No More Horse Trailer (or riding)

I have lost all interest in riding my horse, have not ridden him since Feb.1, probably won't ever ride again.  All the time I was hiking the Appalachian Trail I would think about my Saddlebag women friends each week when Thursday rolled around, however I soon realized that I never once missed riding my horse.  So when I returned home from my hike I made every effort to try to get back into the habit of riding my horse each Thursday but I kept finding excuses not to ride more often than not.  Riding no longer holds any enjoyment for me, so now I feed ole "Tex" every day and pat him and tell him what a good boy he has been for me the last 26 years.  He doesn't seem to mind at all!

Anyway, it has been a year since I hauled Tex in the horse trailer and it is such a nice trailer to just let it sit there so I decided to sell it.  I made up nice colorful fliers w/photo advertising my trailer for sale and went around to all the feed stores, tack shops, gas stations, etc. posting these fliers.

Well after a couple of weeks and only having one phone call, I did what all my friends were telling me to do: craigslist!
Me?  Craigslist?  I've never even looked at craigslist!  So my friend Lanette came over one afternoon and walked me thru the process of creating an ad w/photos and uploading it to craigslist, warned me of all the pros and cons of dealing on craigslist, what to look for, what to avoid.  Lanette's help and advice was invaluable to me.  I began getting phone calls almost immediately and within a couple of weeks some folks drove three hours, looked at the trailer, handed me the cash and drove away with my trailer.  It was a little bittersweet, glad someone else can use it and also remembering all the good times I had with that trailer on Thursdays.

Back in the early Spring of this year I began clearing and whacking away at the "jungle" that was growing in back of our little house.  It was a tangled mass of vines, bushy trees, old rolls of wire and asst. junk.

 

 

 

 Little by little, wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow full, day after day I lopped and chopped my way through that "jungle".

Oh yeah, burn pile after burn pile too!

 Today it is no longer a "jungle".  We call it our "Backyard Park"!  We can sit on our back patio now and look all the way across the hay meadow out beyond and there is so much more air flow in our backyard now, almost always a nice breeze in our Backyard Park.  Toward the end of this project, Tom used his chainsaw to get rid of some of the things I could not cut with my loppers.  What a difference a little hard work and sweat created.  We love it!

One of the changes in my life since my Thru-Hike on the Appalachian Trail is that Tom and I are committed to lessening our impact on our planet by recycling everything we possibly can.  Through our efforts,  very little goes into a landfill now.  Our system has evolved over time but this is working pretty well for us now:

 The only thing out of my camera's view is the paper shredder.  Any paper we cannot shred for recycling, we consider burnable trash.  Behind our house we keep two large trash cans with lids where we can empty the drawer of plastic bottles and aluminum cans into for taking to recycler.  That tiny silver/black trash can marked "trash" is what goes into a landfill when it finally fills up, which is not very often.  We are amazed how easy this is and well it works.  No more bags of trash sitting out at the road for pickup at our house!  That is a good thing.

Tom's garden is all but gone for this year, however the bell, banana, and jalapeno peppers just keep on growing, and we keep on picking them and chopping them, bagging them for the freezer for cooking with all thru the fall and winter.