friday foto finish!! ii

Another Friday, another collection of the various photos that have accumulated on my phone. It's a little refreshing in some ways, right? After a couple days of writing out more detailed or dense posts, it's nice to just sit back and look at some pretty pictures, right?

And sure, we all have our own definitions of 'pretty' but I'm still riding high on this barn door vista kick lol. And I have LOVED seeing all of the versions you all have posted too!!

While the fall foliage is mostly gone now, I'm looking forward to how the view might transform come winter!

Ahh Fall, tho. It's definitely my favorite season - I just love all the colors! And apparently come by it naturally, as my mom and aunt are both big fans too and created this lovely Thanksgiving centerpiece out of leaves and sticks and old blossoms collected from my mom's home on the rural Eastern Shore.  

Or here's another pretty fall view - a dramatically lit oak (I think?) tree visible behind the restored-ruined walls of my friend's wedding venue.

And obviously, we can't discuss pretty over-long without landing on my favorite handsome bay, Mr Charlie Murray. In this pic he's sporting his freshly pulled mane. It's bad lighting tho.... and really, it hardly matters anyway bc despite yanking what amounted to an actual small mountain of hair out, he still has TONS of mane omg. It's been a couple weeks and yea... it's still not really all that obvious that he had the work done lol.

Anyway. Still talking about Charlie, but moving on.... Does anybody know how to teach a horse to paint? Charlie loves carrying things around and I have a sick sense of humor and fantasize about subsidizing my horsey habit by selling overpriced masterpieces on etsy or something.

Tho I guess we have to work on him hanging on to the thing long enough anyway lol....

Oh Charlie. So much to work on all the time. He's good tho. Lately we've been taking every opportunity we can to say hi to new dogs. Charlie's never spooked at dogs or anything... But he's given a couple of them fairly hard looks. And since dogs are ubiquitous around barns he's gotta get desensitized! 

Apparently he has to get desensitized to deer too. Ugh. Well. I guess that's unfair... it was dark out and the deer came out of nowhere. And Charlie did one of those startle-in-place spooks, then recovered perfectly and went on with his life.

Except he somehow managed to more or less crush my foot in the spook. Note the half-hoof-print on the side of the boot? Luckily the foot was only badly bruised and nothing worse... Hurt like a bitch tho. Thank god for solid footwear!! Actually.... there's a funny story with those boots too*... 

Oh but Charlie wasn't the only one of my pets to unceremoniously stomp on me lately!! My stupid fucking kitten (why do I have cats again, can somebody remind me?) did one of those stupid fucking kitten things and freaked out at nothing, jumping straight up off the couch, then running away as fast as possible.

Somehow in the process leaving the above paw print on my bicep. And yea that's all bruising around the scratches. How the F does a cat leave a paw print with the claw marks all in a line like that?!? Wtf. Ugh. 

Seriously these goddamn cats haha. Can you figure out which one is the asshole responsible for the claw marks? And which one is trying to pretend he's the good cat? lol

Hint: the gray one's the asshole. As evidenced in his above pose of "You will accept my grooming. Or I will choke a bitch out."

Cats, guys. Not even once.

Anyway, moving on from my sad little stories about mutilation at the hands paws hoofs weapons of mass destruction ... of my animals... Anyway. I've been so excited about Charlie's great attitude about traveling and going places and doing things that I'm starting to seriously dream about all the fun we could potentially have!!

Like when Allison posts about fox hunting and I start thinking that maybe Charlie and I will have to find a way to go up and join her!!! But then apparently I take it 18 steps too far (with also way too much time on my hands... how?) and photoshop bend MS Paint to my will to imagine what Charlie might look like out in the field!!

Because I can totally see the field hunter in him. Right?!? He's always (always**) got that look about him lol. Maybe one day!!

Anyway tho. Maybe I'm not the only one feeling particularly scatter brained right now, lol. Have you had anything random happen to you lately? (Hopefully not along the lines of being stampeded by your critters!)

* - Funny story about the boots: So I wrote a while back that my calves are wildly different sizes since breaking my leg. The formerly broken left leg is now bigger and a different shape, such that my tall boots don't fit as well (fucking BOO). The weird thing was.... my river boots were the opposite - the RIGHT boot was way too tight, whereas the left boot was fine. Further confusing matters, the left boot fit perfectly fine on the right leg (bc sometimes I put the wrong shoes on the wrong feet. Judge away y'all). This has literally been a giant mystery to me for WEEKS. how could this boot have shrunk like that? How could both of my legs be bigger than the other, depending on footwear??? Until. Finally. I realized. And thought to ask Brita whether she had noticed a strange discrepancy in her boots too..... lolz oops. Turns out we inadvertently swapped a boot somewhere along the way, so I ended up with one of her normal calf boots and she got one of my wides. Haha, at least that mystery has been solved! And I'll still be able to layer under my boots come winter!

** - Charlie ALWAYS looks like this. Austen had been wondering how I always get so many nice shots of him. Until she saw him at the show. And realized. Oh. He just always looks like that, huh. Like the above picture. Charlie stood exactly like that, stock still, expression unchanged, for at least three minutes. lol.