Thursday, November 29, 2012

Not good news.

Hi folks.  If you haven't heard from us in a while- this is probably why:


That's Meg's leg, today.  The apparatus you're looking at consists of 2 steel pins through her skin screwed into her right tibia; there are two more screwed into the femur at the top end of the high-tech carbon-fiber stiffening bar.

She broke her leg on Thanksgiving; and was operated on to install all this that night at the Mayo Clinic.  She has another operation scheduled for tomorrow morning (Friday 30th) to actually do the internal pinning necessary to reassemble the top of the tibia.

You'll recall that we have horses now... they do a tremendous amount of work for us in clearing grass and brush before chestnut harvest and grazing grass in the hazels; they're highly compatible with these crops, when supervised carefully.

One of the horses we have here now is trained to do heavy draft work, however; a registered Spotted Draft in fact.  So- we were working on that...

Meg is a highly experienced horsewoman, having grown up on a ranch in Colorado which sometimes had a herd of over 200 horses (besides the ~20,000 head of cattle and 9,000 sheep).  But.  Not a lot of experience driving draft horses.  In the training process, of horse and Meg- the horse was hitched to a "stone boat" load- and Meg got tangled in the hitch.

We have an abundance of hindsight at this point, of course.  But meanwhile, Meg is entirely immobilized for a month at least, which means she needs care, also.

So- that's why it may take us a while to get back to you.  The Lemonade side- both Meg and I will be spending more time in the house for a while; so there's a fair chance that after tomorrow's surgery, some of that time will be expended on communication.