Hi Sweetie,
Had another early morning, woke up early and spent some time using the massager on my leg. It did seem to feel better for a bit. Of course, it was a little better after the ibuprofen kicked in, too, though by the end of the day, I was in agony again. There wasn't a lot of odds and ends to finish off today, mostly just parking folks and trying to keep them from encroaching on each other. Mostly civilized, though. Of course, the rides started today, so there were pretty horses everywhere, so that's always a plus. Thank goodness I have the quad Mule! I couldn't have survived without it. I could barely walk, even with your stick, and I'm getting sore muscles from being in such an uncomfortable posture. DeDe has offered me her crutches, she's going to bring them by tomorrow, I think they'll be better than the stick. Interestingly, after I finally got back to camp, and taking forever to feed the horses, I finally took off the copper brace thing and took my hot tub, and once again, by the end of the soak, it felt somewhat better. I don't know if it's from the hot tub or from taking off the brace! It does seem to feel a bit too tight, so I'm going to not put it on in the morning to see how that goes. I'm icing it again now as I drink my Sleepytime tea, and I'm going to leave it off tonight as well, just to see what happens. Last night and this morning, I used Salonpas, which I still don't think works very well for me, and used Aspercreme with lidocaine instead, just to see if that makes a difference. Of course, it will be ibuprofen again tonight and tomorrow, we'll see how that goes. Won't be long out of bed tonight, though tomorrow should be easier, since most folks are here, and some have already left, so there are more parking options. Enough for today! Love you, darlin'! Good night!

Hiya Darlin',
Had a mediocre night sleep, despite taking two ibuprofen. I coated my knee with Icy Hot, and once the hot kicked in, it burnt like hell, so it was a fitful night. My knee felt marginally better for about 30 minutes this morning, despite taking three iboprofen, then it was back to agony again. Thank goodness I have a quad Mule to carry me around! I spent most of the day leaning heavily on your beautiful walking stick whenever I had to get out of the mule. I reported for work at 8:00 a.m., finished putting up some signs, helped where I could before trailers started coming in that needed to be situated. Fortunately, they were spaced out quite well, so I never had a line, and never had to wait too long for the next one. Good news, Rick did me a great favor and picked up my tires for me, which is a great weight off my mind. I'm sure part of my bad night sleep was worrying about how I was going to solve that problem. Bad news, at 3:30 this afternoon, several of us got an email from the forest informing us of a 3200 acre aerial burn, located directly where one of our ride loops was. So with just a few hours of daylight left, our ridemaster, Kelsey, had to go out and remove seven miles of trail markings and figure out where to make them up on another loop. I had another talk with Logan about it, and of course, they can't do anything to prevent the burn, but I pressed him about what we need to do to try to avoid these kind of conflicts. He said they don't know which trails we are using, I asked how much lead time they needed to get a map of what we will likely use, and he said a couple of months. So, at there is a possible path to avoiding some of these conflicts in future, though whether it will come to fruition or not remains to be seen. Chelle said the permit did say all areas north of Apex, which is where the burn is taking place, so they should have had warning, but I don't know how long ago the permit was issued, so another angle needs to be explored. Anyway, I finished situating my last camper around 7:45, came back to camp, promptly got in my hot tub, which thankfully was at full temperature, followed by a hot shower, and now, a cup of tea. Everyone has been very helpful and sympathetic with my pain, one man gave me a copper-laced knee brace, telling me to use Salon Pas on my knee after my shower and put the brace on overnight, which I am doing, several people got me food and drink during the welcome meet and greet, and everyone voiced their concern, which was very nice. I hate being an invalid! But I won't have time to see a doctor until next Thursday, at least. Much as I love your walking stick, I'm thinking crutches might be more helpful. Can't wait to find out how to fix this! Anyway, I'm finishing my tea and going directly to bed. Good night, babe! Love you!

