The King of the Toads and a Horse Story.

Remember the plague of toads spawned by all the rain we've had? This morning the KING of the toads showed up in my garden behind the house. I was wondering where all the little baby toads went.

Guess I have my answer.

To give you an idea of scale, that's Jim's foot in the upper left corner of the picture.

There are bigger toads out there. Evidence is on the road where wrecked cars are piling up after collisions with these monsters.

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From Catherine & Dr. Bob #410:

We have been in Indiana for the past ten weeks hanging out with the horses and working on the house, etc. We went to the Heritage Days Pony Express Ride just outside of Peru at the local Fairgrounds from August 21-August 24 and participated with our horses.

We each rode one leg in the Pony Express Relay and carried the mail. Catherine's horse had so much fun she looks like she is almost asleep. We camped at the fairgrounds and everything went just fine. Our horses behaved better than anyone else's. Several people had various kinds of accidents. One woman was life-lined out after falling off her horse and getting stepped on repeatedly and another man had quite a headache after his horse threw him while he tried to put his hat on while on horseback.

All-in-all, we did great. There were a number of horse-people with little

experience, poorly trained horses and a severe shortage of plain old"horse-sense". Thank goodness our "girls" are traffic safe and very calm. The antique tractor folks unloaded their old, noisy tractors right next to our horses' picket line. The girls were a little nervous with the first few tractors but eventually paid no attention at all. Catherine, on the other hand, wanted to attack the tractor drivers.

We plan on leaving here on Monday, 9/22...going to Iowa for a weekwith Dave & Debbie, going to Missouri to visit Tommy & Terry and Yves & Andree and doing horse stuff--round-ups, team penning and team sorting, then heading south to Texas maybe with Yves & Andree, tailgating with their two horses. We expect to be at SPR for Halloween.

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News from Toni & Paul #46:

Paul has been feeling crappy all summer, it seemed as if he never got acclimated to the altitude, has had no energy and lots of dizzy spells. Turn out his aortic valve is thickening and not enough blood is being circulated to his brain, a situation that began to be monitored last year at this time and is getting immediately and crappily worse. That means open heart surgery, and sooner rather than later.
The good news is that we have the Texas alternative to the Colorado house and the surgeons are thick on the ground, the altitude is sea level and the weather way more conducive to slow recovery periods.
We'll leave for Texas the middle of next week.
Please keep us in your prayers, as you are in ours.