Well hey there, long time no post. For me anyway. As you may have noticed I did indeed end up taking last week off from the blog and took a few days away from social media entirely. Now that we’re through all the holidays I feel like I’m in a better headspace and feel at least a little bit recharged, so this week we’ll try to get back to our regular business.

Of course, work is still super busy for me (those last two weeks of December are killer, and January isn’t much better) and today is our annual inventory, so I’m still a bit crunched for time. Tomorrow I’ll give more updates on what’s been going on with the horses, but for now a quick update on what else has been happening…

The weather has been nuts. Like it was 85+ degrees for most of December and then on New Years Day a wicked cold front blew through and dropped us down into the 20’s. Nothing like a 60 degree temperature swing to turn horse people into balls of anxiety. I started upping the horse’s salt a few days ahead of time and gave them soaked alfalfa pellets with a bit of flaxseed oil with their meals (boy does Grace love her mash) and they seem to have done just fine, knock on wood. The weather is supposed to normalize a bit today, aside from another much more minor cold front later in the week, so hopefully we’re past the worst of this particular go-round. I hate the cold. Like really really hate it. Last year’s awful winter storm has left some lingering trauma on my psyche for sure, I absolutely loathe the cold snaps to a level I never quite reached before. And the insane temperature swings that we get here are what make it that much worse… nothing like going from summer to winter in a 6 hour period. Texas is ridiculous.

The holidays were fairly low-key for me… I’m not super into Christmas but I did exchange gifts with a few people. I got a very cool metal sign from the barn owner, luggage (that I picked out) from the SO, some cash, etc. We had our traditional Chinese food lunch on Christmas Day and I didn’t leave the farm all weekend, so we’ll call that a success. As for New Years, it’s always neck and neck for 4th of July as to which one is my least favorite holiday. I HATE fireworks, and this year it sounded like everyone bought the biggest loudest things they could find, judging by how the booms shook my windows. And it went from like 6pm through 3am. Just, WHY? The horses were all freaked out, Mina kept barking, and it made me feel positively murderous. We got through it in one piece though, so… there’s that.

I did also win a couple holiday gift cards from various Instagram contests, which was a nice little bonus perk. I’ve got an Epplejeck gift card waiting to be used, and won enough from Ride Equisafe to get a much-needed new XC vest. I also managed to go through all my trunks, the tack room, the trailer, and my closet and pull out my next round of sale items to clean out. I’ll probably post all that stuff later this week. And, perhaps most exciting (to me anyway), Hillary and I decided to re-open our little shirt business!

We started Barn Dog Apparel in 2017, and it was fun, but as we both got busy with other things we just kind of let it go dormant. Lately though we’ve been talking about some other business ideas for the future, and we were thinking we might as well start up the shirt shop again in the meantime. We spent last week making up some new designs and redesigning the store, and it went live again yesterday.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Barn Dog Apparel (@barndogapparel)

We’ve still got more designs to add, but it’s a start! I think I will probably add a few WTW items in there soon too for those that want some little low cost items. Plenty of stuff is in the works, but we’ll see how this first run of new designs does before we go too crazy. Most of the designs are offered on womens t-shirts for now but if you want one of them on a hoodie or a mens shirt or a long sleeve or a sticker, just let me know and I can add the item to the shop for you to order.

So yeah, that’s pretty much what I’ve been up to for the last week and a half. Sweating my ass off, freezing my ass off, trying not to murder people, obsessively keeping horses hydrated, working, cleaning out and organizing stuff, and designing shirts! I hope everyone else had a good holiday too. On to 2022!