Hey Babe,
Spent the day finishing the setup of the grounds for FITS, welcoming folks in and getting them settled. Last one came in at 7:00 tonight, so it was a long day. Three frustrating things happened, unrelated to FITS. First, I somehow twisted my knee in the last week or two, and I can barely walk. It doesn't seem to be getting better, and I'm afraid it might be leading to another surgery. Second, I purchased some tires online and had them sent to Dave's AutoWorld where I've been having work done on my truck, and who pointed out my tires needed replacing, only to get a rather rude phone call from the wife informing me they didn't mount tires that they didn't sell me! She claimed they didn't have room to store them and would just sent them back! Jeez! I told her I would arrange to get them picked up, but I'm so busy this week I don't know when I'll have the time. I'm hoping I can get someone to help me with that, otherwise I'm going to have to take a pre-dawn run down there to pick them up Thursday. All I wanted to do was give them my business, but with her attitude, they've just lost it. Third, one of your pensions stopped coming, they claim because they need my new mailing address (even though the bank information hasn't changed!), but they have literally made it impossible to contact them. This has been going on for months. They send me emails from unmonitored email accounts so I can't reply to them. I contact them through their website and they either don't respond or send me an email telling me I have to register. I keep telling them their system won't LET me register. And today, I finally got an email, but it was ENCRYPTED and I couldn't open it! How ridiculous! This has been going on for six months now! I think they're hoping I'll just die off before they have to reinstate the pension. Grrrr! The last straw today was not being able to take a hot tub AGAIN because sometime during the day the power flicked off or something, and it wasn't hot enough. Second day in a row, and I could really have used it today, it helps my knee. Anyway, other than these isolated incidents, it really was a good day! I expect tomorrow will be even busier, so I'm off to bed! Good night, sweetie! Love you!

Hi Sweetie,
It rained most of the night, so earplugs went in, and I took a bouple of ibuprofen, but it still took awhile to get to sleep. Woke up with the alarm at 7:15, only to get a message from Chelle a few minutes later to change our start time from 9:00 to 11:00, in the hopes the rain would be cleared out by then. That suited me fine, I crawled back into bed and worked on my shoulder for a bit. My knee seemed a bit better, but in hindsight, it was probably the ibuprofen. Anyway, finally got up, did my chores, had breakfast, and headed out, first to the Dollar store to look for more stakes, but they didn't have any, then over to Val's where I started in on marking out the various sites and areas we are using. There was an obnoxious drizzle most of the day, so I didn't get the ground paint on like I wanted, but I did get the flags in on all of the FEI sites. That just about killed my sore knee, I was limping really badly by the time I did all that measuring and walking around. I still have a lot of work to do on it, but it didn't make sense to do it in the rain, and my knee hurt so much I just couldn't walk on it anymore. Chelle and I went around and put up as many signs as we had, me driving the quad and her pounding and stapling the signs. Got all that done, so we drove into Williston to pick up some big signs she had made that will also need to go in tomorrow. Finally dropped her off (she directed me in the back way, which was all slippery sand, so now my truck looks like it's had a mud bath!), and got home after 5:00. Just had ramen for dinner and settled down for the evening. I decided since ice didn't seem to do much good on my knee, tonight I used the heating pad, hoping that helps more, though I doubt it. I forgot to turn the hot tub on this morning, so it's just a hot shower tonight, and an early bedtime! Good night, darlin'! Love you!

Hiya Darlin'!
I had hoped to go to a local obstacle course for a "Sunday Funday," but my left knee has been bothering me a bit lately (I twisted it somewhere along the line), so I decided to give it the overdue RICE treatment today (rest, ice, compression, elevation) to see if that helps. I need to discern if this is a temporary problem or one that will lead to another knee surgery. Don't want to be lame on my Yellowstone Adventure in August! So I spent the day doing laundry and treating my knee, and by the time I got out of the hot tub, where I did a little massaging of it, it was feeling better. Some ibuprofen tonight just to finish it off, and hopefully tomorrow I'll almost as good as new! Not a moment too soon, I have a VERY busy week ahead of me, working with the Fun In The Sun Endurance Ride. Just need a good night sleep and all will be good! Good night, baby! Love you!

