paint horse we called Peppy. He was a half brother to both Kokomo and Apache, but he had inherited much more of the Shetland attitude than the other two. He was a naughty pony.
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