A Series of Unfortunate Events
- Francesca
- Jun 17
- 4 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
Good Friday turned out to be not such a good day. While out riding Pepper early evening, the bridle fell off! She then made the executive decision to gallop all the way home with me powerless to stop her. Well, after 5 minutes of desperate, futile attempts, I decided to bail out. She continued on for a good 5 minutes more to reach our front gate. I hurt my shoulder when I landed but poor Pepper hurt her knee quite badly. I had it x-rayed and it turns out she has had arthritis for some years and the galloping on hard ground had just accelerated the condition. Sadly she now must retire and become a lady of leisure. I have had her less than a year! As you can imagine, I am devastated.
The morning after the incident was our Easter Brunch. Luckily it went without a hitch despite me being quite upset by the happenings of the evening before.
Speaking of events, soon after the brunch I had an email from the council saying they had looked into the fundraising angle further and that I didn't qualify. So I had to put any future events on hold or I would be in hot water. It's frustrating because I thought it was a good temporary solution just to get things rolling (see the last blog) The big problem is that you can't just have paying guests inside your house without the proper sign off. It's complicated because this is a separate issue from the consent which allows a café and functions outside only. Fortunately though, I have just been given the ok to use the dining room and now I am back to focusing on complying with my resource consent so that I can get the necessary permit to serve food. This means building a kitchen trailer and accessible (disabled) toilet trailer. I am allowed to use the house kitchen too but because I specified that I will have a mobile kitchen for outdoor events it needs to be completed before the consent can be set in stone (insert head-spinning/eye-spirals emoji here) It's been a long difficult journey but I am hopeful that it is starting to come together. The system definitely does not make it easy but I suppose if it was easy everyone would be doing it.
A few weeks ago I had to have a sarcoid removed from Holly’s back fetlock. Basically a non cancerous tumour on her ankle. Ginger has had a sore foot for about a month but she seems to be on the mend now. We couldn't work out what it was so the treatment was ‘bed rest’. So that’s 3 out of 4 horses I can’t ride. Hopefully the Gingernut will be better soon and Hollyhocks should be ok in a month or 2. Silvie Sausage is scoring a holiday by default and wee Pepper Sprout seems to be enjoying retirement.
I had to fix the roof, 11m off the ground. We had a leak in the 3rd floor roof and rain had leaked down the walls through the top floor to the middle floor and ruined some of the floor boards on 2 levels. I managed to squeeze through a little window onto the roof and found some of the butynol guttering had perished. It was actually a relatively easy fix with dad handing me the materials through the window as I worked. I just had to scrub the area and glue on a butynol patch.
Another sad occurrence was the loss of 1 of our 2 pet sheep. Freddy and his younger friend Teddy were 2 bottle fed wethers. We don't know why Teddy passed away but sheep are notoriously full of metabolic problems. Fred got a bit lonely so I posted on our local page and found him another friend. Bonny came from a lady who also has a small business in the area and we are each other's customers.
To round everything off nicely let’s throw in an electrical problem with my car that took weeks to replace and reprogramme and then of course, because of great timing, the old 4WD we use for towing was also out for lengthy repairs so I was house bound for a bit. I guess with the price of fuel these days it’s not such a bad thing and on the plus side all the pruning in the woodland garden is now sorted, including chipping it all for mulch.
I feel a bit like now is the winter of my discontent but you know what does bring a little glorious summer? The people along the way. I have one particularly fantastic neighbour who constantly helps minimise and solve all manner of problems. Another neighbour doesn't hesitate to come over with his digger whenever we have a hole to dig or some heavy lifting. When I fell off Pepper outside a stranger’s house she put me in her car with astonishing speed, gave me water, and drove me home. And my guests and cake customers are the most supportive and lovely people that can be. I just need to keep the end goal in mind and push forward.
To lighten the mood, here's a little compilation of Ginger sleeping like she has been unalived. In a couple of the photos she is lying on her cover because I managed to unbuckle it and remove it without her budging a muscle!
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