Hey Babe!
Didn't sleep well last night, woke up to cold temps, though not as bad as yesterday, but I dressed in many layers, including long underwear, in anticipation of riding with Jo this morning. I decided that since we were mostly walking with her new mare, and only going for a short ride because we were both going to Chi University for equine manipulation sessions (we volunteered our horses for the students to learn on), that I would take Apollo instead of Flash, which ended up working out just fine. Nikki was still acting up too much for Jo to trust her at a trot, so we walked for three miles, but did get her through a lot of puddles, and the deep spring on the blue trail! So that was something. Apollo did a couple of jigs whenever he smelled pigs (we never saw any), but was otherwise well-behaved. Got back a bit after 11:15, which Jo thought was plenty of time because she thought her first session was at 12:30, turned out to be 11:30, so they had to use a standby horse. Very unlike her! Anyway, she headed out quickly and I brushed both horses, forgoing a planned bath for lack of time, Art showed up right at noon, so we were off by 12:15, arriving at Chi plenty early. In fact, they ended up starting late (likely because of the late start on the first session), but everything went swimmingly after that. I had originally scheduled one horse for the 2nd session and the other for the third, but they had a cancellation and wondered if we wanted to both to do the second session, which meant we would be done by about 3:30, which would give us time to go to the evening session of a hunter/jumper Grand Prix at WEC. So Art handled Flash, I handled Apollo, and they both did very well, as usual. Flash got a little antsy toward the end, after standing around for two hours, I can't blame him, but otherwise, it went great. We got back to camp, I put the horses away and changed, Art went to his camp to get a charger for his phone, then loaded up Lola and we headed off to WEC. Had dinner at that little Mexican place, which was crowded and slow as usual, but we enjoyed half our meals and took the rest with us for later. We found our other friends and settled in to watch the show. Lola didn't know what to make of it, and barked a couple of times, but eventually settled down. She even crawled into both our laps for awhile after she tired out. Got back to camp around 9:30, got in my hot tub and shower, and now I'm relaxing with my Sleepytime tea. Later than usual, but it was a great day! Can't remember the last time I actually did three different things in a day! Lots of fun! time for bed now, so good night, sweetie! Love you!

Hey Darlin',
Spent the morning after chores doing a bit of cleanup on the inside of the truck in anticipation of the weekend. I'm scheduled to take both horses over to Chi University Saturday afternoon, and Art might be coming with me, so I needed to clear it out well enough for a passenger. Then Logan came by and we had a good serious talk about all of the issues that I've been hearing about from the neighborhood, particularly about their lack of communication when it comes to have a prescribed burn. Evidently there was a woman out with a young horse and she got caught behind the fire line and was near panic about getting out safely. It wasn't long after that when I received an email talking about a prescribed burning for tomorrow! So that worked, and I hope they keep that up! We also devised a plan for tracking down the evil one who is changing the markings on the trails during events, hopefully that will lead somewhere. Then in the afternoon I drove down to Dave's Auto World in Inglis. He did all the brake work on my truck last year and I wanted him to check them again so see how they fared over the summer when I had no brakes on the trailer. Turns out they did, indeed, overheat enough for the pads to be in bad shape, and even the calipers had hard wear on them, but Dave managed to switch those out under warranty (very generous!), and put new pads on, so like-new brakes again. Can't wait to try them out with working brakes on my trailer and the new brake controller! That should be a nice change! He also recharged my AC which had recently quit. There's a small leak, but we need to see how bad it is. It might last a year, or a month or a week, we'll see. Stopped at Tractor Supply for horse feed, Walmart for a few items, and got back to camp after 5:00. Put everything away, fed the horses and put on their heavy blankets because it's supposed to get near freezing overnight, and settled down for the evening, as usual! Heading to be shortly. Good night, babe! Love you!

