UFOs

In knitting, a UFO is an UnFinished Object. In our neighborhood...they are, well, the traditional Unidentified Flying Objects.  As I was am trying to update all the old pages of our website, I added a bit to the farm page about how much we love our neighborhood.  Less than 24 hours later had just the sort of story to back that up :-). 

Tim was cleaning up the last of tornado damage down by the road yesterday.  One of the neighbors stopped to fill him in on all the latest news and complain about how busy he was.  He listed all sorts of chores and obligations and threw in that he and another neighbor were going to go out and try to find where the UFO landed.

"Wait, excuse me?" Tim asked.

"Yeah, I've got to go here and do this and then help so and so do this and..." the neighbor continued.

"No, the part about the UFO!"

Yeah, a "UFO" had been spotted by several neighbors, the word had gone out, no one knew what it was, but there were several theories and several theories as to where it landed...  After/Instead of doing their practical chores, they were all going around looking for it.  Little did they know that Stella and I had found it the day before ;-).

I saw it "land" about the same time the horses did.

Stella came out to see it.

And Hank was up there in no time as well.

"What is that, Stella?  Looks like there's some writing on there.  Can you read it to me?"

I was thinking it was another one of those little kids tying a note to a balloon and asking the finder to let them know how far it went.  It wasn't.  They were balloons released for a young girl who had died in an automobile accident :-/.  They'd made it over a hundred miles, so we tried to re-release them off the fence, but too many were deflated.  

I love this picture of Hickory even after I found out the balloons he was looking at so attentively weren't happy balloons.  I wish he didn't have his grazing muzzle on, but you can see by how much rich grass is still, in the middle of October (!), half way up his legs, that without the grazing muzzle we might be releasing balloons for him as well.

Some horses just can't handle so much grass.  Grass founder is an ugly experience.  The other option would be to build a small dry lot and lock both horses up for 6 months of the year.  I'm 100% sure that any horse would rather wear a muzzle (that doesn't stop them from eating, but does slow them down) and roam free than stand in a small, dusty pen.

Postscript:

The white hairs on Hickory's nose were not caused by the muzzle.  He came with those and apparently has had them most or all of his life. 

There is another UFO story on this blog somewhere, but I can't find it (?).