Good afternoon. I'm glad your back is feeling better, Awsum. Try not doing too much that might stress it till it heals. I'm thinking vacuuming and mopping. You've probably already done that, though, so I hope it didn't make your back worse.
Today, my friend Karen came up, mainly to pick up the mounting block she's buying from me, but first, we went to visit Maija. I went and got her from the pasture w/o too much trouble, though Karen kept a chestnut gelding, Rocco, at bay who looked like he wanted to get in on the act. I wonder if he'll give me trouble when I have to do it alone. Karen was impressed that Maija stood so quietly when I groomed her and cleaned out her feet. Maybe later, she'll come back and I or we can ride her. She thought I should get Maija shoes or boots, since she said her feet looked sort of flat. That is probably why she was so tender on the stones on the road when I rode her on Sunday out on the dirt roads, which are freshly covered in loose, large stones. I rode with Deb and another boarder, Jodi. Maija behaved well, though on the way home she walked fast and didn't like stopping to wait for the others to catch up. Also, the bugs were bad, and she seems more bothered by them than Penny ever was.
After visiting Maija, we went out to lunch at Red Newt, where we used to love having lunch after a ride together. Karen used to ride Corky while I rode Penny, and now both horses are dead. (Sob!) Red Newt is not the same. The winery was owned by a husband and wife, and he did the winery, and she did the restaurant. She was killed in a tragic car accident with her husband driving, and I can imagine he is still asking himself what he could have done to avoid the catastrophe. Still, with lunch we had a lovely 2012 Red Newt Cabernet Franc, so the winery is doing well, even if the food end has been failing ever since.
Then we went to the place I boarded Penny to get the mounting block. Jasmine was inside, and she didn't seem to remember me, which made me a bit disappointed. Maybe she did know me and was just pretending not to. Horses have long memories, so I doubt she forgot, but she gets offended when she thinks she has been forgotten, and her owner told me she treated him like this when he came back from a few days away. Poor Jasmine still doesn't have another horse to keep her company.
Meanwhile, tutoring is going well, though Wed., the kids were unusually fidgety. It happens every so often, but I wondered what was going on when both the boy and girl were so restless the same day. Nothing was going on, the boy told me.
Both got interested in subjects I had to look up on the Internet to put together something they could read about. The girl was learning the difference between mammals, who feed their babies milk, and birds and reptiles, who lay eggs. So she asked, "How do mammals make milk?" She was amazed when I told her women produced milk to feed their babies, too, and when she asked where it came from and I pointed to my breasts, she seemed shocked and unbelieving till I told her I breastfed my daughter. Then she asked why she didn't have breasts, and I told her she would when she was grown up, that children didn't need them because they were too young to have babies. So I had to get together something about that. I focused on milk production, starting with how all mammals give milk and with pictures of a seal and pig feeding their young. Then on to humans breastfeeding or bottle feeding. (I think all 3 kids were bottle-fed, which is why the girl didn't know about breastfeeding.) Then some simplified stuff about the hormones involved in milk production and a diagram of the inside of a breast and where the milk came from. Then how cows are milked by hand and machine, with photos to illustrate, and then how other animals are also milked, besides cows. Whew!
The boy asked about records and record players, which he has never seen, and I mentioned that the needle in a record player was sometimes made from a diamond since it was so hard, so he wanted to know about diamonds, too. I made up something about diamonds and am still working on the record player/records one.
With the little boy, now that he knows the names of the letters of the alphabet pretty well, I'm starting him on the sounds of them, mainly the consonants which are easier than vowel sounds. He is still working on writing the upper and lowercase letters in the correct places. He tends to stray from the guide lines.
The girl, who is a talented artist, drew a horse for me for my birthday. I'm really impressed. I took a photo of it and will download it and try to show it to you, though it's in pencil, so I don't know how well it'll come out. She said she drew it freehand, not traced, but she used something on YouTube to teach her how. She also draw a fantastic pig and a pretty good tiger.
Meanwhile, today, Karen told me her brother is working for an e-cigarette company. She didn't remember the name. I thought that was interesting. It's a new job he just got. I hope to find out more.
We have copious rain here today. I left my food scraps recycling container out this morning to be washed out by the rain, and it was nearly full when I got home. That's a lot of rain! It's still coming down hard. Luckily, it had just started when I was playing with Maija, and it let up a bit to a light drizzle when we went to get the mounting block. We also walked out in the pasture to see Penny's grave and the little tree planted over it. They put a wire fence around the tree so that if Jasmine is out in that pasture, she won't gnaw on it.