Hiya Babe,
Getting back into the swing of things with my sleep cycle, thank goodness, so I had another good night sleep. After not hearing from the trailer place by 9:30 (they promised to call at 9:00 after their no show yesterday), I called and learned someone was on their way. Of course, he went to the wrong place, but called me and I set him straight. When he got here, he did manage to solve most of my problems, but one is remaining, the giant openings they left around the replacement compartment door, because he wasn't told about it, so didn't bring the materials necessary to fix it. But I no longer have a leaking kitchen drain and my outside speakers now work. While he was working, I got out the tractor and move the picnic table that was at the end of the pavilion driveway. I have an old friend coming down to visit, and I've arranged to borrow another friend's LQ horse trailer for her to stay in here at the trailhead with me, but the table was in the way. I never liked where it was anyway, and this finally gave me the catalyst to get it done. I'm much happier with its placement now! I needed the tractor because this picnic table is incredibly heavy, enough to tip my tractor off its wheels if I didn't grab it right! Seriously, it must weigh about 800 lbs.! It would take six big guys to move it, I'm sure. Anyway, that's done now. Not long after the trailer guy left it started to rain, so I spent the afternoon doing some computer work, then decided that a rainy day deserved a movie and popcorn, so settled in nicely for the rest of the day and evening. Won't be long out of bed, I'm enjoying getting back to an earlier cycle. Good night, sweetie! Love you!

Hey Sweetie,
Got to bed a bit late, but had a good night sleep. While I spent the morning waiting for the trailer repair guy to show up, as was promised to me yesterday, I did some odd jobs. I took all the TOG signs and pulled them apart, then restapled them in a way that will allow us to reuse the stake and sheet protector by just slipping in new signs. Ended up with 36 signs like that. It wasn't as easy as it sounds, though, because first I had to fix my hammer stapler, which jammed up on me last time I used it, and it took some doing to figure out how to unjam it (Youtube is my friend!), and even with instructions, it proved to be a bit more difficult until I mastered the technique. It continued to jam for quite awhile after every couple of staples, but it finally seemed to settle down and I was able to get the last bunch done with less trouble. Rick showed up just as I was finishing, so I enlisted him to help me replace the firehose on the pumphouse so that we could refill tanks more easily for FITS in a couple of weeks. Not that I needed his help, but he looked like he needed something to do, so he moved his truck over and I stood on it. That was about it. After awhile, I headed back over to Val's to meet with Chelle so we could drive around the property on a UTV and figure out exactly what signs we needed and how many. Got back to camp after 5:00, fixed my dinner, did my evening chores as usual, yada yada yada, and I'll be ready for bed shortly! Good night, my darlin'! Love you!

Hiya Darlin',
After a couple hours of housekeeping, I spent most of the day working on my Yellowstone Adventure plans, booking a hotel room for both before and after the pack trip. I've decided to stay on for a few days after the pack trip so that I can toodle around all the spots that are the tourist attractions that I won't see on the pack trip, just to cover all my bases. I remember we went there once and drove around, stopped at Old Faithful but I can't remember if we stayed and actually watched the geyser go off. I've been doing a lot of reading and research on the area, and there's a lot more to see, so I want to try to do as much as I can. I remember how we hated how commercial it was, and that was 30+ years ago! I can only imagine that it's even worse now, but what the heck, I don't imagine I'll ever go back again, and it's a bucket list item, so I might as well do it up right! Not much left on my bucket list these days! We already did just about everything we ever wanted to do! Anyway, in the afternoon I went to a meeting over at Val's to do more FITS planning, didn't get back until nearly 6:00, so it was all about feeding horses, having dinner and doing my usual routine. Back to bed soon! Good night, baby! Love you!