May Wilbur Visit

With PK out of town I thought it was the ideal time to swing out and pay Wilbur a long overdue visit on Saturday.

He looked....good. His weight looked great. Back feet looked like they needed a trim but since we'd taken his shoes off I'm hoping the farrier is just letting them grow out a bit. Fronts looked awesome.
He seems to have some sniffles- in addition to following up on his feet I'm also going to check in with Marlene on his breathing. Hoping it's a combination of dust and allergies.

I did email two local places today about their pasture board (and any Cali friends- please share recommendations). I think Marlene takes great care of her horses but it's hard to visit often when he's an hour and a half away.

Not visiting frequently makes me even more nit picky when I do see him. He's not the copper penny I dropped off but really, what do I expect?

He looks healthy and happy which is really all that matters!

Classic Wilbur pose

Happy Mother's Day!

Paul always goes out of his way to make sure I feel special on Mother's Day. I do have 3 babies (albeit two of them are very large) and I managed to spend some quality time with each this weekend including a visit to see Wilbur on Saturday. 

Today I worked on some groundwork in my lesson with Ellie and came home to a lovely card "from" the critters. Paul treated me to lunch at Chevy's- complete with Lemonade Margarita- and then we went mattress shopping (upgrading from a Queen to a King). Pretty exciting stuff!

A nice walk with Paul and a trip to Farmer Joe's for salad fixin's (while Paul stayed home and vacuumed- he is officially a superstar) rounded out the day!

A perfect weekend with the "kids."

Ellie looking adorable as usual

Paul tests a Tempur-pedic- Slightly out of budget but I did enjoy the vibrating feature

Wilbur refusing to snuggle for any selfies

Linus helps his Dad build a bookshelf from Target

Card from my wonderful husband

"Everything is Awesome"

Raise your hand if you've seen The Lego Movie.

Actually it's quite good and worth a watch. Of course I was sitting on an 11 hour flight sharing a communal TV- there was not much choice in the matter.

There's a fun song with lyrics that go....
"Everything is awesome! Everything is cool when you're part of a team. Everything is awesome, when we're living our dream."

Do NOT listen to it. It will get stuck in your head and you'll find yourself belting out "Everything is awesome" even when it is inappropriate to do so. Worse yet, when something is not actually awesome and the whole situation becomes misconstrued.

Although it is nice to be part of a team.

Extremely Good Customer Service- Equuleus Designs

I jumped on COTH for a second today and ran across a recent thread about a consumer who was disappointed in the Ogilvy customer service experience. And it had three hundred and fifteen responses!

Holy smokes! Certainly a good reminder about the power of web publicity! In my personal opinion, I would almost always rather shop from a retailer rather than directly from the manufacturer. The cost is the same,  it keeps the independents in business, plus there's a middle man to deal with any service issues for me.

Speaking of customer service, I recently had a lovely experience with Equuleus Designs. As you may recall I won a custom pillow from them in a Horse & Style Magazine contest over Holiday where I may or may not have run around my house shouting "I won, I won."

They asked me to send a photo in January that they could use for the design and I didn't manage to actually decide on anything until the middle of March. The pillow had crossed my mind a few times since but as it was a free gift I didn't want to be a bug.

When I returned from my vacation I opened the box and found not one but two pillows, the second au gratis for the time it took them! What a treat!

Ferragamo Shoes

Get excited girls! The Hunter Green Show Coat is on its way for Spring 2015!

In other, rather less exciting news, Ellie had her shoes put on today by our new farrier. Kelly made the switch when said well known shoe-er recently relocated back to Cali from the East Coast. Ells was one of the last horses in the string for his first cycle and I had heard from others that he's been doing a fabulous job- spending a lot of time with each horse and making sure the fit is perfect.

I had the chance to meet him this afternoon and he commented on how nice Ellie was and her good feet (thank the lord). Then he pulled out a bunch of horse leg bones (coffin bone all the way up) and made me quite nervous about how delicate and tiny they all are (poor thing was really trying to show me the important of balance and evenness in the hoof).

Now we all know that horse shoes are not inexpensive. But even I was a little disconcerted when Kelly asked, "Is that Ellie over there getting her Ferragamo Shoes on?" Ummm Kelly? You know Ferragamo's are like $500 bucks right? Couldn't you call them Sam Edelman's as a compromise?
#squintatthebill and it won't look so bad.

Ellie shows off her new front feet!